PDFs Are All the Rage

Resource Shelf has a post about xFruits free service which allows conversion of RSS feeds to PDF format.  xFruits also has a number of other format conversions including: RSS to web, RSS to mail, and Mail to RSS.   I have not yet come across a situation in which any of these conversions would be that useful but you never know.

TinyURL

I just discovered Tiny URL and I love it.  I’m probably way behind on the discovery of this tool as I have gotten a few links to tiny urls.  For those of you are not familiar with it I’ll give you a “tiny” overview.  Copy a url into the box here and your url will be changed to a tiny url. This allows very long urls that often get cut off when pasting in an email or posting to a blog to receive a unique short url that does not expire.  The other advantage of this is the ability to hide your affiliate link since the url gives away absolutely no information as to the source.

Overdue Fines for Friends

David Pogue of the New York Times has a great video introduction to Delicious Library.  I really like that fact that you can keep tabs on who you loaned your items to.

Too Cool for School

I love this article I found via LisNews

If patrons don’t use it does it really exist?

Lately I’ve been thinking about several great strides that have been made in implementing new technologies in libraries.  These include journal alerts, the LibX tool bar, RSS feeds for library blogs, and bibliographic management tools.  These tools can save time and organize research but often times patrons are not aware of the services or find the explanation on how to use them too confusing.  I think we’re doing well at coming up with the tools and implementing them but we need to find better ways to convey the benefits of these tools to patrons.   Even if these tools are available, if nobody uses them they might as well not exist.

Have I told you how much I love Zotero?

I know I’ve blogged about my love for Zotero before but I just want to reiterate what a great tool it is. Here is one example of how it can be useful in presenting information to patrons. You can create a pathfinder on a subject as a folder in your Zotero library. All of the Bibliographic information is saved and you can easily print out a report.  zotero.doc

Note : You can manually add information to include: location of the book or any other notes you find suitable.

Ask.com unveils new Interface/features

I really like the simple look of Ask.com its very similar to the widgets on a Mac.  On the initial page you have the options of searching “web”, “images”, “City”, “news”, and “blogs”.  If you click on the arrow you have the option to “Browse Features” and this is where all of the really specialized searching takes place.  Resource Shelf has a post with Gary Price introducing the new features.  I look forward to trying it out today.

I Can’t wait for ALA

KoolWire Lets You go from Word to PDF via email

Library Stuff has a post about KoolWire a service which allows you to email Word (.doc), Powerpoint (.ppt), Excel (.xls), Jpeg, GIF, Rich Text Format (.rtf), TXT files and convert them to PDFs.  I tried it myself and it works well.

Library Camp

An alternative or supplement to the ALA conference in Washington, D.C.  Read about it here.