NT23: Thing 19, GoogleDocs

Ok so this is an experiment with GoogleDocs. I've watched the instructional YouTube videos and I can definitely see the advantages for online collaboration and the reduction of email clutter, which is always a good thing. In library applications, I would imagine this being of greater use to large libraries with large numbers of staff members, while work in a relatively small academic library. Still, we have branch campuses in Dallas and Houston, so GoogleDocs might offer us advantages for communicating and collaborating with our librarians at those campuses in ways we have not considered previously. It is an exciting time to be involved in Librarianship, and workshops like NT23 show us these kinds of Web 2.0 tools that we can use to help us do our jobs as LIS professionals better.

It would also be a handy way to inexpensively keep a resume online instead of constructing one as a webpage and paying money to a ISP.

You could also save your PowerPoint style presentations online and free yourself from the worry of loosing your jump drive en route to your next presentation event, etc. You could also embed the presentation in a web page or blog later; Kind of cool, eh? As long as you had a computer you could use with internet access, and as long as you had your username and password memorized (or written down), you're home free.

GoogleDocs is definitely thinking outside the box; a good way to reintroduce a fairer division of labor, etc, especially with spreadsheet questionnaires, which was the coolest thing by far that I saw in the intro videos.

Could potentially be helpful in sharing circulation statistics as well as cataloging statistics across the library.

Also helpful for those who can't afford MS Office on their home computer and aren't tech savvy enough to download open source alternatives like OpenOffice from Sun Microsystems.

Those are my tentative thoughts on GoogleDocs and its potential for work in the LIS world ahead.