To my knowledge only one person can be logged into Meebo at a time. It was never intended for libraries (or other organizations with multiple users) and we are really stretching its designed purpose (for individuals to monitor multiple IM accounts!)

It works in libraries, but you have to be careful about trading the shift... if I log in and a colleague is in the process of answering a question you loose the transaction! Now the patron will still show up, so you can reconnect and explain the shift change, but this is clunky.

-George

Most libraries have set it up where there is either just one logged in at a time, or that there is another meebo account set up and are active at the same time. In some cases, this also makes a the service more personable where they know which librarian they are chatting with.

Here is something that was made for libraries. https://admin.libraryh3lp.com/docs/h3lp

We often have more than one person logged into Meebo. When the second person logs in, a message will pop up saying that someone else is logged in, and to type '1' to log the other person out. But of course, we don't do that.

We use a Meebo chatroom so any number of librarians can be logged in at once. It does work quite differently from the normal widget though - instead of having the widget on every page we have a link on every page to the chatroom page, and also there's no privacy by default (though people can shift to a private discussion with a single librarian if necessary).

For notification, a lot of us use Pidgin - I prefer it because the notification noises are louder than the Meebo web interface, among other reasons.

Libraryh3lp works very well in our library. We used to use Meebo, but switched to libaryh3lp because you can have multiple people on at the same time. You can even transfer questions to another person. Good for Ron for posting his answer.

I also want to give a shout out for Libraryh3lp. When it launched in the spring of 2008 we ditched Meebo like a bad habit, precisely because our IM traffic was so much that one person on Meebo couldn't handle it all. Go with Libraryh3lp - it's very affordable for libraries and was created with library and library issues in mind!