Thing 13: Google docs, Dropbox and Wikis

I've got all behind again. I intended to write all sorts of interesting things on here last week, but they just didn't happen, I succumbed to my first cold/virus of the season and spent the last few days lazing at home reading and sewing! With any luck, my planned pearls of wisdom will be written this week instead!

Google docs
I use this as much as I can and purely for selfish reasons! We have so few computers at work where I can access to my personal drive, so I save documents I work on regularly in Google docs, so I can access them on any PC. Unfortunately, this is one of the problems with having a restructure (sorry, it's called transformation here - apparently it's a more positive word).

We have more staff in libraries in the workrooms looking to use a PC and when there's only two or three in each library, it's not easy. Fortunately I can access my email on a couple of extra PCs and I can use Google docs to access the work - simples! We're not allowed to use memory sticks and to be honest, with Google docs why do I need to, I can't lose Google docs and the beauty of it is, I can use my gmail username and password - hooray!!

I will try to share a document with a colleague who does the same job as me, it'll be really helpful for us to share combined files this way. So watch this space, but I can see it's plus points. Until now, it's been as easy to email a document, but now we're doing the same job, I think this will really help particularly if we can both edit it. I'll post an update on this once I get going.

Dropbox
I can't use this one at work, it's blocked... The only reason I'd use this would be for documents at home and I don't tend to share them with other people, I may stick them in Google docs to send to work to print, but that's all.

Oops! Don't think I'll get far with this!

I'll have a look at home on this one, but it won't be used as part of my day-to-day work for obvious reasons!

Wikis
Mmm, don't get me started on Wikipedia!! Having worked in an academic library I have an aversion to the site simply because so much on it at the time was completely incorrect. It's a long time since I've used it and really don't know if it's any better. I'm happy to be proved otherwise, so feel free to say so!

I have however, used lots of other wikis. As a singer, I often use the ChoralWiki to find music and listen to midi files. I've found this site invaluable over the years. I have even used the TravelWiki on and off. It gives an interesting insight into places to go... (Some of this to be taken with a large pinch of salt!) 

The Day in the Life Project is as Jennifer says invaluable for learning about the many different "librarianship" careers. I'd not heard of the Library Routes Project, but because of my general nosiness I love to find out how others have got into libraries. It's a bit like reading lots of Thing 10 on one website!

Working for my previous employer we discussed a number of ways that we could make our Information Adviser work available to the students. We considered using a wiki to try to publicise what we were doing, although I think we decided it wasn't going to work in the right way and so didn't get much further than that.

I'm not sure how I can use a wiki at work. I've a feeling something like that may possibly be frowned upon. A lot of these things have to have an excellent business case for using...


However, I feel quite positive about these three tools, although I've a feeling Google docs will take place of Dropbox. The two seem to do very similar things, and it'll probably come down to which is the easiest to use and access.