Betwixt and Between Collaborative Online Spaces: Editing and Publishing a Collection of Essays

For the past year, my co-editors and I collaborated online as we went through the workflow of editing a collection of essays on the topic of “Generation X” experiences of librarianship.1 While two of us live in the same region—the Southeast—we are separated by 283 miles. Driving six hours oneway to discuss editorial decisions that can be handled more efficiently, and on the cheap via free online collaboration tools was not an option. The fact that the third member of our editorial team lived 1,056 miles north was also a consideration. We discussed meeting at conference of the American Library Association, but schedules were tight and not everyone could attended the conference. To deal with these factors, we explored several online tools that could allow us to collaborate on our project and bring it to fruition: Wikispaces, Manymoon, Google Wave, DimDim, and Google Docs.