CPD23 – Thing 13: Google Docs, Dropbox and Wikis

I’m a bit late on this one but I have to admit to not feeling very inspired about writing this blog post. Thing 13 is all about tools for collaborative working and although all seem to be really useful, they’re just not the most interesting things to write about.

I hadn’t had much experience of using Google Docs and Dropbox before trying them out for this thing. Both seem to be really useful tools both for my own use and for recommending to our students, in particular researchers who may be working on projects with colleagues at different institutions. I think I would tend to use Google Docs more for collaborative working for short(ish) term projects and Dropbox more for saving documents to work on anywhere then share files with others who need to view them rather than sending as an email attachment. Dropbox seems ideal for this as files won’t need to be converted from Word (or whatever programme I’ve created them in). Though I have to say after years of working from a memory stick it will be hard to get out of the habit of just saving my work to this. Although I’m constantly telling students to back up their work and not rely on memory sticks, I confess that for my own non-work files, even for Chartership documents, I have not been taking my own advice. I was really impressed with Dropbox and I will definitely be using it in future, even if it’s only as a place to back up my files at first.

I haven’t had a great deal of experience in using Wikis, though from this limited experience I can see that they can be really useful as tools for collaborative working or for knowledge sharing. I have added a link to my Library Roots and Route post to the Library Routes wiki but this is my only real experience of actually contributing to a wiki – though I do intend to contribute to the Library Day in the Life project at some point too. At work we use a wiki as a knowledge sharing tool within our division of the library. However, this was created in-house so lacks some of the functionality of a platform such as PBWorks and acts more as an electronic bulletin board rather than a true wiki. (It’s only really referred to as a wiki because it used to be a PBWorks wiki before the current in-house incarnation). As it is this is a fairly good tool for sharing knowledge – especially as we work on 3 different enquiry desks at 2 different campuses – but if it were developed to function more like a wiki this would be extremely useful and could be expanded to be used across all divisions of the library, improving communication between teams and cutting down on unnecessary service-wide emails.