Shareware

One of the major themes in my library systems class this semester is using technology to enhance collaboration. In class we have talked about this as it relates to some of the Web 2.0 capabilities such as Wiki, Blogs and RSS. For me it seems that between work and school, I am getting to experience the whole realm of collaborating via technology.

Now that our company has split in two, we have gone to an e-version of our quality control process in order to allow people working on the same project in the two offices to complete their work without having to drive the paper work back and forth. In order to do this, file sharing software has been set up and a central file is created for each job where each member of the team logs in to access their particular file for work. In order to maintain the integrity of the original work file, each member has been instructed to use a converted version imaging file and make changes to that. At the end of the process the project owner incorporates the changes to the original document.

We have been using this system for about a month now and it is going okay, but as with any new technology implementation, not without glitches. For example, there is an e-routing form attached to each project where the individual who completes a given task then sends the form to the next person on the list notifying them that they can begin their particular function. Several times, this routing system has failed and the progress of the job essentially gets lost in cyberspace. This proved to be stressful the other week when we realized two large jobs that were due ASAP had been lost in the routing process for over a week and had not been touched.

I think what I am learning through my class and work this fall is collaborative technology can be a good service, but the people involved need to maintain a good control over the systems being used or strange things can happen.

Wiki Org

The past week our class wiki project team has been more involved in building the structure for our project wiki. This is my first experience with putting a wiki page together and it has been a good learning experience to go through this process. I must say that I am pleased that some aspects of our page are beginning to come together as it seemed for a while that we were at a standstill in terms of actually getting something "down on paper" ...... so to speak.

One of the challenges we have encountered as a team is that we are setting up a page for separate schools within a large university. These schools' needs are so vastly different and the information required to fill these needs comes in different quantities and forms. It has become a nice challenge to meet the information request from the schools and at the same time produce a wiki page that is straightforward and uniform to a point. I think these are good challenges to deal with in a class environment because the work force is becoming the same way and librarians are confronting these issues in almost every type of library environment.

Going back to the wiki we are working on -- it seems that more often than not when working with technology, the small un-anticipated glitches throw me for a loop. I was putting the categories in my page the other day and had them set uniformly for each school I was working with. Although I had the same category names for each school, I needed a separate page within each school for each category. The wiki code looked at the category names and linked each school to the same page if the category was named the same. Anyway, stuff you don't anticipate.