There are so many different tools on the web today to manage collaboration and storage. It’s almost mind boggling. I remember when I first started using computers, hard drives were just a few megabytes, and the most you could store was what you could put on a floppy (1.4 MB). Now, I can send extremely large files through the web and have a central place to upload them.
I’ve been using the service Dropbox (http://db.tt/oTi8cc0) for quite a while now. This service is absolutely free and gives me 2 GB of data to sync across multiple computers and the web. This is perfect for juggling all of my different school projects without having to e-mail it to myself or worry about uploading it anywhere. Since I do work on my desktop, laptop, and sometimes on my iPhone, it just automatically syncs. It’s really great!
There is a lot that I can do with Dropbox that I haven’t been doing, so I decided to explore a little bit more. First, Dropbox has public and private folders. The private folders are only accessible on the computers that I specifically authorize and these would be where I store things like my school documents and other personal items. Dropbox also has public folders, though, and this is a place where I can put anything and share it with anyone, as long as they have the specific URL. They do not need to have anything installed on their computer! So for instance, if I want to share a document with some other people, all I have to do is put it somewhere in the “Public” folder. Once it is copied, I can right-click on it and select “Copy Public Link”. This will generate a URL that I can share with anyone else to see the file. And, they can only see that specific file, not necessarily all of the other content in the Public folder.
I also found out that there is a “Photos” folder as well. At first I just thought this was a place to put photos, but there’s more that you can do with it, too. Any pictures or subfolders you put in there automatically create an album. Then, if you go to a specific URL while logged into your dropbox, you can easily view these pictures as If they were a webpage. If you want to share the gallery with your friends, Dropbox generates a special link where you can share the specific album with other people. This is great for sharing photos to send to a lot of people, especially if they are not active on other sites like Facebook and Flickr. Personally, I still prefer uploading my pictures to a place like Facebook just because I know the exact security settings, but this wouldn’t be such a bad place for general photos.
Also, while poking around, I noticed that I can see the version history of all my files. Take for instance my “Research Paper Proposal” for this class. I worked on that on both my laptop and my desktop at different times. If I right click and select “Previous Version History” I can see when the file was last updated and on which computers, too. Not only that, but I can view what these previous versions looked like and restore back to a previous file if I accidentally made a mistake. This feature alone makes this the ideal choice for storing my school documents. No one wants to have to rewrite a paper.
One final thing that I discovered is that I can “share” folders, too. This is different than the public folder, where anyone can access specific files as long as they have the url. Sharing folders allows me to share multiple files with anyone I wish, but only with the people that I want. For instance, if I share it with 3 friends, only those 3 friends can access it. It’s not like a public URL that anyone can access it as long as they know it. The people that I share it with can also add or modify the contents of this folder if they’d like. This would be great for school projects where people are uploading, changing, and sharing files a lot – it also makes things like e-mail much less cumbersome.
I think of all the Web 2.0 tools, however, Dropbox is the one that I'd want to exercise the most caution with when using in libraries. I think Dropbox works best for individuals and for specific groups. I think it could be not as effective if you're dealing with a large crowd. I can see this as a great tool for librarians to share information and data with each other, but might not be as good for librarians to share data with patrons.
Overall, there are some pretty neat things that you can do with Dropbox, and I’m still exploring. I like how it’s very simple and easy to set-up, but has a lot of more complex features if you want them. This is a great compromise between cloud storage and local storage.
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