Regarding Thing 9 of the 10 Things.
Ah, the almighty, ubiquitous Google…what else is there to say about the Goog that hasn’t been said already? Some people think it’s the greatest thing humanity has ever produced and others think it’s the epitome- of -evil. I think it probably falls somewhere in between 
. All I know is that it’s a major part of our daily lives and there’s no end in sight to its dominance as a search engine and a lot more.
Librarians seem to have a love/hate relationship with it and I can understand that, but I think I’ve come to accept it especially since they come out with incredible stuff all the time. If it helps us in our work, we should use it plain and simple. During my first semester at University of Michigan, the announcement came about Google’s massive book scanning project in collaboration with, among others, the U of M Library. It was the biggest news you can imagine for us newbie librarians in training. Mostly, there was excitement about the whole thing, but I sensed uncertainty and some tension about the implications of a project like this. I think librarians are still trying to figure out if the Google Books project is a good thing or not, but I tend to gravitate towards the position of it being a good thing if it means more access to more people. The key word is “if” in that last sentence. There’s been some interesting discussions (okay, let’s call them verbal wars) recently about the so-called googlization of everything. Btw, Paul Courant, the University Librarian at Michigan, is blogging now and it’s worth a read.
Also, it appears to me that some libraries are beginning to adopt the Google model of allowing staff members to think creatively, sort of following the “Google Labs” idea where there is an ongoing effort to push things forward. I think this is a good thing. We don’t need to feel like we’re competing with Google but it wouldn’t hurt us to adopt their work practices. Spending 1 day per week on pet projects doesn’t sound like a bad idea!
As for Google Docs, I love the idea but I’m not so crazy about how it currently works. I’ve been sharing docs with people from work to collaborate on various projects (including the 10 Things) and there have been several instances where I’ve made changes to a document and it erased the entire document. Thankfully, there’s a way to revert back to a previous version, but these problems have kept me from feeling entirely confident in using it. We’re also using it to make past computer class presentations available to the public, but I’ve noticed that there are the occasional formatting issues when uploading a ppt file, which is more of an annoyance than a reason not to use it.