Tips for Working Smarter

Cynthia L. Smith [Barley Snyder LLC, Richmond, VA] and Julia E. Hughes [McGuireWoods LLP, Harrisburg, PA] presented a session on “Working Smart: Innovative Ways to Do More with Your Day” at the recent conference of the American Association of Law Libraries in Washington DC. The session was sponsored by the OPL Section of the Private Law Libraries Section.

It looks to have been a very good session. You can get the following online: the outline, downloads of the slides, a bibliography and list of resources (with links to screencasts), and the original proposal.

URL: http://sites.google.com/site/e5workingsmart/

PLANNING FOR AALL CONFERENCE

If you’re planning to attend the 2009 conference of the American Association of Law Libraries in Washington DC in July, or if you’re even thinking about it, here are a couple of sessions you shouldn’t miss.

Building a Coalition of County Law Libraries: A Place to Begin
Working Smart: Innovative Ways to Do More with Your Day

See the full preliminary program in the December 2009 issue of AALL Spectrum or at http://aallnet.org/database/meeting_annual_programs.asp?meetingcode=AM2009&link=

MAXIMIZE YOUR SOCIAL NETWORKING

It is time consuming to send the same message to all of your social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.). Web Worker Daily has a great post on software that can automate this activity.
Broadcasting to Your Social Networks, by Aliza Sherman, describes several levels of Social Aggregation Broadcasting Tools. An active SABT is HelloTxt; ShareThis and AddThis are passive SABTs; Utterz integrates SABT features; and Twhirl, Tweetburner, and Twitterfeed are examples of narrow SABTs. Some of the 14 comments suggest other programs you can use for this purpose.

URLs:
the article: http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/06/25/broadcasting-to-your-social-networks/
HelloTxt: http://hellotxt.com/
ShareThis: http://www.sharethis.com/
AddThis: http://www.addthis.com/
Utterz: http://www.utterz.com/
Twhirl: http://www.twhirl.com/
Tweetburner: http://tweetburner.com/
Twitterfeed: http://www.twitterfeed.com/

GREAT FIREFOX EXTENSION

Read it Later (beta) is a wonderful extension for Firefox that allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest. I really use and like it.

“When you come across something you want to read later, simply click the ‘Read Later’ button and the page is instantly inserted into your reading list. Then when you have some free time, just click ‘Reading List’ and it’ll randomly pull up something for you to read (or you can choose which article to read). When you are finished, click Mark it As Read and it will be removed from your list. If you found what you read to be worth bookmarking, you can use the dropdown under Mark it As Read to add it to your Firefox bookmarks or any online bookmark service such as Del.icio.us.”

URL: http://www.ideashower.com/ideas/active/read-it-later

GET ORGANIZED! A GUIDE FOR DEALING WITH INFORMATION OVERLOAD

Ellyssa Kroski [Columbia University, New York, New York, USA] has a wonderful post on iLibrarian listing articles on information overload, organization, and productivity. Here are the titles—check out the full post for the links.

Organization/Info Overload: 20 Great Tools to Keep Your Life Organized, Master Your Information Manifesto: 21 Tips to Deal with Info Overload, Eight steps to thriving on information overload, Key to Organization: The Habit of Now, Get your life back: Organise your brain, Get Organized: Keep All Your Information in One Place, Too Much Information: Take back your attention span

Productivity: Cut the Fat to Get to Lean Productivity, Get productive with the best Facebook Apps, 15 iGoogle Gadgets for Web Worker Productivity, 25 To Do Lists to Stay Productive

URL: http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2007/get-organized-
a-guide-for-dealing-with-information-overload/

(this one linked...go figure...)

SAVE TIME WITH WEB 2.0 TOOLS

Aaron Schmidt [North Plains Public Library, North Plains, Oregon, USA] writes in a post on his blog, Walking Paper, that he is a very busy reference librarian in a small public library. He uses Web 2.0 tools to same time. You don’t have to be in a public library to follow his example.

The library’s website was created with WordPress; the library tour is powered by PictoBrowser and Flickr; and the librarians use Google Spreadsheet “to organize the collaboration of multiple employees that are infrequently in the same room.”

He concludes, “I hope this mini case study of a time strapped library helps expose the ‘I don’t have time for social software’ excuse to be just that: an excuse for not wanting to expand and learn.”

URLs:
Complete post: http://www.walkingpaper.org/402
NPPL website: http://nplibrary.org/
Library tour: http://nplibrary.org/tour-the-library/
WordPress: http://www.wordpress.com
PictoBrowser: http://www.db798.com/work/
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com
Google Spreadsheet: http://docs.google.com