A lot of ground to cover in one Thing, but most of it familiar.
Email: We've been using email internally and for reference ("Ask A Librarian) at Ramsey County Library for a very long time.
The best "productivity tools" I've run into are email groups (allowing for quick addressing to multiple people), and canned messages (for those responses to commonly asked questions that make you feel like a recording each time you have to pen them...How do I get a pin number? Do you have a notary public? I need a St. Paul obituary from ___ (insert any year prior to 1972). Do you take donations? I returned my book to the ____ (insert any MELSA library outside of Ramsey County) three days ago but you still show it checked out to me...)
The hardest thing for me to master is refraining from editing (and re-editing) my text.
Instant Messaging: IM is newer here -- but already an old friend (at least for me). So nice to get business accomplished quickly, privately, and SILENTLY -- no overhead paging; fewer noisy ringing phones! Potentially impressive when used for customer service -- at least with older than teen patrons. I'd love to try my hand at chat reference via some IM platform available to our patrons.
SMS: Text on the other hand, is less useful for me. I'm not a phone keypad wiz, having missed the opportunity to practice stealthily, cell phone in pocket, during class. I lack educated thumbs and the visual acuity needed to read messages on my cell phone without my glasses. Bah! Fairly recently, one of my children removed my cell phone from my hands with the comment, "You're still sending that? Here, let me finish it for you." Well, once upon a time, I had a similar experience with another child and a mouse. I did learn to use the mouse. Problem is, I really have no desire to text.Groups: I'm not really a fan of Google Groups either. Okay -- I do see their potential, but unless there's a lot of moderator attention, which probably takes more time than many of us have to devote to it, I'm not sure it's worth the effort. There's far more spam and other "unrelated content" unpleasantness posted to the 23 Things group (nothing worth reading since mid-summer!) than anything else. Got so fed up wading through the trash that I dropped my membership in the group. Writing this, however, I decided that was probably a mistake, and reported the abuse to Google, and to the group owner as well. I'm waiting to see what happens next.
Web Conferencing: Proquest offered a webinar on Ancestry Library Edition at the end of September. It was of particular interest to me as we were scheduled to begin offering an ALE class for patrons at the end of October; I wanted to see what the database vendor had to say about their product. I registered for the class, did all the appropriate login stuff, and discovered that even major database providers are occasionally plagued by technical difficulties.
The class didn't happen. Instead, I got a message back from Proquest staff member Aimee Leverette that read, in part, "Due to serious technical problems with our web-based presentation software, I am unable to host today’s session. Please accept my sincere apologies for any inconvenience and consider attending a future session. I would also be happy to schedule a one-on-one session to make up for this last minute cancellation."
Needless to say, the "one-on-one" was great, and probably answered my questions about teaching the class better than the scheduled session might have, but I do like the webinar format, and I'm still interested attending a future presentation.
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