Tuesday 17 June 2014

Going Google - five gmail things

My workplace has "gone Google" today - moving staff and faculty over to use the same Google services that our students have been using for several years.

Personally, as a Google girl, I've been looking forward to the move, but some of my colleagues have been a bit nervous in anticipation, and adjusting to any new work flow, even an improved one, is change, and change can be hard. (I automatically opened Outlook about a half-dozen times this morning, before I deleted the pinned icon, because that's where my work mail has lived for years, and it's going to take a few repetitions to re-program that automatic action as I think 'email', for one thing!)

I thought it might be a good moment for a blog post, though, so I can note down what I'm doing as I 'move in', in case that's of any use to anyone else, but also because once you're in to your customised version, it can be hard to remember what the default experience is, and I may need to refer back.

Thing #1 - Conversation view. I kind of love conversation view, but I know plenty of other people who loathe it. If that's you, it's probably the first thing you notice about gmail, hence Thing #1.  There is a setting to turn it off.

You can access the settings screen via the little 'daisy' in the top right of your mailbox, with a down arrow next to it. (I think it's a stylized cog, actually, but almost everyone I've had to talk through a gmail screen over the phone recognises it as a daisy.) Click on the down arrow, and choose 'settings'. You're looking for an option about half way down the first, 'general' settings tab - there's a radio button to toggle Conversation View on or off.  

Thing #2 - Inbox layouts. Actually, while we're on that settings page, the other things I tweaked on this page were:
  •  Show "Send &Archive" button in reply - toggle to yes (default is hide). Once I have got auto-labelling working fluently, this becomes the most elegant way of 'finishing' an email - especially if you run (or aspire to) Inbox Zero. 
  •  Set email signature (this didn't get brought through from our old system, so needs to be re-set.) 

Thing #2 - Inbox layouts. (Settings - Inbox tab) The default setting us one giant list of everything. I prefer 'Priority Inbox' which shuffles out a) new unread email that is marked as 'Important' (the auto-filtering takes a little bit of training, but once trained does a good job), then b) things you have starred then c) everything else. There are a number of other options, too - just Important and Everything Else, if you don't use stars, for example.

Thing #3 - Labs. (Settings - Labs tab) Labs are a number of extra tools that Gmail makes available as options, while deciding whether or not to incorporate them into the main gmail experience for everyone. There are some really useful little tricks in here. I turn on:
  •  Canned Responses  (which I've always thought sound great, but had no use for in my personal mail)
  •  Google Calendar gadget (to get a quick view of my day's appointments on the mail mail screen) 
  • Mark as Read Button  (which just saves a few mouse clicks, but does so multiple times a day)
  • Quote selected text (another tiny time saver)
  • Smartlabels (although I may turn this back off - it's less obviously useful here than on my personal account) 
  • Undo Send (which gives you a few seconds to go 'Nooooo!' and summon the email back from the ether. Go back to 'General' once you've saved the Labs changes to set the time period for this one.)
  • Unread message icon (which I hate for my personal account, but suspect I will find useful for work.) 
There's also a 'Preview Pane' option here, for those who prefer that layout for reading their email.

Thing #4  Filters.  Filters are the quickest and most reliable way I know of to get auto-labelling to work well, where there are standard rules about how you want labels applied.  In my case, I typically want, say, all emails from the handful of people who I email with regularly about our LMS (and vanishingly rarely about anything else) to be labelled as "ND LMS", so I have set filters (Settings - Filters) with rules that email from Alice, Bob, and Cindi should be labelled "ND LMS" automatically, instead of my needing to manually do that each time an email comes in. (A little bit of work now, time savings every time and email comes in in the future.)  The easy way to slowly build these up over time is - every time you get an email that you think should be the basis of a filter, you can click on the arrow next to the reply icon, select 'filter messages like this', and set that up  (it defaults to the From address info - I have filters based on subject lines, and sig file text in my mix as well). I make pretty liberal use of the 'Always mark as important' filter action as well, which feeds back in to the way I have my inbox set up.

Thing #5 - Labels.  Gmail replaces Folders with Labels. For more recent stuff, this works very smoothly, but it does expose the mess that the previous systems 'after 3 months we automatically move things to deep storage' made of my record keeping!  The bulk of it, I'm just going to have to hide under the file tree, and trust to Google's search capabilities, because it isn't worth the time to re-set, but some things I really did need to fix up.

It's worth knowing that you can bulk change all the emails with a particular label by clicking once on the edge of the label name, and selecting edit. You can't directly merge labels  (so I can't change "Managed Folders ND LMS" into just "ND LMS"), but there is a work around. It is kind of fiddly and involved which is why I am only doing it for a minority of folders where I know I will regularly search by label, and need archive things to show up without having to remember to include both "ND LMS" and  "Managed Folders ND LMS" in my search criteria.  These instructions are pretty clear, although instead of their step 5, I'd insert a step 3.5 which would read  "If you have more messages under the label than can be displayed in a single screen, you will see the message "All 20 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations in [name of label]" - click on "Select all conversations" to do exactly that."  That saves the whole 'rinse and repeat' part of their instructions and will save you hours if you have a few hundred emails to re-label.  


Saturday 25 January 2014

Notes on an essay

Earlier this week, I turned in my first academic essay in over a decade. Back in September, I started a part time MA in British History, and I've been really enjoying my return to being a student so far. Now that the first module is done, it seems like a good time to reflect on how the experience is informing my library work.
1) I knew this in theory when I applied for the course, but full time work and part time study makes mastering time management a key core skill. Fortunately, I've spent the time since I was last in the classroom building up those skills and habits and routines, and a toolkit that includes reflection and re-evaluation which means I am in the habit of asking myself "is this tool / technique / habit still working for me", and adjusting my course as needed. Knowing myself and my work patterns has been a huge help as well. Now, here's hoping I can keep this up!
2) Talking of tools, Zotero. I may be just a little in love here. Not just the being able to keep track of citations, although *not* having to hand type pages of footnotes and bibliographies is, of course, great, but actually for keeping track of readings and notes along the way. Having everything rationally and flexibly grouped together, and being able to add notes and metadata and attach files, and have the whole thing sync to the cloud and work on every machine I use, regardless of OS ... I ended up with a folder for class readings, and one for my research essay, with an entry for every book / article / website used, which had the biblio, the pdf for articles and the book chapters I had ILL'd, and a note in which I had typed up my notes on the item, and also kept any quotes I might want to use (with page numbers, bien sur). It's building out of my old notes system, which was to keep a giant Word doc for each class, with all my notes and quotations and citations, out of which I could C&P ingredients for an essay, but far, far more flexible. As I am already into my next module, and there are a couple of books that overlap, I'm just adding a second note for "notes with focus X" and appreciating having my existing work easily to hand.
Did I mention it integrates not only with Word, but with Open Office? And behaves on linux? And it's free? I would plan on using this for my next personal research project, and possibly for CPD stuff, as well as for academic essays. I met Zotero briefly during CPD23, but didn't really have a reason to dig deep enough into it to really see how it could help. The other options I considered for the module were Evernote and Google Drive, and while I'm still a Google girl in general, I'm happy with the choice I made. Zotero is a tool I'll be recommending to students in the future.
3) ILL librarian's are *awesome*. Although it's important to ask specifically for the notes when it's a book chapter with endnotes. (Neither part of this is news, but having first-hand user experience very much re-enforces it)
4) I have even more sympathy than I did before with the students who respond to being told something is available as an ebook, with a sigh and asking if there's any way of getting it in paper. Access to a text is better than no access, hands down, but format does matter, and so many of the academic ebook services are, frankly, a pain to use. You have to be online to use them. They're expecting you to be on a desktop or laptop, and may or may not handle the screen you're actually using, let alone an e-reader. They've disabled copying text, so you have to hand-type the quote despite the fact that it's right there, in a format that is inherently copyable. There's the log-in hoops to jump through, and getting timed out at annoying moments. The notes and the text may not be hyperlinked to each other, and flipping back and forth is fiddly. The load time for each page - and the fact it won't just go ahead and load the rest of the chapter in the background - made me want to grind my teeth, and then there was the particularly charming moment where one e-book platform decided that the time it took me to hand-copy a quote was evidence that I was done now and "check out" the ebook to another user, leaving me suddenly facing a "this book is being used by someone else - check back later" notice in the middle of a sentence. (That last one was the subject of some rude words, not least because if the book had been available in any other format than a £75 hardback with a 3-week lead time, I may well have purchased a copy for myself!)
5) Electronic access is wonderful. Even given all the above, I'd take e-access over none any day of the week, and the range and depth available is fantastic. E-journals particularly are just a thing of joy, and there are some types of (basically narrative) history where my personal preference is to buy an e-book and save my spine from carrying the hardback back and forth on the tube. Ditto institutional repositories and Ethos. Worlds of riches!
6) Research skills help - obvious, but true. Time spent mastering advanced searches, subject bibliography tools, and going on library introduction sessions was time well spent, but not time that you'll want to spend as the deadline approaches. I'm not sure how to get this message across to students who haven't experienced it yet, but I'm surer than ever that it's a message worth trying to send.
7) Related to the above, doing those induction sessions was a great reminder of how confusing and intimidating unfamiliar institutions can be, even if you're familiar with the type of institution, and how much of a difference a friendly face can make. The value of every interaction in creating an impression of your library, from the signage, to the website, to the front desk to the in-depth conversation. How much it helps when people act like human beings rather than automatons. That making explicit the expectations about the use a space or set of resources helps people meet them, but may also make them feel safer in the space, and thus more comfortable (and more able to learn).
8) Research as play to steal a phrase. This stuff is fun. Deadlines, not so much, but the process - even the writing and the editing - can be.
I won't find out how I've done in this essay for several weeks, but I really hope I passed, mostly because I'm really enjoying myself, and I want to carry on doing this!