Google Calendar

From LIS 460 Summer 2007

Google Calendar is one of the Google tools. It is an online calendar template on to which you can add events. You can view your events in various formats, by month, week, day, the next four days, or your agenda, which lists all of your events in chronological order. It's very simple, and easy to learn and to use. To get started you can either import calendars from Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Calendar, or Apple iCal, or you can create a new calendar and add events directly to it. You can have as many calendars as you want, and show or hide them independently.

Some of the features include notifications by phone, e-mail, SMS text message, your daily agenda by e-mail at 5am, and event reminders. You can send invitations through Google Calendar, RSVP to invitations you have been sent, leave comments as a guest and view guest comments. You can keyword search in public calendars, and add public calendars to your own, for instance sporting events for particular teams, DVD release dates, or politicians' campaign event schedules. Another nice feature is that it is easy to print your Google calendar in various formats, with options such as fonts, sizes, color, etc., and you can choose which of your calendars to include.

In terms of privacy and accessibility, for each calendar you can set the following preferences: you have the option to share details or just whether you are free or busy with everyone (make public) or share only with specific people, and if you share with specific people you can decide who can make changes and manage sharing, only make changes, see all event details, or just see whether you are free or busy.

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In a school library

If you search "school library" in public calendars, there are not many hits. It's possible that more schools have calendars that are not public. The school that do have calendars posted publicly seem to use them for scheduling classes in the library and scheduling employees or volunteers.

In a school library, if you use flex scheduling, Google Calendar would be a great way for teachers to sign up for times on a shared calendar. The librarian could post which areas or rooms in the library are being used when so teachers know what's available. You could post dates that you are receiving items, or release dates for books. You could also post library related events in the surrounding area. Posting due dates for major library research assignments might help teachers keep track of when their students had other major assignments due, and also when different clusters of books might be under higher or lower demand. And if you offered library workshops for teachers this would be a great place to post them and to invite all teachers or specifically those whom you think might be interested in attending. You could also posts events that parents might be interested in, such as a book fair, due dates for major research projects, parents' night, etc.

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