I have only really used Google Docs once. My friend and I were planning a holiday around California and he shared a spreadsheet so that we could figure out which town we were going to be in, when, what we were going to do, what hostel we had booked and transport. Other than that occasion I’ve never really worked on anything that needed to be shared in that way. At work we have a shared drive that we can access documents through. A good job because staff computers aren’t allowed to access sites which are deemed Personal Network Storage and Backup (see also my struggles to look at Storify, Evernote etc.)
I was inspired by one of the cpd blogs I read (I’m such a bad librarian for not noting which one!) where it was mentioned that this site could be used by library members who had forgotten their USB stick. I have just been out into our library and could access Google Docs from their PCs. However, unless said member already has a Google account (or is particularly on the ball!) then I think it could be too complicated to use in this situation.
Dropbox is also banned on work computers. I have been inspired to download the app onto my posh phone to have a go though. Now I just need to remember to turn on my home PC and put it on there and actually start sharing (my inability to do this is just one reason why this thing is so late being posted!)
I really like wikis. At my old job I set one up using WetPaint. The idea behind this was for all the children’s librarians to be able to post their ideas for events so that we weren’t having to think up new things (e.g. for Easter) each year. However, I couldn’t get any of the others interested so it quickly died a death.
In contrast, at my current work we have two wikis. One has all the procedures so that we can quickly double check what to do in a particular situation. However, this hasn’t recently come into some trouble as the wiki was linking to Google Docs until access was denied. The other wiki is a place for library staff to share news/ stories/ ideas that could be of interest to others. Looking at the associated word cloud now I can see that the most popular tags have been web2, Xmas, party and Google. I’m not sure what that says about us!
In honour of Google Docs, here is a photo taken on my tour of California.Here I am at Alamitos Library in Long Beach.
Instead of having a wiki to share cool (!) stuff with colleagues we have this thing called Yammer which is like a cross between facebook and twitter (socially professional) but I'm not sure who actually uses it (if ever...)
ReplyDeleteThe "forgotten USB" saga continues: The only other thing I suggest is copy and paste a document into an email, or use SkyDrive (if they have a hotmail/msn/live account - the most popular email after google?) I would say it's more user friendly than GoogleDrive because it looks more like the actual programmes and less scary to navigate.