Communication Tools, thing 6

I sure do love email. My first email address was back in middle school, through some random provider that my friends were using. I quickly 'upgraded' to the more mainstream Hotmail. I tried Yahoo! mail for a while but never really warmed up to it. For the past several years I've been using gmail and have been very happy with it. What I like best about Gmail is its intuitiveness, a quality I think Yahoo! mail and, especially, Hotmail lack. I love the way emails are sorted into conversations, making it super easy to keep track of multiple replies.

MCPL uses Microsoft Outlook as our email provider which I pretty much can't stand. The awesomeness of Gmail makes Outlook feel ridiculously clunky and dated. In circulation, most clerks don't have their own dedicated computer so we are stuck with the web version of Outlook. Most of the time I use Firefox as my web browser, but Outlook isn't fully functional with Firefox so I end up with multiple browsers open at once. I wish MCPL would convert to gmail, like Boone County Public Library. I think email itself has definitely made communication easier within the Circulation department. But I think something like gmail or a blog or a wiki would make communication even easier. With Google Talk we could communicate even more quickly about missing holds or busy service desks without having to call or email.

I also really like Gmail's new SMS feature, where you can send text messages to your gmail contacts from Google talk. This can be really useful if one party can't get to their phone while the other party is only available by cell. This feature could be used for communicating with the Bookmobile or security and maintenance.