Google Docs and Wikis

My working day, although it does include some individual working, generally focuses on sharing and working collaboratively. Whether I am creating a new Internet taster class guide or wanting to pass on a piece of information to other LIOs (Library and Information Officer's), I often share my work or updates via email to my team and colleagues. This is great for immediately flagging up and passing on information, but the problem comes when multiple documents are created and when numerous emails cause increased workloads for colleagues who have to plough their way through hundreds of emails every day. So are Google docs and wikis a possible solution for this problem?

I am familiar with both Google docs and wikis although I haven't really used them in an ongoing way. Before Newcastle Libraries opened, other LIOs and I attended a bespoke course with University of Northumbria and one of the outcomes of this was to create a wiki to speed up the communication between us. The wiki unfortunately didn't last for very long, due to the fact that we kept forgetting to look at it and because some LIOs were more confident in using it than others. So we reverted back to emails and a word document electronic day book, which although very useful, is in danger of becoming too large and cumbersome. So I do think it was time we re-visited using a wiki and ponder on how it could improve our shared working.

We are in the process of setting up a Business and Intellectual Property centre in partnership with the British Library and what I do like about The British Library BIPC website is the Business essentials wiki which can be added to by staff and the public. This is something that I think we should consider for own Newcastle BIPC as it's an effective way of hearing about new useful websites, while also allowing the business community to get involved.

While looking at wikis for Thing 13, I also decided I should try to contribute too one as well, so I went to the Library Routes Project and added my blogpost on My Journey so Far, to the other blogs and tweets about how people have got into the library profession.

I also had a play around with Google docs for while and despite having some problems (the docs landing page was in French - help!- it wouldn't let me upload a file larger than 1 MB and it wasn't connecting to any templates) I do think it's a really useful resource and one that I could see myself using much more than Evernote. I like the fact that you can email documents to people you want to share it with straight away and I'm also impressed with how you can create drawings, as well as downloading documents. It's certainly something which I could use for work when sharing documents with colleagues to limit the amount of drafts floating around. However, my worry with docs, is the same with any Google projects; how long will it stay around for and will they one day just decide to pull the docs project and lots of work will be lost? Maybe I'm slightly paranoid, but it's just a thought........ 

Imgae by Steven Combs used under Creative Comms Licence