October 2004 Archives

Just remember that old saying...if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. As reported by Steve Bass, be on the lookout for the latest spyware scam called Marketscore. Marketscore claims to increase your Internet speed by 100%. Not only does it NOT increase your web browsing speed, it DOES intercept all of your web communication including data entered in web forms such as credit card numbers. Don't even visit the MarketScore web site, as it may install itself on your computer without your knowledge. It's a scary world out there.

RocketNews is now offering RSS keyword feeds. Just run a search, then select the orange XML button for the feed. Add the feed to your aggregator, and future search results will display.

The XML button has been showing up on RocketNews search results for some time, but I could never get the feeds to work. So if you tried before without success, you might want to give it a second look. It's working for me now!

[Via Library Stuff]

I don't stress over the number of passwords that I have to keep track of because I use Roboform. The only downside is that the data it collects resides on your computer, and is therefore unavailable to you when you're out and about. That problem has been solved with the new Portable Roboform. Portable Roboform allows you to save your passwords and a stand-alone version of Roboform to a USB flash drive so you can take it all with you and use it on any computer. You can browse the web in a secure manner, without leaving a trace.

[Spotted on Inter-Alia]

Virtual reference tools are in use in hundreds of libraries. Most are based on the live help customer service software used by many businesses on the web including Lands End. The software allows a user to contact a librarian via the web and communicate via chat. Web pages can be pushed to the user, or a web session can be conducted jointly, with the librarian co-browsing with the patron. Sounds cool, right?

And so it is. But the volume of patrons using virtual reference has been decidedly underwhelming in the public and academic libraries that have offered such service, and for that matter, even web businesses handle a fairly small percentage of customer service requests via live help. Now it appears that one of the champions of virtual reference, Steve Coffman, also has some concerns. What does that mean for virtual reference in the law firm library?

Some people firmly believe that LexisNexis has the best news coverage of the two major online legal vendors. But Westlaw could always tout the Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones content, very high value stuff not available on LexisNexis. Not for long....by March 2005, LexisNexis will be the exclusive provider of Factiva content to the legal market.

You can fill a very large book with all the amazing features offered by Adobe Acrobat 6. And many people have. Which is why it's often surprising and annoying what it CAN'T do.

Shaké Hagopian, the Legal Information & Research Officer in the CN Law Department, wrote to me asking if I knew how to cut and paste a list of bookmarks from a PDF file. Hmm, that seems pretty basic, there must be a way to do that. But no, apparently not. After we both researched this question on the web, Shaké confirmed with Adobe that there is no way to accomplish this simple task using the standard edition.

In the course of researching Shaké's question , I found a PDF for Lawyers article on how to print bookmarks using 5.0. Printing bookmarks, now that's another task that I would think would be useful. But the fix doesn't work in 6.0 standard edition, though perhaps the $99 plug-in would. But wait, didn't we just pay a fairly hefty sum for Adobe Acrobat Standard??

As reported by Infotoday's Newsbreak, OCLC has agreed to open up the entire Worldcat database, all 53.3 million records complete with library holdings from OCLC libraries (unless they opt out), to both Google and Yahoo! Soon any web searcher could potentially retrieve books matching their search terms, including the more esoteric ones, and easily locate a local library that owns it! That should increase business at our local libraries! (Sorry for all the exclamation points, but the librarian in me gets excited about this kind of thing.)

As previously reported, OCLC has already made available a subset of their catalog records, about 2 million of them, for inclusion on both Yahoo and Google. That's all very nice, but rather incomplete. Expect to see the new and improved coverage possibly starting as early as November. So the Google-Worldcat bookmarklet is about to become even more useful!

Browsers alone are rather inadequate for most serious researchers. If your browser leaves you wanting more, there are other options out there. PC Magazine reviews 8 web utilities that help find, organize and sometimes share the information you worked so hard to find. Amplify, enLighter Retriever and Onfolio Professional received the PC Magazine's Editor's Choice award. Librarians should especially appreciate Onfolio Professional's ability to create html reports summarizing your research that can be easily emailed to the requestor.

The rumor floating around for the past several months is true. Google has introduced a search engine for your hard drive.

This is like, SO cool. (Thanks for letting me get that out of my system.) I've been considering trying one of the many alternatives out there for searching email and other files that hide on my hard drive, but procrastination is sometimes the best policy. I didn't procrastinate in installing Google Desktop Search.

If you're a news junkie, you'll like MSNBC's new RSS feeds. You can opt for top news, politics, health, business, entertainment and more. In a moment of weakness I signed up for politics. Who needs to watch the news anymore? I'm happy to avoid the latest slow-speed chase which inevitable appears on our local stations.

If you're more interested in what's happening in the legal community, you can now opt for Law.com's Newswire via RSS. [Spotted on Virtual Chase]

Internet Explorer is so early millennium. It's almost 2005 after all, and time for a change.

Why? There has been a LOT of talk lately about the advantages of using browsers other than Internet Explorer, partially because of functionality offered by these "other" browsers, but primarily because of the non-stop attacks waged by hackers, and the constant need to patch IE to prevent your computer and/or data being compromised. IE is so dominant in the browser arena, it makes an excellent target.

Another reason for all the buzz is the recent availability of an excellent alternative, Mozilla Firefox 1.0. Once I'd read about the 10th recommendation, I figured it might be worthwhile. It's been installed for the past month or so, set as my default browser.

We all know that there's an amazing amount of knowledge contained in simple email messages. As I've mentioned in several presentations, I often use Microsoft Exchange public folders to easily make such emails available to groups of users.

Public folders look just like your own email folders, but they can be shared with other individuals or groups. You can set security to limit access, or make them available to everyone on the network.

So how would you use public folders? If you have an internal email mailing list for the firm's reference librarians, there's likely valuable information being passed back and forth, so you might want to store all such emails for everyone's viewing pleasure. To do that you can easily set up a rule in Outlook to automatically move all messages sent to the list into their own public folder. Or perhaps you'd like to store selected emails on a topic in their own public folder by moving individual emails from your inbox to the folder. By making this information public, you may be able to avoid individuals having to store these items in their own, private folders. And you have searchable, though primitive, knowledgebase.