Status Line
- General Information
- October 2006
- Issue: 206
Catching Up With Innovative Internet Applications and Other Information for Busy Librarians
With new technology being created all the time, how do librarians keep up with it all? Well, there are some great web sites out there designed to help us with that. A few sites of general interest that come to mind are:
ResourceShelf http://www.resourceshelf.com which is updated daily by an editorial team headed by Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy
- Steven Bell’s Keeping Up web site http://staff.philau.edu/ bells/keepup/.
- Innovative Internet Applications in Libraries http://www. wiltonlibrary.org/innovate.html by Kathy Leeds of Wilton Library.
- Neat New Stuff I Found This Week http://marylaine.com/ neatnew.html by Marylaine Block, who also publishes ExLibris: A weekly E-zine for Librarians http://marylaine.com/exlibris/ .
- Another good source for keeping up, thanks to our colleagues in the UK, is the BUBL LINK Catalogue of Internet Resources http://bubl.ac.uk/link/l/libraryinternetuse.htm , which is part of the BUBL Information Service http://bubl.ac.uk/ . BUBL LINK is an Internet link collection for the library and higher education communities, run by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde. Its name was originally short for Bulletin Board for Libraries. BUBL describes itself as “Free User-Friendly Access to selected internet resources covering all subject areas, with a special focus on Library and Information Science.”
Now for some web-based technology that you might find useful in helping you keep up with all those web sites I mentioned above: web page change detection services. Steven Bell’s Keeping Up web site has a good overview of what web page change detection services are all about; you can find it here: http://staff.philau.edu/bells/keepup/detectit.htm. There are many good change detection services out there, and a good review of them was done by Marshall Kirkpatrick: http:// marshallk.com/a-review-of-web-site-change-detection-services . Gary Price offers additional information at Search Engine Watch http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051228- 172334 . He also did a review of web site monitoring service Site24×7 on ResourceShelf http://www.resourceshelf.com/ 2006/08/26/free-monitor-any-site-or-page-and-receive-quicknotification- when-it-goes-offline-slows-down-and-more/ .
In his Site24X7 review, Gary Price mentions AdventNet’s Zoho free, browser-based suite of office services, which he calls “must see” web-based apps. Zoho Office Suite includes a word processing app, a presentation tool, and a spreadsheet alternative. Gary did a review of Zoho and it can be found here http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/08/13/zohos-web-basedservices- continue-to-improve-new-services-too/ . From the little bit of playing I've done with the Zoho products I thought they were easy to use and would encourage you to check them out! A good review of ZohoProjects, their web-based project manager, by Marshall Kirkpatrick appeared on TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/25/zohoprojectschallenges- basecamp-on-project-management/ .
More helpful information for librarians and the users we serve that I came across on Vitaly Friedman’s Personal Notebook is his list of nifty tools for drawing diagrams, charts and flowcharts, which can be found at: http://www.alvit.de/blog/article/nifty-tools-and-tutorials-for-creating-diagrams-chartsand-chart-flows . Along those lines, but geared more toward engineering and the sciences, Knovel offers sample interactive books, with tools like a unit converter and the Periodic Table of the Elements. You can learn more about them at http://www.knovel.com/knovel2/free_tools.jsp . Knovel also offers K-Essentials, which is permanent, ongoing access to 7 titles and tools; you do have to register to use K-Essentials. Find out more about Knovel’s K-Essentials and register at http://www. knovel.com/knovel2/free_content.jsp .
If you’re on the road a lot, you may want to check out Furl or del.icio.us, social bookmarking web services that save your bookmarks and let you find them again instantly from any computer. It also allows you to share sites you find and discover useful new ones by exploring what others are looking at. Find out more about Furl or del.icio.us and sign-up for free to use them at http://www.furl.net/home.jsp or http://del.icio.us/ .