Thing 5 - My Doodle experiences

Doodle is a useful tool for librarians (or anyone else) who want to arrange meetings or find out which date/time for an event is most convenient for its participants. This was my first attempt at actually creating a Doodle poll as in the past I had only used it passively to respond to others' Doodle polls. I thought Doodle would be a doddle but didn't find it quite as user-friendly as I had expected - perhaps because as soon as I had set it up I went back to edit a time and then was surprised that I wasn't directed back to the admin page again. I opted to send the link to participants myself, which is fine as long as you remember to include the link in your email to them! When I next create a Doodle poll I will remember to include my email address so that I am notified when people respond as this saves having to keep checking the poll results.

The 'yes/no/if need be' option is handy as it allows people to show times that they would prefer not to do but could do if needed. It would be nice to be able to customise the wording as 'have time', 'could make time if absolutely necessary' and 'do not have time' might not be the wording you would like in every circumstance.

I've learnt that you can also use Doodle for more than scheduling events. I'm not sure that Doodle's example of choosing between polenta, pizza and pasta is very relevant to libraries, but there must be an example of this 'make a choice' function being used for some library-related purpose somewhere!