Monday summary

It’s interesting to hear what the speakers say are their favorite social media or website tools. From the discussion about public libraries at the end of the day, this question came up: If you could pick only one social media, what would it be: There were just two favorites from all of the panelists: flickr and facebook.

While I was listening to these Monday presentations, there were several that I thought would be a great help in chat reference, where efficiency of reply to questions in text form can be a challenge. Here are a few:

Citebite is an example of a site that looks useful for those times when you want to refer to a particular section of a website to answer a chat question. At times you have a very long url, and when you copy it into the chat window, you see immediately that it looks absurd, incomprehensible. Citebite may be a way around this, by creating a shorter url. Even better, you are spared all of the effort of typing instructions about where to look in a web page for specific information, since citebite highlights in yellow the excerpt you want them to know about.

Screengrab is another that might help for economy of reply in chat reference. Screengrab is a firefox extension, like citebite. Use it to save a web page as an image, anything that you can see in a browser window, from a small selection, to a complete page.

From the session by Mary Ellen Bates on search tips, I am going to try out the examples she gave and see what works well for chat reference, that can perhaps lead to quicker results.

Here is one in particular:
searchcloud: a beta search engine that formats your search terms into a tag cloud – the larger the text, the more important the word. example: nanotechnology and solar and green – type a query with your words and decide the importance by choosing a larger type font for the word – this creates the tag cloud for your search, and might be a quicker and more successful way to get started with a question that has multiple terms and ideas.