I am feeling rather chuffed with myself for managing to combine two different professional development experiences. While at the NZLLA Symposium in Wellington, my attention was caught by the PricewaterhouseCoopers librarians, who have developed a rather elaborate database for capturing requests. We don't need anything as clever as that in the Davis for a number of reasons (we don't have to work out time spent on requests for billing students, for starters), but I felt we needed to find a way of storing request outcomes for later use. This would have been paricularly useful when I was new at the Davis. When I saw Thing 13, I was hopeful that I had found a solution. I accessed Google Docs through my Google account and loaded the first couple of requests in there. The rest of the team have shared access. We will review this in a little while to consider whether we should open a Google account using the Davis generic e-mail address. But even if the team decides not to continue with it, I will save requests and other usesful information there as a way of preventing duplication of time and effort.
Since coming back from the Symposium, I have also requested access to the NZLLA wiki. I haven't had time as yet, to thoroughly investigate this, but members of the NZLLA committee gave a comprehensive demonstration at the Symposium, along with some excellent training notes. I am hopeful that later this week I will get time to have a look through this.
The concerns I have with tools such as these, where information is loaded online somewhere (the cloud?), are regarding security and ownership. How secure is the information? Who owns it? When something is deleted, is it gone forever? What happens if the system crashes? What happens if some evil dictator with plans to rule the world buys the company? There are many questions that need to be answered before important and confidentail information is kept online.
But right now, I'm happy that our requests have found a place to live.
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