Hacking Away at Life

Here's another great tip from the Librarian in Black: Top 20 Free Applications to Increase Your Productivity, written by Kim Roach, a productivity junkie who blogs regularly at The Optimized Life.

The introduction states: "The Internet is loaded with free software, making it hard to know which ones you really need. This article will act as your guide to the top 20 free applications (web and Windows) for increased productivity. These programs will make your PC faster, stronger, and more productive."

The article appears on lifehack.org, a daily digest of pointers on productivity, getting things done, and lifehacks. What is a "lifehack," you ask? According to lifehack.org, the phrase describes any hacks, tips, and tricks that get things done quickly by automating, increasing productivity, and organizing.

Wikipedia spells it as two words -- life hack -- and says the term "refers to productivity tricks that programmers devise and employ to cut through information overload and organize their data." The lengthier description of the original meaning had so many words I didn't understand that I was glad the more current description made more sense: "Today, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack. The term became popularized in the blogosphere and is primarily used by geeks who suffer from information overload or those with a playful curiosity in the ways they can accelerate their workflow." I guess I would qualify as a cross between the two; no geek, but definitely suffering from information overload, and curious about ways to accelerate workflow.

Climbing the ELM

ELM is the Electronic Library for Minnesota, which is available by direct link on the MHS Library's in-house homepage or via the ELM portal. (Isn't it nice that you don't need to use your library card number anymore?!)

I'm so glad this was one of the "things." We don't use ELM as much as a public library probably does, so I wasn't familiar with most of these tools. I can see great uses for me personally, for helping students (especially), and for MHS staffers in other departments. I already e-mailed an e-book citation that I found (while looking for the "101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site") to someone in HR.

I also set up an RSS feed for the search alert "Library 2.0" in EBSCO's Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts. I got a lot of feeds on that one!

I love NetLibrary! I hadn't used that before and I think it's really cool. I can see lots of uses both for NetLibrary itself and for its tools. It's great being able to leave yourself electronic notes about citations that you find, to share things with others, and even to collaborate with colleagues.

I'm also discovering how prevalent the tools are all over the web that give you bibliographic citations for sources formatted according to the various style manuals. That's a question we get constantly from students and I tend to be more familiar with Chicago and Turabian than I am with MLA or APA, so it's nice to have somewhere to look. Now if we could just get them to do citations for our manuscript and government archives records!

Bookmarks on Steroids

That's how MyStickies describes itself. Thing 13 is about customized home pages, calendars, list-making applications, personal organizers, online sticky notes, and PDF converters--a LOT of "things" here!

At work I use the MHS in-house library page as my homepage, because I'm constantly checking something in the MnPALS catalog, in the death certificates index, in Minnesota Place Names, on Ancestry.com, etc. It is a customized homepage with many of the things I use most often! I wonder, though, if we could include some widgets on it that would make it more useful for those of us who use it as our work hompage?

At home I use Google as my homepage. About six months ago I had played with iGoogle and decided not to use it. Personally, I find those customized homepages more of a distraction than a help. But I tried iGoogle again, and also tried out MyYahoo. This time I tried to pick only work-related widgets attempting to make the page more useful (I admit, though, to including those eyes that follow your cursor around!). There were some things that I liked better about MyYahoo and some thing I liked better about iGoogle. For the time being, I've made my iGoogle page my homepage. We'll see how long it lasts!

Of the other "things," the most useful, for me, for work, would be the PDF converters. There have been so many times I wished I could turn a PDF into a Word document, but didn't know it was possible! And, we've just started using our photocopy machine to scan documents and turn them into PDFs. I can see the value of sometimes then turning those PDFs into Word documents. What a great find--thanks!

And thanks for the link to the Top 25 Web 2.0 Apps to Improve a Student's or Professor's Productivity. (I passed that one on to my niece.) Some interesting things there for those of us who work with students.