March 2005 Archives

Considering how much we use email to communicate, day in and day out, it would behove us to use it as effectively as possible, or we could spend our days doing nothing but reading and responding to email. I've read many articles on using email efficiently, but never found one that offered more than common sense advice.

That's why I really espcially enjoyed Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload by Steve Robbins.

He starts by noting that he receives over 100 REAL emails daily, and that "at three minutes apiece it will take five hours just to read and respond." But let's get real, I don't know about you, but if I spent 3 minutes per email, I'd never get anything done! Perhaps that's why email communication can be frustrating...people tend to skim, me included, sometimes completely missing the critical point.

There's been a cosmic shift when it comes to recommendations for anti-spyware software. Until recently, Ad-Aware and Spybot, both free, were the tools at the top of everyone's list for preventing undesirable and unknown programs from taking up permanent residence on your computer. But the commercial spyware software has evolved, and is now taking center stage. In a recent PC World article, Spyware Stoppers (April 2005), Sunbelt Software Counterspy gets a Best Buy. In the PC World test, Counterspy found 85% of spyware, a considerable improvement over Spybot's 54 percent, and Ad-Aware's slightly higher catch rate.

It may not be free, but at $20, at least it's cheap!

Blog tools can be a great way to feed current information to a library's constituency. Blogs are easy to use, easy to maintain, and perhaps most importantly, allow librarian bloggers to communicate brief pieces of information in a chronological fashion, while, in some cases, also building archives by subject/category.

David Badertscher, librarian at the New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library, has recently introduced a blog for his library users. He includes cases of note, current events relating to law and legal research, and other news items of potential interest. His tool of choice is the Bloglines blogging function, a no-cost and quick way to get information out to the real world.

As reported by FeedMeLegal, Kirkland and Ellis librarians/researchers are publishing research tips and developments on their recently released blog, Kerblog.

While these aren't "enterprise blogs", because they are available on the open web, the principle is the same in that their main audience is likely to be their own attorneys and staff. Though, in these cases, the rest of us can always listen in!

The implementation of bookmarks in Internet Explorer leaves a lot to be desired. But when Microsoft leaves an opening, there's always someone ready to jump right in and give people what they want and/or need. Enter Furl, one of several "social" bookmarking tools available on the web.

The number of RSS feeds continue to grow in leaps and bounds. Here's just a few sources for feeds that have cropped over over the past few months.

Law Journal Feeds from Washington & Lee Law School - Currently includes 550 journals.

U.S. newspapers with RSS feeds, organized by state.

Directory of Corporate RSS Feeds

Supreme Court opinions RSS feeds from Legal Information Institute. There's an RSS feed for today's cases, as well as recent opinions.
[Spotted on Robert Ambrogi's LawSites]

This post on Library Web Chic about using iPods in academic libraries for such things as audio reserves for music classes and pictures for art history classes reminded me of something I've thought would be very useful; attorney MCLE programs via audio MP3 files.

Sure, there are probably some attorneys in your firm that don't have a MP3 player, but that's okay, because you could purchase a couple of MP3 players as loaners. (iPods would be fun, but a much cheaper player would be more practical for this purchase.) Just think, no more lost audiotapes. We could maintain a library of MP3 programs, and copy them to the player as needed. Of course, how you'd get the loaner MP3 players back is another issue.

I assume that vendors aren't supplying programs via MP3 because they don't WANT us to be able to copy and redistribute too freely. But there must be a way to make this work for both vendor and user.

Podcasting could facilitate something like this, but you don't really need podcasting to deliver MCLE programs in MP3 format.

Speaking of podcasting and MCLE, Robert J. Ambrogi wrote an article on just that topic in the Feburary 2005 issue of Law Technology News, "Podcasting: CLE's New Wave." (Law Technology News requires registration.)

If you're not using web conferencing tools for training and/or collaboration, you're missing a great opportunity to connect with people that you otherwise might not reach. Though these tools are quite inexpensive when compared with something like video conferencing, price still can be an obstacle.

If cost and ease of use is holding you back, you've got no more excuses. Take a look at the PC Magazine article, "Instant Meeting" for reviews of seven services including GoToMeeting Corporate, which gets their Editors Choice.

I was very excited to find a spellchecker built into the new version 3 toolbar for Google. It's perfect for checking text typed into forms on the web, making it indispenable for bloggers or anyone else who fill in a lot of web forms. Even better, I could use it to spellcheck form fields on some of our intranet applications.

A somewhat controversial enhancement is the AutoLink feature. If you click on AutoLink, it looks for ISBN numbers, street addresses, and package tracking numbers in the web page you're currently viewing and creates links that you can then click for further information. Click on an AutoLink address and Google will give you a map showing the location. If you're viewing a page with an ISBN number, click Autolink, and the number will now be an active link to Amazon. In particular, this last option made for some cranky people at Barnes and Noble who quickly created their OWN links on the ISBN numbers to keep people from being directed away from their site.

I'm hooked on Google Desktop. I use it several times a day, and often don't bother even trying the pathetic Outlook find feature to search my rather large, email archives. As long as my search terms are specific enough, I can quickly find my emails, files and previously viewed web pages. I've recently realized that it also keeps several versions of files I've been editing, so even if I've lost a file, it's not really lost.

Just when I thought there wasn't any reason for Google to rush to get their Desktop Search out of beta, they went and did it! The best part is that the new, non-beta version 1 indexes PDFs, a file type that was at the top of my wish list. The only thing missing for me now is Microsoft OneNote files. There's hope, though, since they've also released an API for Desktop Search which means that some other Onenote fanatic with better programming skills than I, can add that capability in a "plug-in". Support has also been added for Thunderbird and Firefox, so nobody needs to feel left out. Other file types added with this new release include music and video files.

There are also security improvements, for example, Office files that are password protected will no longer be indexed.

For my recent review of the beta version of Google Desktop, see "Instant Recall Thanks to Google Desktop" (Online, March-April 2005, p. 15. Articles in this issue of ONLINE will be available later this month on a pay-per-view basis.)

For more information on the Google Desktop release, see:
Google Desktop Search Moves Out of Beta on SearchEngineWatch.com.

For a review of the variety of desktop search tools that are available, see Total Recall, PC Magazine, March 22, 2005. (Psst, their highest ranking goes to....Yahoo! Desktop Search, followed by MSN Desktop Search and Copernic Desktop Search 1.2. Google's not the only game in town by a long shot.)

Libraries by their nature tend to be neat, tidy and well-organized. That's what we expect from libraries, after all. And catalogers valiantly strive to identify and describe library collections, imposing structure where there was none, in order to provide access to the materials housed therein.

In contrast, the web is NOT neat & tidy, but chaotic and impossible to control. It's contents can't be adequately described in a MARC record and it can't be cataloged by humans carefully assigning LC subject headings. It's simply too large and changeable. What has been made possible by machines must be organized by them, which may not be easy to accept by people who have spent their lives classifying information, piece by piece, bit by bit.

Some of us are dealing with reality better than others. In particular, Michael Gorman, ALA President-Elect and former cataloger, needs to develop some new coping skills. His current approach is perpetuating a librarian stereotype that we usually try to avoid, that of the Luddite librarian. Along the way, he has insulted a large group of people who tend to like to express themselves rather vociferously in very public forums; not a wise move, in my opinion. These are the people that Michael Gorman calls "The Blog People."

I only recently realized how easy it is to edit existing email messages in Outlook. I guess I assumed that an email message was "locked down" somehow once it was sent. But that's not the case, so I often add a note to a saved email to remind me of an action I need to take, or a conversation that I had with the sender.

In Woody's Office Watch, Woody points out how to edit emails and how to tell when an email has been edited. See "Has an Outlook Message Been Edited?" in the Feb. 16th email with a follow-up today discussing the pitfalls of assuming that email messages can't be tampered with and changed.

According to Woody, "It's worth remembering that not only received items can usually be edited but the 'Sent Items' copy of message you send can be edited after sending. So it is possible for someone to change their record of an email that was sent."