Thing #7

Productivity and Collaboration Tools

The two productivity tools I ended up exploring were Google Calendar and Google Docs.

First, Google Calendar because I think it would be great to have calendars for both of our library campuses in one location. We have a library staff calendar for vacations, meetings, etc. on CampusCruiser, our college e-mail system, but I don’t think it has all the features that Google Calendar offers. I am thinking we could create calendars for the reference desk schedule, and student circulation assistants’ schedule. For the media room reservations, we have a binder that we keep at the circulation desk to jot down the reservations. Faculty or students call in or walk up to the desk if they wish to reserve a room. Sharing the calendars would be easy because anyone with the link could view the calendar online to see if there’s an available time slot even before making the phone call. An easier option is if you want to make all of your calendar information (including event details) available to the world, all you would do so click the “Make this calendar public” button. For sharing with specific people, you would just add each person’s e-mail address and choose their permissions settings—whether or not you want them to edit the calendar or just be able to view it.  The calendar help menu is a good place to start in getting started on how to create, customize, organize, and share calendars.

Google Docs: I have been playing with the idea of creating an online form for librarians to submit their book orders. This is a really good tool that I could use in acquisitions because each librarian has his or her own way of submitting book orders. I created a form a couple of years ago, but it never really took off. The idea was for librarians to use the online form to submit their book orders (title, author, ISBN, publisher, publication date, edition, campus, shelving location, fund ID, price, and any special notes). Using the responses that would be saved in a spreadsheet, I could then go ahead and create the order information in our catalog. Google provides lots of templates to choose from, so reinventing the wheel is not necessary. For security, I can specify that the form be available only to anyone with the link. This is still a work in progress, but it’s a lot of fun customizing the form, and doing test runs. Documentation on Google Docs can be found here: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/search/label/forms/