Thing #7

My library has had e-mail for years and I have a couple of personal accounts. I use folders at work to archive important e-mails and try to keep my inbox at less than 300 items. Most of my home e-mails are advertisements from retailers or jokes forwarded by friends and family. It's easy to keep those accounts down to almost nothing.

I've been using IM for several years now, mainly to communicate with my college-age kids. It seems pretty commonplace to me. My 78 year-old father and my 79 year-old mother-in-law use IM.

My library system offered staff IM accounts last year. It's a great way to communicate between buildings and to reach staff working on another desk or a different floor. We don't offer IM reference for the public yet, but we use IM in the reference process. We'll IM another library to ask them to put a book on hold for a patron. We occasionally do group brainstorming on a tough reference question via IM.

Text messaging isn't my preferred method of communication, but I use it. I probably send one or two text messages a week, often to respond to a message someone has sent to me. I find it useful when I want to contact someone but one of us is not in a good place to make or receive a phone call. I find the auto-spell feature on my phone annoying to use, so I type every word, letter by letter, and I use very few abbreviations.

National Treasure is on TV in the same room as me and I'm having a hard time concentrating on Thing #7. More later...