Circulation

Here’s a site to practice your web searching skills: a Google a Day.

Be careful. You might find yourself wasting as much time here as you would on Facebook, LOLcats, or whatever your fancy. Have fun!

via @SwissArmyLib

Want to co-browse a website with another person at the same time? Check out channel.me. Share the link via Facebook or through email, and your friend can open the website and view with you in real time. Chat together, add notes, switch to other pages – this is pretty neat.

One (big) issue is channel.me doesn’t provide much information about their product, so I wonder what they do with information shared during browsing sessions. Despite this possibly major privacy issue, it is so easy to use and the applications are endless.

Thanks @webmaster_ref for sharing this resource!

Lately, a few folks have asked me how I manage to keep up/stay fresh with the latest information for professional development. Thanks to the beauty of RSS, I can follow many blogs, podcasts and free webinars, and I can access the information when I have free time in the evenings.

A few of my (highly recommended) favorites are listed below…

Podcasts
Podcasts are a great way to pass the time while driving to work.

1. EDUCAUSE
2. T is for Training
3. Adventures in Library Instruction
4. NPR Technology

Blogs
I follow many, but here are a few of my favorites:

Library Blogs

1. ACRLog
2. Agnostic, Maybe
3. Attempting Elegance
4. HackLibSchool
5. In the Library with the Lead Pipe
6. Information Wants to be Free
7. Info-mational
8. Librarian by Day
9. Librarian In Black
10. Musings about Librarianship
11. Resource Shelf
12. Swiss Army Librarian
13. Tame the Web
14. The Unquiet Library
15. Virtual Dave…Real Blog

Education Blogs

1. EDUCAUSE 7 Things You Should Know
2. Inside Higher Ed
3. The Student Affairs Collaborative
4. Pew Research
5. ProfHacker
6. Chronicle of Higher Education

Tech Blogs

1. Digital Inspiration
2. Digitzd
3. Mashable
4. ReadWriteWeb
5. Six Revisions
6. TechCrunch

Webinars
Webinars (especially free ones, of course) are a great way to actively participate and learn from other professionals.

1. WebJunction (archived webinars are free)
2. Marianne Lenox’s Google Reader Bundle
3. Library Webinars Blog

A few other favorite websites:

1. TED Talks
2. MIT Open Courseware
3. Open Courseware Consortium Courses

In addition to the above, I follow a few Listservs and many Twitter feeds and lists. Subscription-based periodicals are great, as well as open access library and information journals, but the above links provide information daily.

Save the Data! From the Sunlight Foundation:

It was over two years ago when I researched Libraries using twitter for a library school assignment. Back then, there were about 90-100 libraries on twitter. As much as time has allowed, I kept an updated list. Just typing them into a blog post is a bit user unfriendly, so I put the list in an excel file. The goodness that comes from this is the ability to filter and sort by academic, public and special libraries, or subspecializations like law or teens.

It is saved in dropbox (public link here) for all to enjoy, in case folks want to use it for research.