Submitted by Brenda Ellis

If you are based in the main library, you may have noticed signs advertising this new service (I’m campus mailing color signs to the branches today).  A company called Mosio offers a “text a librarian” service but we’re not calling it that but instead are using it for LIS in general.  Our users can use a cell phone to anonomously text a message to the number 66746 but they must start the message with the word midd (this gets the messsage to us and not some other library).  The message gets sent to a special webpage setup for us where we see the question and can respond backto their phone using our computers rather than a phone ourselves.  Our responses are limited to 320 characters.  Librarians are monitoring this for now and if a message comes in for another area of LIS, we can forward the message or act as intermediaries.  A few people at the helpdesk (Shawn and the helpdesk students) and circ desk (Elin) have seen the system and I am happy to train anyone else who’d like to participate.  We have this service free for a year, so we are trying it out to see how our users like it.  If you have questions, just ask me.