Week Eight: The Conclusion

In my first Week Eight post, I discussed my plans to create a collaborative document using Google Docs for the 23 Things Kansas program that would allow my colleagues to add to a list of favorite, or infamous, reference questions received during their careers.

As promised here is a link to the document. There are some whoppers listed!

Anyway, the exercise was fun, but there were a few aspects of Google Docs, and cloud computing, that I thought were interesting.

• Things only work well when everyone is a member. It is nice that Google Docs has a method for sharing a document that does not require a person to become a member or sign-in.  However, not all the features work as well for "guests" as they do for members. 
• How secure is this thing anyway? Copyright anyone?  In order to give access to a broad range of users, I had to make the document so anyone could edit.  All edits are label as "by guest" so there is no way to tell--easily--who made what changes.
• Where did I put that thing? People got lost. That's the short of it.  People lost the link; forgot to save their changes; saved their changes, but saved the document to their computer in the process; and a host of other equally annoying challenges.  They were all easy to fix, but again, things work best when everyone is a member.
• When it works, it really works.  The plus side is that when people finally figured out how Google Docs functions, ignored that anyone could change their edits, and remembered how to access the document, the whole process was great.  People from various locations were able to easily and quickly access the same document and make changes.  The process became truly collaborative.

For small and mid-sized libraries who can not afford centralized servers, Google Docs or other service are extremely useful for sharing documents among staff.  As these services continue to grow and improve they should become a cost effective alternative for large libraries.

How does your library use cloud computing? Also, feel free to continue to add to the reference question list, via comments on this post.