Dropbox

Working in an academic library, I routinely fill document requests for faculty. Sometimes a request is for a single article. Other times it's a list spanning several pages. The request list I'm working on now, for example, contains 25 articles. Fifteen years ago, this would've meant photocopying all 25 and hand delivering them to the faculty member. These days, with most articles available in PDF via electronic databases, the usual delivery method is email. With 25 articles to send, however, that can get tedious. Odds are good that my school's email system has a low enough file attachment size restriction that I'd have to split the documents into multiple emails. Even Gmail's higher size restrictions probably wouldn't suffice.

In recent months I've all but stopped sending email attachments to faculty. Instead I'm using a tool called Dropbox to store the documents. Then I just send an email containing each file's URL to the faculty member who requested the articles. When she clicks each link, she downloads the article directly from Dropbox.

So what is Dropbox? From Techcrunch:

The idea behind Dropbox... is that little to no effort should be put into keeping your desktop files synced with “the cloud”. So the three founders have built a... desktop client (available for both PCs and Macs) that acts like a regular folder on your machine. You can manage files within this folder just like elsewhere on your machine (add, edit, copy, and delete them) and changes will be automatically synced to Dropbox’s Amazon S3-backed storage, and very quickly at that.

So, in other words, when I save a file to the Dropbox folder on my office computer, it's automatically synced to the Dropbox folder on all my other computers, like my laptop or my home desktop. This isn't just a virtual folder, like with Apple's Mobile Me service. The file is actually transferred to my other computers, so I can access it even when I'm not online. That same file also becomes available on any other computer simply by logging into the Dropbox site with a web browser.

Each Dropbox account includes a "Public" folder, and that's where I place documents I need to deliver to faculty. Each file in this folder is assigned a unique public URL, and if I share the URL for a particular file with a faculty member, she can then download the file, even without her own Dropbox account.

Overcoming file attachment restrictions isn't the only benefit to this method of document delivery. In the past when I sent files by email, I still saved a copy to my computer for future reference (in case the faculty member accidentally deleted the email attachment and needed the article again). Since Dropbox's Public folder resides on my computer, I now simply use that folder as my faculty document archive and, thanks to auto-syncing, it's automatically available to me everywhere. Plus, anytime a faculty member needs to access an article again, she need only click on the link to it in the original email. Essentially, this folder becomes a shared folder of research between faculty and their librarian liaisons.

Dropbox offers a 2GB account free of charge, or you can upgrade to a 50GB account for $9.99/month or $99.99/year.