Doodle

Ever try to find where your schedule overlaps with others for a meeting or group project? It can be a pain unless you use a handy dandy tool like Doodle (doodle.com)! Doodle allows anyone to create two types of polls for free without so much as signing up for an account. You can either “schedule an event” or “make a choice.” I am most familiar with the former, although the latter looks and works pretty much the same.

After assigning the poll a name, description, and administrator name, you are able to select dates from a calendar. The next screen allows you to select potential times. Click finish and voila! You have a poll. Send the link to your participants and they can select their available times quickly and easily. You can opt to receive email notices when participants respond or check back to see the results on your own.

There are additional handy features — such as comment support — and settings — limiting number of entries per person, for example. So play around with it a little. The coolest feature to note is on step 3 when creating a poll. There you will find a link to enable time zone support. You select the time zone you are in before submitting the survey. When participants come to the survey, the time zone of their IP address will be automatically filled in and the times presented will be in their local time! (Note: Participants can also manual select a time zone). No more adding or subtracting hours, figuring out what zone the poll creator is in, etc!

Neat, huh?

September meeting topic(s)?

For the Fall 2009 semester, FLIP will be meeting every three weeks.  Which makes our next scheduled date only one week away!  Please do come if you can.

What should we talk about?  Some general topics that people have previously expressed interest in include:

  • E-Books
  • Library marketing
  • Job preparation and application
  • Educational opportunities and career enhancement
  • Academic librarianship and faculty status
  • Scholarships and funding information
  • Application to and participation in library programs/committees
  • Projects and publications by local librarians

There are also a lot of discussion ideas that are mentioned in the news everyday (Google Books, copyright issues, social networking in libraries, etc.).    For instance, here is an article that was published on CNN.com just today: The future of libraries, with or without books. 

So please add your comments to this post and weigh in on what you’re dying to opine about!

A bit on blogs

At the August 21 FLIP meeting, the discussion was primarily about blogs: the good, the bad, the way too wordy.  The topic was prompted by the recent release of this 100 Best Blogs for Librarians list, which comes from another blog (of course).

In your opinion, what makes an interesting blog?  Do you find that blogs make great professional reference tools, or are they more of a social media outlet,  a little of both, or none of the above?  Further, do you have any suggestions for this new FLIP blog?

Please add comments, thoughts, links to your favorite blog(s).  Let’s get this conversation started.  Ready….go!

2009 FLIP meetings recap (so far)

Moving backward in time, here is a brief summary of the last few FLIP meetings.  It is the goal that from now on our meeting topics will carry over into this blog for further discussion, analysis, and/or general commentary.

July 21: A mid-summer meeting when attendance was low enough to promote discussion about how to increase attendance and participation in FLIP.  Possible future topics of discussion were brainstormed.  Hopefully, new ideas like this blog will help!

June 19: A discussion regarding travel to library conferences and the time/money/effort involved for both in-state and national events.

May 15: Andy Page, coordinator of the e-Learning graduate certificate program at UAA, was our “virtual” speaker.  Andy gave the group a thorough and enthusiastic overview of the program coursework – all the way from Indiana.  The relevance of integrating emerging technology tools into our education and careers was made perfectly clear with the seamless use of the online technology that made his participation possible.

April 17: Included discussions about developing project management skills and how they can be quite useful, if not actually required, for most professional library positions.

March 20: This  meeting took place the week after the Alaska Library Association’s annual meeting in Kodiak.  A few folks that got to go to Kodiak told the rest of us all about it.  In 2010, the AkLA annual meeting will be in Anchorage and we will all have the opportunity to participate AND volunteer to help make it a success.  Visit the 2010 AkLA Conference Planning Website for details.

February 20: About a dozen folks showed up for introductions and a brainstorm session on topics of interest to discuss for future meetings.