Thing 7: Productivity and Collaboration Tools

I started writing this post when Blogger went down for a couple of days, and it was hard to return to it.  Thing 7 has been the best lesson for me yet, but it is an embarrassment of riches.  (An aside:  As I typed this, I was wondering about the spelling of "embarrassment." Can you believe it took me this long to notice the spell check tool in Blogger?  Sorry for all my previous misspellings.  Oh, and it just told me I misspelled misspellings.)  There are so many wonderful tools in Polly's post that might be useful in both my personal and professional lives.

The tools I am most interested in are those related to backup & file storage.  This is something I've been meaning to look into for a long time, but just never seemed to get around to it.  Since I am an archivist, you would think I would be diligent about backup, but that is not the case.  A tool like Back Blaze will be a backup to my lax backup. I will have to talk to Polly to see how she likes it, although, truth be told, like everything these days, I have information overload.  There are so many tools out there.  If it works and Polly uses it, that's probably good enough for me. 

A few thoughts on some of the other tool:

Hoot Suite:  Hmm, I think I know someone who must use this or something like this.  He has posts always and everywhere.  Very useful, but be careful - using it may lead to the impression that you are not working at all but are spending all your time on social media.  Especially true if you have contact with a lot of people that are not highly tech savvy, although they do use some social media.  May be a lot more useful for a corporation trying to sell something or raise awareness.  Of course, libraries also want to raise brand recognition, but at the same time don't want to appear TOO corporate, as it may turn people off or lead voters to believe we have plenty of money.  A bit of a tightrope.

Reminder Tools:  I am definitely going to have to play around with these.  I have used Outlook Calendar in the past for this sort of thing, but I have found recent versions more cumbersome and clunky to use.  Or maybe I'm just more used to the functioning of web-based tools now.  I could definitely use some reminders, although a paper calendar works pretty darn well for organizing my days and seeing the big picture of my month at a glance.

join.me:  This looks like something that could be very useful to CDLC Digital Collections.  I watched the video, and it appears that you can share anything that is on this desktop during a call/online meeting using join.me  We have a lot of calls from CDLC Digital Collections participants for help with troubleshooting CONTENTdm, our Digital Asset Management System.  Using join.me means that a remote user can see exactly what we are talking about.  It also means that users who are having a problem could share their desktop with us, and we could more quickly identify whether the problem is something going wrong with the software or the user doing something incorrectly.  I really like the fact that you do not need to download any software with join.me  I don't think I'm ready to have a remote user take control of my desktop, though!  Maybe some of our project participants have a lot of faith in us, and would be willing to allow our staff to temporarily take control of their desktop to help with CONTENTdm.

Doodle:  We use Doodle all the time to schedule meetings at CDLC.  We have so many people from so many different institutions participating in CDLC committees and task forces that it can be almost impossible to figure out when people are free to meet.  This tool gives you that information in a glance (as long as the people you poll respond).  I highly recommend it.

I have several questions and concerns related to all of these tools.  The first is how much disk space is taken up by those tools that require a download of some sort.  With one or two tools, it is probably negligible, but if you really want to take advantage of the great things many of these things can do, it could greatly slow down your computer.  My home computer has lots of space on it - 3 drives, in fact - yet I still often have to clean up the drives because they are almost full due to the downloads my kids do to play their games. 

The second concern I have is privacy/security.  Most tools have security safeguards.  However, we have all read stories of big corporations whose records have been compromised.  These corporations have a huge incentive to keep this from happening, and yet happen it did.  What's to keep some tiny tool from being hacked, other than the fact that it is tiny.  The trick might be to stick with the less well-known tools.  And perhaps it's irrational, but just putting things like my passwords together in one document using one tool freaks me out a little.  It would be very useful, however, so weighing the risks versus the benefits is something I do with every tool.

My final big concern is related to the obsolesence of these proprietary products.  I am reluctant to rely too much on these tools that might be gone tomorrow.  I think they are good as a help or a back-up, but if you are relying on them to do your day-to-day work, you may find yourself out of luck one day when you wake up and find that tool is gone.  That's why I always advise people to put the photos and other documents they really want to save onto multiple media formats.  Flickr is fine for distribution and back-up in case your disks fail, but it cannot be counted on to be there tomorrow.  What happens to tools like Flickr is totally up to those running it.  If they wake up bored with it, they could simply stop providing the service.

Paul Rapp had an excellent column, "Hey Hugh Get Offa McCloud," in the May 19, 2011 edition of Metroland ("The Capital Region's Alternative Newsweekly").  In this column, he basically says that by using tools where your information is in "the cloud," you lose a lot of control.  You are at the mercy of how Google, Flickr, Facebook or whoever, maintain their servers.  You also have to rely on being able to connect to the Internet, something that isn't always (or even often, in places like the Berkshires or the Adirondacks) guaranteed.  He makes some very good points that warm the cockles of this archivist's heart.