Thing 9: Online Collaboration Tools

The online collaboration tools are really quite interesting. I have known about Google Docs for a while now, but have never used it. I am very impressed by the list of tools in Zoho, and plan to try some of them out more thoroughly in the future. The non-profit organization that I do work for does a fair amount of document generation for which there are copious editing passes by up to 4 individuals and this might be something we could use. Right now, we rely on the Tracking Changes feature in Word to keep our various edits separated.

I love that there's a planner component to Zoho as well. I can see uses for that.

In our particular library, I have done some editing on some brochures we use that might have seen benefits from a shared editing environment like this, but for the most part with the work I have done in the last year, I am not getting a lot of ideas on how it might be used in our setting.

The first time around 23 Things, I was not able to edit the Google Docs item, even though I have a gmail account and was logged into it at the time. This time I requested access and did make some changes to the document. It was pretty neat to be able to see all the edits. It was quite entertaining reading the commentary added to the Declaration of Independence and even more fun to try a comment or two myself. Such serious librarians with such delicious senses of humor!
:-)

Obviously, for 23 Things, we are doing non-serious editing here, but one of the things I like about Word's "track changes" feature is that I can look at the document with all of the changes incorporated so I can read it without all the markup. Believe me, when the changes to a real document get that busy, it's can be handy to be able to edit it like it was a clean document to begin with. So, this might be a good way to do some editing, but I can see cases where I'd still rather do it the way I've done it in the past. Maybe that is just my lack of experience talking. I also have some questions I'd need to research when it comes to confidential documents and how secure they are when on a public site like Zoho or Google Docs.