Remember the what?

Things 20ish -

I've been using Google docs for quite a while, for lots of things - collaborating with library colleagues on a Powerpoint presentation, sharing programming ideas, maintaining a closely itemized household budget on a spreadsheet, accessing an address book, saving forms that I may need to access both at home and at the library, and converting/opening other files that the reference desk computer can't handle. I understand that it might not have some of the functions or flash of other online workspaces, but I also use Gmail so it's really convenient to stick with the Google products.

I'd love to see more of our patrons using Google docs (or some kind of online document editing/storage) because, way too often, patrons' computer time expires without their having saved or printed their documents. Nothing is saved to the computer so things are just LOST a lot of the time. Yes, warning/reminder boxes pop up at 5 minutes and 1 minute till log-off, but so many people are used to clicking away every dialogue box without reading it. So we have a lot of sad people who lose an hours' work because they weren't paying attention to either the timer or the fact that they have to save the document somewhere.

Also, we have a lot of patrons who are upset when they come to our library and learn that our only "Microsoft" programs are Word (actually, ThinkFree) and Publisher. It seems like lots of people have Powerpoint or Excel assignments, or even want to open/print WordPerfect files--neither of which our computers support. (Don't ask me why we can't add ThinkFree's Powerpoint and Excel programs to our website. These are touchy questions in our behemoth behind-the-times library system.) So Google docs are great for those scenarios as well. The library home page has a link to Google docs, but I'm not sure how much it gets used.

When I help patrons, I often respond only to their requests of "how do I get to Word" rather than asking a few questions about whether they have a way to save their work or if they'd like to try working online. That's sometimes because I'm swamped with other reference questions, or sometimes because it might seem nosy for me to go there. Also, sometimes people aren't ready to create a Google account (like if they don't already have an email address) and setting that up can take the whole hour that the patron needed for typing. Because of that, I wish that there could be a safe, secure way for a library card account to be automatically associated with a Google account through our website. How easy that would be! But I'm sure there would be many privacy issues with that idea.

Finally, the idea of putting my to-do lists online via RTM, or something similar, also makes me feel a little uncomfortable about living my life online (whether private or public) but mostly just makes me feel overwhelmed, like it would increase my to-do list to store it on a computer. Maybe if I had a smartphone I would use the RTM app, because it seems useful. But using some technology like that makes me feel like my life is way too controlled by screens. It can get oppressive.