#13: Zoho (Online productivity)

This is a very useful site. It'd be especially helpful for anyone--like myself--who has written a document, saved it to a floppy or flash drive, but then forgotten the drive when it needed to be edited or printed. Since internet access is so ubiquitous nowadays, this sort of retrieval could be easily done. What's also interesting is that this is akin to the "Go to my PC" service I hear advertised on the radio, except that this is free.

Here's part of the first document I created. Fortunately it's also seasonally appropriate:

[II.]

Friday after thanksgiving

Let the madness begin!

Whoever heard of Advent

when the goal is so slim?

(See accompanying sale papers)

#12 Customized Search Engines

This assignment involved creating a Rollyo account. I put in seven or eight sites that I read a lot, and tried a couple different searches. The inclusion of Amazon.com meant that a LOT of the results I got back were from that site. So although this meant wading through a glut of book titles (and some other random, non-book items--electronic appliances found using "John Henry Newman"??) it was also very helpful at times. For instance, today I did a search using the term "conciliarism" (it was my bedtime reading last night, before my cold got the best of me). This gave me some good results, since not only were there (not surprisingly) a number of entries from First Things magazine but also a book by Nicholas of Cusa, whom I read about last night, that showed up on Amazon. Aha! Another book I want for Christmas.
I will have to tweak my website list a bit more to get a broader set of results, and when I get to that I will try it again. Overall, I think Rollyo is a very helpful search engine.
http://rollyo.com/davids/librariangr/

Library Thing: #11

I already knew about LT since it was mentioned in our Shelf Awareness daily e-mail we get here. But the assignment got me to start an account, which was good. However, I don't know if I'll continue with it or not--not because I don't have lots of books to catalog, but because I already have a much lower-tech version of LT at home. This would be a certain metal file box that I've been working on for about 7 or 8 years now, and that works like a traditional card catalog, though with less information than you'd find in the library. These cards have only very essential information--a title, an author, sometimes a subject heading (if it's not an easily recalled title) and then in one corner is a letter. This letter refers to a box, which is one of many in my attic (I'm close to "Z" now, actually). I've found that this system is quite reliable, and, for my purposes, efficient. Of course it's still no substitute for actually going through the boxes when it comes time to decide what to get rid of. This is something I did recently when looking for Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer", which I was sure I owned, despite there not being a card in the file for said book. I never did find the Percy, but in the process I came across a number of titles that were certainly ready to be "withdrawn".
Getting back to LT though. I think it does have one advantage: if I was in another town and was considering buying a book, I could always get online and check my collection--but first I have to get the whole collection on Library Thing! Given my current time constraints, it's going to be a long time....
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/shawd63