Archive for September, 2008

Firefox extensions for research

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

One of the benefits of using the Firefox browser is the wealth of creative extensions contributed by the community to make you more productive on the web. Legal blogger Benson Varghese gives his top 20 in two parts:

  • Part I: Find what you’re looking for
  • Part II: Save, Organize, Annotate, and Cite Your Search Results.

Books with extras

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

The library is getting many new books with increasingly sophisticated accompanying software, as well as supplemental free online information. CDs and DVDs with documents, images and video complement the texts.  Links to publisher information and tables of contents are also available.

A sticker is placed on the front of the books with accompanying material, and information about the software is listed in ThomCat, our online library catalog.  Links and descriptions are found under the heading “HOLDINGS” toward the bottom of the record.

Accompanying materials are housed at the Circulation Desk on the second floor of the library, and can be borrowed along with the books.  Ask the staff for them!

Make your TinyURLs personal

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

The website Tinyurl.com, always a valuable tool for sharing websites with long addresses, like this:

http://fa7pn9ym8k.search.serialssolutions.com/log?L=FA7D=RHI&=http3A%2F2Fhighwire.stanfo
volume%3D28%26author1%3DBybel%26title%3DS
%2Bemerging%2Btechnology%26firstpage%3D109

now lets you choose what you’ll call the shorter links it creates.

Before, TinyURL translated long Internet URLS into pithy addresses that began http://tinyurl.com/, followed by half a dozen random characters.

Now you can specify what you’d like to call the link, so instead of something like:

http://tinyurl.com/6ade3436

you can share a link like:

http://tinyurl.com/SpectCT. Click here to see how.

The popular efficiency blog LifeHacker reviews some of the other URL-shortening services, noting the usefulness of these features for mobile and chat services.