Email as collaboration tool?

Yesterday Read/Write/Web ran a story about collaboration services in email, focusing on a new service that makes sharing documents through an email system more reliable. The idea behind YouSendIt is that many people try to send big documents through an email system that was not created to handle files of that size. This service gives you a way to store the document “in the cloud” and use the YouSendIt features to make the document available to download to your collaborators – without having to actually send the document in the email. They have a close relationship with Exchange and Outlook, for libraries who use that sort of email system. Libraries who use Gmail can use the new Google Docs functionality that lets you store (and share) any type of document on Google’s servers (again, “in the cloud”) to get many of the features that YouSendIt offers. Either way, using cloud services to share big documents with other librarians is becoming easier – and is always more reliable than trying to figure out if the document you are sending is small enough to work with your teammates’ email services!

Metrics for Improving Social Media Communication

Social Media Metrics
By David Stuart, ONLINE Magazine

Excerpt: “Social media has been adopted by every type of library in recent years, from small special libraries to large national ones. Many now host blogs and wikis, are members of numerous social network sites, and even participate in virtual worlds. These sites and technologies offer new ways for library staff and users to communicate and collaborate. However, with so many different technologies and sites available—and with more emerging all the time—it is important that librarians develop methods for measuring the use and effectiveness of the technologies so that time is not wasted and the implementations are justifiable to upper management.”

Values Remake: An Experiment in Virtual Collaboration

Library Journal Newswire Special—How do you build staff consensus across campuses?  Joan Starr
Library Journal, 12/3/2009

Excerpt: “Everyone values give-and-take. But how do you translate that into genuine collaboration, and avoid merely paying lip-service to participation? In the world of busy and increasingly decentralized library environments, more and more of us are depending on technology to mediate the collaborative process.  This was the issue the California Digital Library (CDL) faced as we set out to remake our organizational values statement.  In the end, we found a technology framework to suit our needs, but more importantly discovered that careful encouragement, a dedicated project “evangelist,” and a singular focus on virtually connecting our dispersed staff were crucial to the creation of a worthwhile staff-generated document.”