Online Collaboration At Work

On reading the articles for this week’s reading, I realized how little online collaboration is done at the library where I work. We’re still in the age of sending memos, procedures, schedule changes, and the like via email. It would certainly be useful to add these items to a Google Doc or wiki that everyone can access, read, and even contribute to.

One example I will elaborate on relates to the work I do in the preservation department. I am the person in charge of bindery shipments and as such, I have certain procedures that I follow for each shipment going out and each shipment that is returned from the bindery. My immediate supervisor, who has little to do with the bindery shipments specifically, will occasionally have procedural questions or will ask me about the current schedule of when a shipment is going out. It would not be too difficult to create an online document in either Google Docs or on a wiki that my supervisor (and everyone in the department for that matter) could access with the current bindery schedule and written procedures for the various bindery jobs. We have bindery procedures that were written many years ago that are saved in a Word document and are likely out of date. If those procedures were put up on a wiki, changes could be made effortlessly and for all members of the department to see.

Luis Suarez’s blog post When Wikis Won’t Work: 10 Questions To Ask Before Full Adoption is helpful in considering whether creating a wiki will work for this type of situation. The last of the ten questions, “can the team / community perform that task at hand with the same quality and participation using other tools than a wiki?” makes me reconsider the idea of creating a wiki for the bindery shipment procedures and schedule. I think the simplicity of using Google Docs wins here. The bindery procedures and schedule could be placed in a Google Doc that everyone could access and is much easier to edit and make contributions to.

If I propose the Google Docs idea to my department, my guess is a few of the seven people will embrace the idea and the others will be indifferent or noncommittal. Either way, simply introducing the concept of online collaboration will be a step forward for my department at the library.