SL2.0 Suggestion Camp: Calendars
August 30th, 2006 by Christopher HarrisSpeaking of calendars, this post seems to have missed the intended Tuesday posting date. Hopefully the discussion, though a bit later than intended, can help you with calendars. I don’t need to tell you that things are busy. Things are always busy in school libraries. Too many jobs (full time teacher/full time librarian) with too little help and too little time… So what can you do? While the longer term goal may be to change the perception of your library in the eyes of the rest of the school, a short term solution is to get all kinds of School Library 2.0 on your calendar.
School Library 2.0 talks about the need for the school library to be a foundation within the school – it needs to be infused throughout everything as the common base (both physical and virtual) for information, resources, curriculum, and pedagogy. In order to fullfill this goal, libraries need to move beyond current models of flexible or fixed scheduling to scheduling the library as a foundation. For this to work, libraries, librarians, and library resources need to be scheduled independantly of each other. And this requires some serious calendaring. Luckily, Web 2.0 provides some useful solutions for those whose districts aren’t already using groupware management software (Novell Groupwise, Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Domino, etc.).
Suggestions:
1) The key to this discussion is an ability to share your calendar. Why? So your calendar can become your users’ calendar. As noted above, if your district is using a groupware solution like GroupWise or Outlook you should be able to easily create a shared calendar that users can view. If you don’t, despair not. You can create an online calendar to share at a site like 30 Boxes or Google Calendar.
2) The next step is to give your users write access to the calendar. Remember, this is their calendar, not your calendar. Letting them see the calendar and find a convenient time is great…letting them then book the time is even better. If you look around many calendar programs, you should find a way to set different types of events to display in different colors. This will help users see that the library may be booked, but the library resources are still available.
3) Won’t things get confusing with multiple bookings and overlapping uses of library, librarian, and library resources? Well, let’s hope so! Think of what the message that sends to your school and your adminisration! Communication, documentation…and a dash of organization.
August 31st, 2006 at 4:02 pm
This is a great idea, but can anyone suggest any other calendars? I have been experimenting with the one at 30boxes, using it with a small group before attempting to put it out for the whole faculty. The process of adding a date is a little confusing, and I am concerned that some faculty members would find it too time-consuming.
Holly Wolf
August 31st, 2006 at 6:54 pm
My first recommendation would be to see if there is some calendar available from the e-mail package your school uses. This is best because then the users already have accounts.
Otherwise, there are a slew of calendars available online. The Web2.0List Calendar section has a number of possiblities listed. I would avoid Kiko as they are recently auctioned themselves on E-Bay. Better suggestions would be for SpongeCell – but it uses they same “easy entry” that 30boxes does which might not work here. CalendarHub is another one I had looked at before and rather liked. It also includes a desktop client which could be handy.
To expand on Google Calendar, it would be nice because you can have differnet calendars (with a little “c”) within a single Google Calendar (big “C”). If people don’t have Google accounts, you could create a generic one for people to add appointments with, I guess.
September 13th, 2006 at 11:28 pm
We use http://www.localendar.com for the library calendar and love it.
September 14th, 2006 at 9:55 am
Thanks for sharing your suggestion. Still, I have to insert a note of caution here. Jacquie Henry over at Wanderings has a great post about reasons NOT to use a calendaring system. I can certainly see pros and cons for either side, so please consider all the possiblities before developing a system.