Wicked Cool

Mouse Faster -- With Your Keyboard

Adding a few keystroke shortcuts to your repertoire can make your workflow actually flow.  Here are a few good ones to learn:

Switching between multiple windows:  Alt + Tab
Hold down the Alt key and click Tab.  This will bring up a menu with all the open windows.  Keep holding down the Alt key and click Tab until you have selected the window you want to switch to.  Faster than using the mouse to minimize one window and then maximize another.

Saving:  Ctrl + S
Less interruption in your typing means that you can save your work more frequently (and risk losing it less).

Copy:  Ctrl + C, Paste:  Ctrl + V
Both faster than selecting these commands with the mouse.

More Windows Keyboard Shortcuts

Try them and see if they help you!

Fifty Ways to Take Notes

Via Rebecca's Pocket, the Solution watch blog has posted Fifty Ways to Take Notes. Try some out the next time you're at a conference or meeting, or find a favorite to recommend to library patrons to save their research.

My favorite new find is ShortText: it's incredibly fast and easy, and requires no registration. You can set a password ("key") if you want to keep notes private.

The author also lists a few neat personal start pages - like Netvibes, PageFlakes, Protopage, Fold, and Google Personalized - where you can gather your daily info (like various RSS feeds & weather) and handy tools.

Blazing New Trails at the SCLS Annual Meeting

It was great to see many of you at the SCLS Annual Meeting in Devil's Lake last week! Jean Anderson and I gave a 10-minute talk about "Blazing New Trails" to kick off the discussion about how to stay on top of change in the library world. Below, for your convenience, is our bibliography. Jean rounded up all this great information, so all the credit goes to her; be sure to check out her new Continuing Education blog, Know More, and leave a comment saying hi!

Benefits of RSS
WebJunction’s Weekly Tips article from April 23, 2007

If I had just 15 minutes each day by Meredith Farkas

Keeping Up when you Don't Have the Time by Jenny Levine

Keeping Up with Keeping Up. Gordon, Rachel Singer and Michael Stephens.
Computers in Libraries 26, no. 9:52-53. 2006.

Keeping up with Really Simple Syndication (rss). Goldsborough, Reid.
Teacher Librarian 34, no. 3:51. 2007.

Kelly Watson's Bloglines Tutorial (pdf)

Librarians Keeping Up and Making Time

Schedule meetings with Doodle

Doodle will change your life! It's an incredibly simple, fast way to poll a group to schedule a meeting. With AnyDoodle you can make a poll on anything at all.

It's old news in and around Switzerland, where it won "Produkt des Jahres" (Product of the Year) for 2004 from InfoWeek.ch, a Swiss IT webmagazine. Lifehacker picked it up in October 2006 and we at the SCLS office have been hooked ever since.

Track webpages with Blogarithm & WatchThatPage

Ed.: I seem to be stuck in a rut, always writing about how to keep up with news & find neat stuff. If you're tired of this kind of post, let me know & send me some tips!

Say there's a web site that you visit regularly, and it doesn't publish a news feed (or you don't have a news reader - though you really should...). What to do?

There are a couple free services that can help.

WatchThatPage and Blogarithm and will check the pages you tell them to, and email you a list of the pages that have changed. I use WatchThatPage to keep an eye on authors and artists I like, though I suppose you could watch library-related web sites as well...

Thanks to Gregg D. at MPL for the Blogarithm tip!

Teach yourself speed-reading with Spreeder

From the Lifehacker weblog comes a link to Spreeder.com, a speed reading tool and trainer. Paste in some text, and Spreeder will display it one word at a time at the speed you specify.

I gave it a try with some paragraphs from a Project Gutenberg book. It was amazing - I could crank the speed up to 500 words per minute and still keep up. My eyes felt less tired, too, since they hardly move. Yay for letting computers do the work!