Thing 12: Collaborative Tools

I'm not often involved in collaborative projects, and those that I participate in don't as a rule include individuals outside of the library.  This makes meetings simple as everybody is sitting face to face, and between meetings communication can be easily managed via email.

I do however have one project experience in the course of which I would have given my right arm for collaborative tools.  Two years ago, we were asked to create an exhibition based on one of our collections.  The exhibition was to be held in the Hunt Museum in Limerick City, it was designed by a Dublin-based company, and co-authored by a historian who at a critical time of the project was lecturing in America.  It was a communications nightmare.  We never managed to have a meeting with all team members present, and email chains worked poorly as nobody had real clarity on what tasks were the responsibility of which people.  We did manage a couple of conference calls but these only seemed to add to the confusion.

In the end, we managed to create a cracking exhibition but with the right tools the whole process would have been a lot easier, not to mention quicker.  Google Drive would have enabled us to scan and upload the exhibition items for the absent historian to see to make the exhibition narrative easier to write; instead, the narrative bore little relation to what was put on display and had to be extensively rewritten.  Trello would have been fantastic for keeping tabs on who was doing what and how the project was progressing.  Slack would have made communication a lot easier and ensured that nobody was mistakenly left out of the loop.  For conference calls, Skype would have been perfect as it would have enabled us to create virtual meetings with everybody present at the same time.  These are certainly tools I shall keep in mind if ever I am involved in a large-scale project involving a lot of people in different geographical locations.

I am a bit more weary of sharing documents online, particularly if these are of personal or sensitive nature.  I also find it a bit difficult to imagine a scenario in which a number of people would need to be working on the same document simultaneously.  The only example that comes to mind is a book in which every chapter is written by a different contributor, but even then one contributor would surely not start meddling with chapters written by others.  Anyway, that's just me being thick!  On the whole, I think collaborative tools are brilliant and increasingly relevant in a world where remote working and long distance travel have become a daily reality to many.

Image: Pixabay