April 2007 Archives

As I've mentioned before, I love my external hard drive enclosure. Sure, I thought about buying an external hard drive instead, but the hard drive enclosure (HDE) is more flexible and on top of that, it's cheaper. So what's not to like?

The HDE is a simple box that connects to your computer via a USB port. You can install a hard drive you've removed from a previous computer, or you can purchase extra ones to use in the HDE. Just hook the hard drive into the enclosure, and your computer will see it as an additional drive. If you have other hard drives that you want to access, just swap it out. It only takes a minute or two to remove one drive and install another.

The big advantage of an HDE over an external hard drive is that you can access an endless number of hard drives rather than just one. You might choose to use one hard drive for a monthly backup that you store off-site, and one for a on-site daily backup, for example. When I was moving to a new computer, I purchased another drive from Ebay and stored an image of my old computer on one drive, and selected data files on the other. What can I say, I was paranoid about losing data! It was easy to move the files from one computer to another. I just unplugged the HDE from my old computer and plugged it into the new one. All that was left was to copy the files.

Before sending my oldest computer to the hazardous waste disposal center, I removed the hard drive, and stashed it away. If for some reason I ever need some tidbit of information from the drive, I can pop it into the HDE.

If you want more information on hard drive enclosures, see the recent Lifehacker article, AlphaGeek: Turn an old hard drive into an external drive.

Are you creating another PowerPoint presentation? Stop. Do not pass go, do not collect $200...until you watch

Life After Death by PowerPoint.



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[Spotted on Law Librarian Blog]

You're heard of deep linking, which is one way of directing someone to a specific page in a web site. But often you want to point to a passage or quotation somewhere on that page. In that case, you need Cite Bite.

I've created a CiteBite link to show you an example of the end result. Click on this link - http://pages.citebite.com/e1i5f5c5s3yyr and you'll be taken directly to the passage I highlighted on CNN. There's no searching and reading the entire page to try to locate the specific section of interest.

It's very easy to create a Cite Bite page. You don't have to install anything. Just visit Cite Bite, and cut and paste the URL and quotation into the appropriate boxes; Cite Bite will create a link that you can send on to others. Like it? Then I'd recommend installing the bookmarklet or Firefox extension so that you can create a Cite Bite in just one click. (Don't forget to turn off your pop-up blocker.) Keep in mind that your Cite Bite will take 30 seconds or so to create; the response isn't instantaneous.

The concept is simple and useful. I would imagine that any researcher could use Cite Bite on a daily basis to make it a little easier to deliver just the necessary piece of information.

[Spotted on Steven Cohen "Library Stuff Revisited" column, Information Today, Feb. 2007]

There sometimes seems to be a lack of detailed information on what firms are doing internally with their Intranets and search engines. So I was interested to see the Microsoft Case Study on Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton's new Intranet based on Sharepoint and and product called XMLAW.

Watch Tom Baldwin's blog for more specifics on how things are going at Sheppard. He's now working on introducing a faceted search capability.I don't know about you, but I'm always happy to find a search engine that supports faceted searching.