Friday, March 27, 2009

Thing 29 - Google Tools

I looked at Google News from the first category. I customized a news page with my zip code and recommended stories, although I would have to use this regularly for the recommendations to be populated and useful. I also added it to my iGoogle page. Then I searched my grandfather in the archives. I remember when the archives first came out and articles were free. That was pretty cool, and I should have printed out what I found then.

In the second category, I played with the calendar. I'm actually familiar with the calendar because we use it for work. We have set up a shared vacation calendar, a sick time calendar, a general calendar, and calendars for each room we schedule. Everyone has read access to these calendars, and certain people can write to them. It certainly facilitates the scheduling of vacations and meetings.

I keep my own calendar on Google as well, synching with both Outlook and my PDA. (I use GooSync for my PDA.) I have to keep Outlook up to date so people outside the library in our institution can schedule meetings with me, and my PDA allows me access to my calendar when I'm away from my desk. The whole system is working fairly well right now, although sometimes the synching fails miserably. I want a PDA with wireless that would let me just use Google calendar.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Thing 28 - Customized Home Pages

I embellished an iGoogle page with my Google calendar, my Delicious bookmarks, the weather, and a Spanish Word a Day. It was pretty easy. I hope the Google calendar continues to work. I know other people who use it in a iGoogle page, and it frequently has to be deleted and readded because the application is very buggy.

As far as using this for the library, it might be interesting. We are currently using Google calendar to keep track of staff meetings, sick time, vacation time, and also for scheduling our conference rooms in the library, and lots of staff keep that open all the time. I don't know that it would display enough information as a widget to be useful. But it's something to think about.