This article describes how librarians at the University of New Mexico collaborated with vendors to embed proactive chat in databases, detailing the process, technical glitches and use trends.

Mobile messaging apps are the fastest-growing digital communications phenomenon ever. Today, more than 2.5 billion people around the world use messaging apps, a figure that is expected to rise to 3.6 billion by 2018 – that’s almost half of the world’s population.

The short list for this year?s Global Mobile Messaging Awards provides a window to the future. One of the finalists in the Innovation in Messaging category is SpinVox Messenger, an application that ?automatically converts a voice message into text and delivers it directly to the...