Rudaí 23 #thing16: Collaboration Tools

The focus for this week's thing was collaboration tools and I was happy to discover that I already had some experience with one of them, Google Drive. We currently use Google Drive in work to share folders and documents and it's a great way to access documents remotely. This Rudaí 23 introduction to creating and editing Google Docs was useful however, as I generally create documents in Word and save these to Google Drive, rather than creating documents from scratch in Google Drive itself. Following the instructions I was able to create a new document and a new folder and share the document I created with another user - who also happens to be me as I currently have several separate email accounts on the go!

When I checked to see if any documents had been shared with me I got a nice blast from the past to see a shared document there from my time spent volunteering in the National Library of Ireland in 2011. I was able to easily make a copy of that document and add it to my own folders in Google Drive. The task I chose to complete this week was adding a comment to the Rudaí 23 public Google Doc and I was happy I went with that one because of the great contributions made by the other Rudaí 23 participants. I was able to add my comment easily while enjoying the comments, jokes and pictures posted up by other people doing the course.

I've been using Google Drive in work over the past five months and I generally find it a really useful way to search and access shared library documents quickly and easily. I've used it to collaborate in creating a document a few times but on one occasion found that the changes I made and saved in my document weren't saved once my colleague had made her own changes and saved her document. This may have been because we were working from a Word document saved in the Drive rather than using a Google document so from now on I'll use Google Docs for this kind of collaborative editing.

I also found Dropbox a good tool for collaboration when I was completing the MLIS in UCD. My capstone group used it for our thesis project and it was a great to be able to work from home and add to our own sections of the thesis remotely. We also used it in the Tiernan MacBride library in the IFI to share documents and images with researchers so it's a versatile tool. When using Google Drive, you need to have a Google account to access and edit documents and people are sometimes reluctant to sign up to yet another provider. With Dropbox you can access and edit documents through your own Dropbox account, but you can also share links and documents with users who don't have an account.