Ask a Librarian widgets embedded on a web page allow your patrons to chat without leaving your website. An iframe tag places the AaL hosted widget anywhere on your page.
Code sample to embed an iframe:
<iframe src="http://askalibrarian.org/is/orange.asp" height="150px" width="300px" frameborder="1"></iframe>
Widget Samples
Gulf Coast Community College
Miami Dade College
Monroe County
Palm Beach State College
SCFMS
SPC
UF
Winter Park
More widget layouts
The Gulf Coast and UF widgets let the patron chat with librarians staffing their local desks; the St. Petersburg and State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota widgets are set up to operate with the full local - academic - collaborative cascade that's used on the AaL local pages. Your library web page fonts, colors, etc. are used to make the widget blend in as seamlessly as possible with your web page (UF's login form uses one of their background images for the header and the login button).
It's also possible to use the Instant Service documentation to place the code on your page, hosted on your site, without using an iframe, which is what Nova Southeastern University has done (view Nova's widget). This widget is set up for the local - academic - collaborative cascade.
Whether the widget is hosted on AaL's servers and placed on your page with an iframe or the widget code is placed directly on your library's page, email login forms must reside on the AaL server, as this server is the only one that has permission to send email to Instant Service.
In order to judge how effective your widget is vs. your local AaL web page, chat patrons using AaL developed widgets display widget entrance point to the librarian staffing the service and to Instant Service stats. For example, a patron that's entered chat via the UF widget has "UF Chat Widget" displayed as optional information #5 in the Agent Console, the chat transcript, and Instant Service statistical reports.
