When I started at Jenkins ages ago, I had this program on my computer called SnagIt - and had no idea what it was so I said I didn’t need it. Now I know what it does and it might actually be as handy as Snapper. Thanks to Lifehacker I just found out that you can get a version of SnagIt for free if you’d like.

Normally not-free screenshot application SnagIt is being given away in a slightly older version for free"”good news for technical writers and others who want to upgrade beyond the PrtSc key.

Instructions on downloading this free licensed version can be found at Digital Inspiration.

Technorati Tags: snagit, screenshots

Thanks Jill for letting me know about this Add On for Firefox.

TinyUrl brings the http://tinyurl.com functionality into your browser. It takes a long URL as input, and gives you a short URL to use in it’s place.

Installed!

Technorati Tags: tinyurl, firefox

So, I read on TechCrunch and Lifehacker about Windows Live Community Builder and I want to poke around a bit (because I’m trying not to be prejudiced) - but the link takes me to a very minimal looking page.

I tried a few different links and then thought … hmmm … this is Microsoft, I wonder if it will work in IE - and low and behold it does. How can you expect to get respect if your tool doesn’t work in all browsers? I guess I’ll just have to wait to try it out until I can use it in Firefox, because it’s not that important to me to have to use IE for just one website.

Technorati Tags: windows live community builder, windows live, internet explorer, firefox

I mentioned a while back that I hadn’t tried out Zoho’s office tools in a while. I also said I’d have to go take a look … which I didn’t! Now I’ve learned about Zoho Meeting and I really want to make the time to poke through the other tools offered by Zoho.

• Meet Online
  Have a live meeting with your colleagues or friends
• Demonstrate
  Showcase your product to prospective customers
• Troubleshoot
  Support your clients by solving their issues online
• Embed
  Embed Zoho Meeting in your blog, wiki, notebook or any web page

Hopefully I’ll find some time soon and share the results with you all!

Technorati Tags: zoho

I have added all of my PPT files to SlideShare - unfortunately I didn’t read the instructions and my tags have all been jumbled together. Anyone have any idea how to edit tags once they’re added? Because I’m not seeing it.

Looks like SlideShare is the tool of choice for the IL presenters this year. You can find many presentations from IL07 already online on SlideShare.

Technorati Tags: il2007

I bookmarked this resource ages ago - but apparently it was only recently released:

The first official alpha version of Google’s OCRopus scanning software for Linux was released yesterday. OCRopus is built on top of HP’s venerable open-source Tesseract optical character recognition (OCR) engine and is distributed under the Apache License 2.0.

OCRopus uses Tesseract for character recognition but has its own layout analysis system that is optimized for accuracy.

OCRopus sounds like an interesting tool - but probably doesn’t come close to a tool like FineReader - which is the most awesomest OCR package I’ve ever used!

Technorati Tags: ocr

Well, maybe not, but I do have another note to add. I was singing the praises of Google Presentation for a while … and I still think it’s pretty neat, but it may not be the answer for me.

I was working with my fellow presenters on a presentation using Google Presentation … but today I wanted to export as PPT so I could add notes pages to help me when I present … but you can’t!!!!

Technorati Tags: google presentation

How many homepages can one person have? There’s My Yahoo!, My Google, My … fill in the blank here. Anyway, now the NY Times wants to give you a homepage - My Times.

My Times is a free service that lets you create a personalized page with what you like best in The New York Times and your favorite sites and blogs from all over the Web. This personalized service makes it easy to read all that you like, from one central place.

So, take your pick - which homepage best fits your needs?

[found via Sites & Soundbytes]

This is just too cool. LibraryThing has added a new feature (and updated the layout of the site - I think).

Common Knowledge adds fields to every author and work, like:

* Author: Places of residence, Awards and honors, Agent
* Work: Important places, Character names, Publisher’s editor, Description

All-told there are fourteen fields. But Common Knowledge is less a set of fields than a structure for adding fields to LibraryThing. Adding more fields is almost trivial, and they can be added to anything existing or planned"”from tags and subjects, to bookstores and publishers. They can even be added to other Common Knowledge fields, so that, for example, agents and editors can, in the future, sport photos and contact information.* This can lead to, as Chris puts it, “nearly infinite cross-linking of data.”

Learn more and see some examples in Tim’s blog post.

This is just going to eat up all of my time - I’m going to have to catalog the characters in every book I own!!!

Technorati Tags: librarything

How nifty is this? Download Squad (which is an awesome blog, by the way) has pointed out FloorPlanner.

This free application takes the pencil, drafting table, and the $150/hr architect out of the equation and lets everyday people create and play around with floor plans online. Floor plans are simple to create with a feature rich toolset of drawing tools and household items to place on plans. Users start off by creating living space walls, choosing flooring material, adding doors and windows, and dropping in furniture and electrical outlets. Walls can be moved, colors changed and furniture moved all with a simple click until the perfect plan is set.

This would have been handy before I moved - or even for small libraries thinking of moving a few things around.

Technorati Tags: floor plan, floorplanner

Back when street view was released for Google, I was hiding my head in 100 books, but I did bookmark the announcement. Now, Download Squad has pointed out that Google now has 6 new locations on street view - including Philadelphia! I could have used that a couple of weeks ago when I got turned around coming out of the subway and walked 6 blocks in the wrong direction!!

Technorati Tags: google maps

This is a nifty new tool if you live in (or are visiting) one of the few areas that Google has maps for. Google Transit lets you plan itineraries using public transportation in 19 locations in the U.S. and all of Japan. Here’s a sample using the examples in Oregon posted on the Transit search page.

Pretty nifty, but since the cities I visit (Philadelphia, D.C., & New York) are not on this list it’s not useful to me yet.

Technorati Tags: maps, public transportation, google maps, google transit

I have to catalog a lot of foreign language materials at work - and I speak 1 language (typical American). So I use a tool called Babylon (not a freebie) to help me translate bits of text as I search through OCLC for the right copy.

Well, now the makers of Babylon are trying something new - they have a wiki-dictionary - a wiktionary, a wikitionary … hmmm - anyway they have a new site LingoZ where anyone can add entries to the dictionary. Sounds like a neat idea and helpful for those stranger terms and jargon that we can’t find definitions to elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: dictionary, lingoz, babylon

Yesterday I gave a presentation at a special library on how to use the power of blogs and wikis to improve communication and collaboration within your organization. The slides are online, but if you’ve ever attended one of my talks, you’ll know that the slides are just a quick intro. The meat of the presentation was the live demo.

• Office Communication the 2.0 Way
  Lawrenceville, NJ, September 20, 2007

After giving this talk, I realized how much I miss have a great library intranet Guess I’ll have to start giving the same talk here

One of the great things about doing hands on workshops is that there is always someone there to push you learn something you didn’t know! Or someone there to tell you something you didn’t know. Now, some instructors may not like that - but I’m all for it!

On Tuesday, Tim Siftar of Drexel University asked me we could embed Google Calendars into our websites. My answer? “I dun oh” But after a bit of poking around I found out that you can in fact embed a Google Calendar into your website. Here is my example.

To share your calendar you need to:

• Click on Manage Calendars
• Click on the calendar you want to share
• Choose to make the calendar public
• Click on the HTML button at the bottom of the screen (next to Calendar Address)
• Click on link for the configuration tool and follow the instructions

Technorati Tags: google calendar

As I mentioned earlier, I gave a Tech Topics session last night for the Philadelphia SLA Chapter. Well, a few hours before I left work for Philadelphia, I got an email informing me that Google had added presentations to their office suite.

I have tried to use some other collaborative presentation suites and always ended up going back to PowerPoint, but Google Presentations really has some awesome features! Its interface is very similar to PowerPoint, making it easy to learn. In addition to collaborative editing (a feature of all Google Office tools) you can publish your presentation and work with it as a webcast (without sound). During our class last night I published my test presentation and we were all able to chat while I changed the slides everyone was seeing. Couple that with Skype, voice chat or a conference call and you have a free collaborative webcast!

This is certainly a tool worth checking out!

Technorati Tags: google, office, google presentations

Google Books now has a My Library function where you can search Google Books and put items in your own library. You can also share your library link (here’s mine)

Your library has a public URL you can share with other people and even a feed. You can also write reviews, rate the books or categorize them using tags. Probably the most important reason you should build the library is because it becomes searchable. Imagine being able to find a scene from one of your books without knowing its title and by typing some keywords that describe the scene. Of course, Google didn’t index all the books in the world, so many of your favorite books aren’t yet searchable.

While this function does have an import available, it was able to find 138 of my 650+ titles that I exported from LibraryThing. I think this is handy for the reason stated above - being able to search full text, but I’ll stick to LibraryThing for cataloging my books.

Last night I gave a talk on the value of the content management system (CMS) at the Princeton Public Library. Most of it was live demos of Drupal, Joomla and the Jenkins Law Library intranet (a homegrown CMS), but I also had a few intro slides that are now on my Publications & Presentations page

• Managing Your Content: Everything You Need to Know about the CMS
  Princeton Public Library Tech Talks, Princeton, NJ, September 4, 2007

I just read about this beta site via Sites & Soundbytes. The tagline for CampusExplorer is “School Search Made Smart” and I totally agree. I have been trying to help my husband find a master’s program near our new home for special ed. Most sites just let you search by state - but if you don’t know the area you’re moving to then searching by state is useless because you don’t know what towns are near you. This site lets you search down to the zip code!! Now, it’s missing only one thing - the option to narrow by Masters degree

I saw this new tab earlier but just ignored it (who needs another “my” tool?), but then I read what it was all about on Lifehacker and had to share.

To add multiple layers of data points to your maps - like information about real estate prices, weather, earthquakes and movie showtimes - from the “My Maps” tab hit “Add content,” and watch all those third-party Google maps mashups get consolidated onto GMaps proper.

Very very very cool! This is a great example of how using user-generated content can add value to your tool (or possibly - you library catalog?).

Technorati Tags: google, google maps, mashup

Awesome! Alice posts about WorldCat Lists.

Lists are a way for you to group library-owned items you have found while using WorldCat. Lists let you keep track of items of interest and refer back to them whenever you want to. You can share your lists with friends and colleagues, too.

Here are some existing lists. I see one name I know on the list of existing lists: Stuart Weibel has added his own favorite books list. What list will you add?

How did I miss this? I got an email today from Carol Connell Cannon, director of the Lee Memorial Library in NJ and fellow Juniata College Alum. She points me to the fact that you can cite titles you find in WorldCat in (what I assume is) every format. Very handy!!

I usually use KnightCite which is created by Justin Searls (a.k.a. “Juice”), a student at Calvin College, but the new BibMe site sounds interesting too - I might use it for the papers I’m working on now.

[update] I didn’t miss it (just forgot about it) - I had it in my del.icio.us bookmarks - I just didn’t write about here. [/update]

I was listening to the most recent Library Geeks Podcast yesterday and wanted to share one thing that I learned (I learned a lot - but I want you to go and listen to what Gary Price has to say).

I learned about Ask City, a map search by Ask.com. This is not just another map app though! This is the coolest thing thing maps hit the web. What’s so cool? Well, using the tools below the map, you can draw a shape. Then you can search within that shape for the Businesses, Events, or Movies you’re interested in.

As some of you know, I’m looking for a new home. I’m looking in an area I know nothing about - so when the realtor sites ask me for a zip and to choose surrounding areas - I’m lost! If they had a tool like this I could draw a shape around the area I want to live and let them figure out the specifics. How cool would that be?

Well, for now I’ll stick to the old fashioned way and hope I end up in the right place! For now though, Ask has become my map app of choice (for everything else) on the web!!

Via VentureBeat:

Did you know our primitive brains weren't wired very well to read this paragraph?

Scientific research conducted by Walker Reading Technologies, a small Minnesota startup that has been studying our ability to read for the last ten years, has concluded that the natural field of focus for our eyes is circular, so our eyes view the printed page as if we're peering through a straw.

And a very bad-behaving straw at that, because not only do our eyes feed our brain the words we're reading, they're also uploading characters and words from the two sentences above and below the line we're reading.

I totally agree!! I always find that my eyes have wandered to another paragraph or line when reading online … and in print … but more online.

The solution is Live Ink:

Live Ink works by analyzing written language for meaning and language structure, and then applies algorithms that reformat the text into a series of short, cascading phrases. It breaks complex syntax into simpler syntax, which makes it easier for the brain to absorb the material.

You can see a screenshot of what it does - I’m not sure it’s the best answer - but at least research is being done.

I’m one of those people who likes to print out long articles or e-books so that I can read them in print - maybe I won’t want to do that anymore.

Technorati Tags: live ink, reading