Search Tips & Keeping Current

Steven Cohen, Senior Librarian, Law Library Management & Editor, LibraryStuff.net

Author of Keeping Current

Why keep up?

• help market your organization and  be useful to your organization
• help your customers keep up with whatever they need and market your skills with your customers
• research question doesn’t end until your customer tells you that they have enough info
• Steven Cohen forwards more info to his customers as fyi, almost like an rss service for them, personalized to their interests
• use services like rss so that the information comes to you to help send ongoing info to your customers. Steven has google alerts on research areas that his customers ask about.
• Friends of the Library: they tell other people about the services you provide, so provide good services to them for questions that they have.
• Steven monitors news articles, press releases, changes to web pages to send news to his clients. He looks for new products, staff changes, etc. to help them get new business.
• Look beyond the initial question that is asked. For each lead that you find, send on to your customer the results of the leads that you find. He provides a research service for people, a “keeping up guide”

Tools he uses:
1. rss readers: 

• rss reader: Steven uses google reader He uses keyboard shortcuts to read info from his rss reader and forwards them on email to his clients. When he forwards info to his customers, add the date and time that it was published, so that the customer knows it is really current.
• Quote: “this is not rocket science, it’s library science” - [this gets a big laugh]
• he doesn’t look at his google reader during the day, since he is too busy. But at home, late, after everyone is asleep, he spends about an hour and speed-reads through it all.

2. Supreme Court and Circuit Court Opinions – sends info to his customers

3. watchthatpage – monitors web pages for you and emails you the new items from those pages. subscribe and send changes on to your customers. From the site: WatchThatPage is a service that enables you to automatically collect new information from your favorite pages on the Internet. You select which pages to monitor, and WatchThatPage will find which pages have changed, and collect all the new content for you. The new information is presented to you in an email and/or a personal web page. You can specify when the changes will be collected, so they are fresh when you want to read them.

4. web site watcher  WebSite-Watcher detects website updates for you and highlights all changes in the text

5. Page2rss -if a page doesn’t have rss updates once a day. It is a service that helps you monitor web sites that do not publish feeds. It will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favorite RSS aggregator.

6. ReloadEvery  Reloads web pages every so many seconds or minutes. The function is accessible via the context menu (menu you get when you right click on a web page) or via a drop down menu on the reload button.

7. feed sidebar  Feed Sidebar is an extension for Firefox that displays the items from your Live Bookmarks in the sidebar.

8. update scanner Monitors web pages for updates. Useful for websites that don’t provide Atom or RSS feeds.

Steven Cohen’s favorite tools:

• turn part of a page in an image: screengrab
• cool iris
• invisible auctions.com  An ebay typo finder. Every day thousands of misspelled auction items on eBay fail to sell because they can’t be found using eBay’s built-in search tools. To find these so-called ‘fat fingers’ eBay misspellings you need to use a specialised eBay typo search tool such as this one.
• citebite makes a url for you, so you can send a website to someone without a long url, or telling them to scroll down. makes a static page good for assistive technology and mobile devices.