Free online storage October 29, 2006
Posted by Katherine in Software, Specific tools.add a comment
As a public librarian I had a lot of computer documents to keep track of. Disks didn’t allow much storage and we weren’t given pen drives (much cheaper now). I tried using Yahoo Briefcase for a while but something went very wrong and I lost some work. After that I took to just emailing myself stuff (not the greatest system when your network was prone to crashing, gosh I’m glad I got myself a new job!).
Online storage sites are becoming much more popular and if I was in the same position now I’d probably give one of the a go. Whilst tidying up my Bloglines saved posts, I found one about Orbitfiles (thanks to I want to) and it looks pretty good.
The free account gets you 1000MB of storage and you can use it for backing up and sharing files as well. There is also a tool you can download that will automatically upload and therefore back up your files for you.
New version of Koha October 18, 2006
Posted by Katherine in Libraries, Software.add a comment
Peter Scott reports that the latest version of Koha has been released. What’s Koha? Koha is what I wish I had known about several years ago, it’s a free, open source library management system. I don’t know much about it but from what I’ve seen it’s pretty impressive and should definitely be looked at if you need an LMS and are on a tight budget - especially if you are seriously considering using Access! As I did…
Medical search engine October 5, 2006
Posted by Katherine in Searching.add a comment
I have to research a lot of health information at work and over the past few months there have been some really great health search engine developments. My current favourite (after seeing it on Phil Bradley’s blog) is Search Medica. You can choose to search resources approved by GPs and you can search across the world or just for UK content. It’s aimed at GPs but is useful for anyone. You can also search NHS content only and there is a kind of cluster tool after you have searched, in the side bar. For example, searching for a condition such as depression will bring up lots of results but click on the links at the side and you can choose to look at patient information, patient support and related topics. I often get high results for Scottish information too, which may not seem that important but there are some policies and laws that are different from the rest of the UK which can affect my work.
Highly recommended.
