Research of a Medical Librarian

What an interesting set of tools are available to us through Social Networking. This was an introductory class yet I felt I learned a lot. There is certainly more available than I’ll use either professionally or personally. At the same time, I’ve already starting adding some of the skills I hadn’t used before

I’ve been happy with del.isci.ous. I like the online bookmarking more than I would have guessed and have set up quite a few new tags with more to come. My biggest problem is that I accidentally imported all my bookmarks from my work computer so now I have hundreds of imported, not tagged entries. I’m slowly going through and cleaning those up.

I now have accounts in Facebook and LinkedIn. I don’t use the professional one much, yet, but am connecting with friends and family through Facebook. I don’t know if I’ll ever make a pod cast or web cast - those are potentials that will suddenly fit a bill in the future. I finally had to try to import a YouTube video, though, and was glad. Now I have the Interval Library at a place I can easily tell other people about.

Probably my major problem with any of the classes with the the online documents. I really like what I’ve been able to do in Google Docs. Yet I can’t seem to share any of my work. I see a good possibility with those here at work for someone else, but only if I can figure out the sharing problems I’ve had.

Now I can let all these tools settle in my head for a while. I know that the best thing I can do is not concentrate on them for a while. That’s when my brain will start working in the background and I’ll have more “aha” moments. I may find these tools invaluable then.

Thank you to the Medical Library Association (MLA) for sponsoring this online class. Thank you, too, to all the different people who took time to put together the sessions and make them interesting. This was a group effort that worked well.

One of the interesting facets of this MLA social networking course is being forced to try these different tools that I’ve heard about in different places (such as LifeHacker or from David Rothman). When I signed up for Google Docs I wasn’t sure because I get a 1984 (”Big Brother is watching”) feeling.

The next day I was presented with a potential use for it that could be beneficial for my coworker. One task she has is to creating meeting minutes weekly for the executive group. She sends an email asking for agenda items, collates them, then sends them out to be ranked, and then creates the agenda after receiving rankings of importance of the agenda items. This requires multiple emails between people. Google Docs or a similar type program may work for her.

But I’ve had collaboration problems. I created a short presentation in preparation for the talk I’ll be giving next month. I tried to share it as per our instructions, one with the above mentioned coworker. It doesn’t seem to have worked. I tried a second time, still with no success. To increase the frustration, there appears to be problems at Google today. When I was switching between Docs and Reader, my browser froze. I ended the program and couldn’t restart it. I finally had to shut down my computer and start all over. My browser finally started working again.

Because of it, I don’t know if my second collaboration attempt succeeded. I’ll talk to the recipients later.

Right now I’m still ambivalent about using Web Office tools. I looked at Zoho and Microsoft Live. The Microsoft Live review link was to PC Magazine, so I checked the other online office tools programs as well. PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice is for Google Docs.