What Happened to the Calendar?

The calendar for Computer Classes at Lane Public Library's Fairfield Branch Computer Lab is now available as a monthly listing on our Lane Public Library website.

It's been about a year since this blog was updated. There are several reasons for that:

a couple of significant staffing changes that changed time available
moving the Lane Administration Offices to a new building
the bewildering speed of new developments.

This last factor is probably the most challenging. Keeping up with the developments in libraries and technology is a full-time job, and even then, it's probably impossible. The only way to cope is to narrow the focus.

Here's an example of something that has impacted all library staff in this last half year. The Google Calendar which is part of a larger service known as Google Applications for Your Domain (GAFYD). For a relatively small expenditure, free if you're a small business not needing extensive capabilities or user bases, Google offers companies a full email and document service that, like everything else Google does, is fully indexed and retrievable with huge amounts of storage. So, as a money-saving measure, we switched.

This switchover led to a number of new ways of thinking about and doing things, as anything would. To some, it was like learning to balance on a new prosthetic leg, while for others it was a trivial issue: these latter people had been using freely-available public Google accounts, so the differences were minimal. One example was the introduction of the Google calendar to consolidate all of the various calendars into one place to look and maintain all events.

The new calendar brought with it an end to self-registration for computer classes, since that is not an available function. But it is a superb tool for planning, as private users can find out by registering for a Google account and setting up their own calendar(s). The key difference between this and earlier calendars is the collaboration feature.

Most demonstrative of Web 2.0 (the interactive web) is Google Documents and Spreadsheets. The key benefit is that documents and spreadsheets can easily be shared amongst viewers or collaborators, leading to instant distribution and cooperative editing. Since the library already appoints cross-department teams to work on issues that arise, this web-based alternative to printing, mailing and meeting is a tremendous time and cost saver.

Of course, there can be problems. Computer-intensive approaches to projects involve a range of different people with different skills and comfort levels in any job setting. There can be training issues, comfort-level problems, technical failures and so on. But over the next few years, there will be continuous gains in efficiency. Not the least of these will result from the library staff's efforts to keep up with useful developments in the world of computers and libraries.

BH 10⁄30⁄2007