Thing 7

Yeah, I know I promised to do a slide show of my grandkid, but I never got more photos, so I'll come back to that later. I did the reading and viewing of the materials related to Thing 7 this morning. There wasn't much there with which I wasn't at least familiar, but we're only doing a few of the things here. We've had internal email for almost as long as it's been widely available, and I've got Outlook on my desk pc, so I use some of the organizing features of that with my work email--for example, I get a lot of suggestions from patrons about particular titles we should add to our collection through email. I've set up a separate folder for those, and as I make decisions about whether to buy particular titles, I move the email into either an "ordered" or a "rejected" folder. But that's as sophisticated as I feel the need to be.
We've been using Instant Messaging internally for about 6 months, and it's really useful. We're in a two story building, and it's handy to ask questions of my colleagues upstairs while I'm at my desk downstairs. Saves many a trip up and down the stairway. We have also begun using it to eliminate overhead announcements about phone calls etc. Another way we've used it is to rpelace meetings. We hold discussions among the librarians on a monthly (give or take) basis related to some particular topic. We've held a couple of these meetings using IM with a moderator inviting all the librarians logged in into the discussion. It felt kind of weird at first, and those of us who are, shall we say, typing-impaired were at a distinct disadvantage i9n keeping up with the discussion. But it was a fun experiment. We'll probably do it again as the need arises, and the topic lends itself to a non-face-to-face meeting. We'd like to move towards proving IM reference for the public, but the closest we've gotten is an "Ask a Librarian" email reference service.
It may just be my inner fuddy-duddy coming out, but I've never really understood the attraction of text messaging, especially when I see people driving down the road texting as they drive. I guess I can see individuals texting the reference desk from remote parts of the building as in the Youtube video, but I'd be surprised if that happened very often. And it seems like it would be really hard to have a real conversation via text.