Thing 13 - online collaboration

Two whole months since the last blog - oops. Meant to keep this going but outside life took over for a while. However, am getting back into the 23 things and will make a regular date with my PC to add to the blog.

Task 13 was all about online collaboration tools, including Google Docs, Wikis and Dropbox. My first thought about collaborative working in my current environment was "shared drive"! Our work shared drive can be pretty useful, but has all sorts of problems such as version control and tracking changes, so I really like the idea of online sharing as an alternative.

Google Docs was incredibly easy to get started with, which I like! And especially good if not everyone you want to share with is accessing the same organizational network (so long as everyone is happy to sign up for a Google account, of course). It also seemed to be a great tool for solo working too, and I suspect it is for this that I will continue to use it. As with so many of the tools I have tried for this programme, there is almost too much to explore within it, and I doubt I will ever find time to get round to most of it. The free templates were nice, such as a to-do list that I have started using in an attempt to replace the endless post-it notes which cover my desk. I was disappointed that I couldn't easily see a way to move docs to and from Microsoft Office however (though that might be my lack of techno-wizardry rather than a fault with Google Docs). Overall, I can definitely see myself using this for daily work in the future, and perhaps as a way of sharing docs when I need to as well.

After falling for Google Docs, I tried DropBox next and was impressed with that too. I liked that you can install it on more than one PC and have your files synchronized between them, which helps to make up for the fact that it is not online, anywhere access. But it does still clutter up your desktop, where the last thing I need is any more icons. You can have 2GB storage free with DropBox and then you need to pay. The advantage of DropBox seems to be that you can use your own Word docs etc - it is not just a proprietary format. It's also good that a colleague doesn't have to be a member of DropBox to access your files - you can just choose to share an individual file with them if not.

The final thing to try was a wiki - we do in fact already use wikis as part of our VLE intranet for shared projects, which we have found a good place to bring together group documents and comments with a nicer format than just a file and folder structure. What I don't like about our current wikis is that I need to go to them to find out about updates - an RSS feed/email notification would be really useful. But that might just be our VLE - I haven't really explored other wikis (apart from Wikipedia, scourge of the library universe!). I was interested to see that PBwiki is free for librarians to use, but I didn't try it out as I have already signed up for so many things that I need to start getting choosy now! This task has at least made me realize that I ought to go back and examine our internal wikis in more detail to figure out how to get the best from them, and also to consider moving our current cataloguing procedures to this format, which I have heard of several other libraries doing.