Thing 8: Google Calendar

2 Jul

Now that I’ve had a look, I’m quite surprised that I haven’t been using Google Calendar already. At work we use the calendar on MS Outlook as a team: arranging meetings, saying when you’ll be at an external event, etc. I think it is probably the best tool in this situation – we all have Outlook up anyway for our work email and have access to our own plus a group calendar for the library, it’s easy to use, sends reminders and we can access it from any computer using webmail. The only problem we’ve come across is that it doesn’t say who has added an event and when they did it (that usually doesn’t matter but it has caused issues in the past).

Switching to Google Calendar wouldn’t be useful to this library but after having a look around online I’ve seen lots of great examples of it in use by other libraries, especially those that run a lot of events. There are some really interesting ideas on this blog post: Musings about librarianship. I particularly like the suggestion of linking the library management system to Google Calendar to allow users to be alerted on things like due dates.

I have decided that I should start using Google Calendar to keep track of what I’m up to. It wouldn’t be using the tool to it’s full potential but I’ve had real difficulty sticking to using electronic calendars unless it’s solely for work. I generally find it too time-consuming to enter in each event and don’t keep up with it. At the moment I organise my time with a combination of the work Outlook calendar, a physical diary and occasionally the calendar on my smart phone aaand sometimes things fall through the gaps. So we’ll see how I get on with Google!

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