Extra Thing 3: Library widgeting and Thing 9: Drowning under Documentation? Google's lifebelt

As my mammoth catch-up mission continues, this week I'm tackling another two Google applications; one directly, and one indirectly.

My exciting 30th August:
Return library book.
Water plants.
What a rock'n'roll lifestyle.

And as we all like a good beat-about-the-bush, let's start with the indirect one. We have had the library widget on our Classics library page since the last Cam23Things, and it was an incredibly useful tip during the days of buggy Newton. I hadn't realised, however, that you could link your account to your calendar of choice - in my case, the ubiquitous G-word one. It's dependent on the way Google indexes information, so it can be quite slow and, as Lyn pointed out, it's not ideal for our undergrads as our loans are only 2 days whereas, by my reckoning, it took the best part of a working day for Google to update and display my new loan on my calendar. However, it could be useful for our tirelessly-hardworking and techsavvy grads, or our increasingly dippy academics (you know, the kind who forget their kids' names but could reel off line after life of the Odyssey. In ancient Greek.)

A nice, tangible representation of the capability of Google Docs
And it's German :)
Photo by EDO lounge

The other Google application on this post's menu is Google Doc(ument)s. Again, I have used this tool a few times, finding it useful in group work situations during my final year at University, when we had to complete one of the more bizarre tasks of my degree, a group Syntax essay. We saved a considerable amount of time and inbox space by using Google Docs to email round drafts etc., even if we still decided to come together in physical space to finalise things like formatting, which Google Docs is less happy with. I have also used it as a kind of online jotter pad, creating documents to store quotes, poems or links which I want to use later. I hope, however, that some of the bookmarking tools in this week's Thing will largely supplant that.

Google Docs has also been useful from a library perspective; our Google spreadsheet is useful for collecting book requests, and our 'Ask a librarian' form has attracted questions from all over the place, even internationally. I can see how it would be useful for small-scale, embedded surveys, and the information is easy to manipulate from the resulting document.

On a less techy note, I spent my entire weekend (and, thanks to my lovely boss and an empty library, half of Friday) at the Cambridge Folk Festival. A fantastic, eclectic mix of people in the stunning Cambridge sunshine. I recommend Feufollet, Peatbog Faeries, and Ange's superb headwear...