Using an Online Environment for a Long-Term Collaborative Writing Project

Abstract

In October 2005, nine Library and Computing services faculty from six universities around the U.S. began writing a book collaboratively. The book, entitled Teaching with Technology: An academic librarian’s guide, will be published by Chandos Publishing, Oxford in early 2007. Each contributing author is writing, or helping write at least one chapter for the project. Because the authors are spread out geographically, and because the book is focused on technology use, we decided to use an online environment as a collaboration, project management, and professional networking tool during our 14-month project. The tool we selected is called Imeem, available for free from www.imeem.com.