Tips

My Favorite Tools and Tips in Ten Installments: 5. Evernote

May 22, 2012
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My Favorite Tools and Tips in Ten Installments: 5. Evernote

I love Evernote, I’ve even written about it before, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m not using it to it’s full potential. I primarily use Evernote to take clips notes from my browser. By highlighting a section of a blog post or article online I can “clip” it and save it into Evernote. Evernote allows you to organize your clippings by folder but also tag them with key words making it easy to find that quote or statistic later. I still use Delicious for bookmarking (more on that later) but I prefer Evernote for online note-taking. I also use it to clip things people have written about me online. Mostly nice stuff (because some days you just need the warm-fuzzies) and interesting stuff too like that time that Facebook used one of my blog posts in their smear campaign against Google. As I said I don’t use Evernote to its fullest so I have included this video and some recommended reading if you want to explore its potential.   Recommended Reading 5 ways to make life easier with Evernote 10 Tips to Use Evernote to it’s fullest How to Use Evernote: 22 Ways How I Use Evernote to Organize Everything Previous

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My “Perfect” System for Storing, Organizing, Reading and Annotating PDFs

January 10, 2012
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My “Perfect” System for Storing, Organizing, Reading and Annotating PDFs

I have been looking for the perfect pdf reader for a long time. You may remember that earlier this year I returned the Kindle DX after it failed to live up to my qualifications. Here is what I was looking for: ability to highlight ability to make notes ability to export those notes & highlights (I like to put them in a Google docs folder so I can search them easily at any time). small & portable, easy to read on a plane or carry around with me. preferably e-ink, but if you can recommend a super awesome program that will work on the PC I’d consider it. If you read the comments on the Kindle DX post you’ll see that many people recommended the iPad to me. I was hesitant to buy an iPad because no one could suggest an app that would do all the things I wanted/needed and while my technolust said that of course I needed an iPad I couldn’t really justify it given all the other devices I owned (Laptop, netbook, Kindle 3). Now remember the reason I wanted a “perfect pdf reader” was for all the reports and articles I was reading, some of which

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Why I’m Returning the Kindle DX or My Continued Search for the Prefect PDF Reader

June 8, 2011
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Why I’m Returning the Kindle DX or My Continued Search for the Prefect PDF Reader

Update 3/21/2012 I have since purchased an iPad specifically to read PDFs and wrote a post on the system I’m using – My “Perfect” System for Storing, Organizing, Reading and Annotating PDFs There is nothing exceptional or particularly exciting about my returning the Kindle DX . But I’ve been talking about how much I want one just to use it to read PDFs that I thought I should share what went wrong. In a nutshell something call “enhanced pdf reader”. A huge motivation for getting my Kindle 3G last year was the highlighting and note-taking ability for books. Amazon magically syncs them to kindle.amazon.com so you can access your notes any time. I copy mine to Google docs so I can search all of them whenever I need to. It’s wonderful. It’s fabulous. It’s magical. I read a lot, I mean a LOT of reports, in pdf format and I got to thinking wouldn’t it be great if I could use these same features for reports. No more searching for that statistic or quote through the 3 shelves of printed reports (yes really). So I started longing for a Kindle DX. I read around, I did some research and after months I finally caved and ordered one.  I

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My Favorite Tools and Tips in Ten Installments: 4. Facebook

May 9, 2011
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My Favorite Tools and Tips in Ten Installments: 4. Facebook

Yes its true. Facebook. Facebook is one of my favorite things and not just for checking up on what my out-of-town friends did last weekend. I use it for professional stuff a LOT! I follow a lot of professional organizations and websites on Facebook. I listed the top six of the library ones in my post 6 Facebook Pages Every Librarian Should Follow: American Library Association – You don’t need to be a dues paying member of ALA to benefit from the stories and information relevant to all libraries they post on Facebook. Webjuction – Webjunction regularly hosts free webinars and conferences like the one coming up this week, Serving the 21st Century Patron, they also share links to other free webinars and resources. Your state and local library association - again you don’t have to pay dues to benefit from the information shared on Facebook and you can do a little online networking too. Library Journal - in addition to their stories (many of which you can read online for free) they also post links to interesting stories around the web. Library Renewal - This is a new project worth keeping an eye on. Libraries need a new electronic content access and distribution infrastructure! www.libraryrenewal.org Research, advocacy

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My Favorite Tools and Tips in Ten Installments: 3. Bit.ly

May 2, 2011
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My Favorite Tools and Tips in Ten Installments: 3. Bit.ly

This is post 3 of 10 in my 10 favorite tools series. I regularly get asked how I “do it all” so I’ve put together some of handy tools that (in addition to hard work) help me do it. I covered how I use Google tools and my tools & strategy for Twitter last week. This week its bit.ly, yes a URL shortner, but it does so much more! This is my favorite sharing tool for Twitter, it allows you to shorten and share links right from your browser.  Any time I’m reading and article or a blog post or see something I think might be of interest I can hit the bookmarklet, and it automatically grabs the title and creates a short link. It will allow you to modify the title or add text before sending. Extensions You can use bit.ly by installing the extension for your browser, there are extensions for most of the popular browsers. The extension will give you some enhancements to Twitter when you’re using Twitter on the web such as showing the number of clicks on bit.ly links. Or you can just use the bookmarklet in any browser. I actually prefer the bookmarklet to the

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photo by Beth Tribe

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