Photos by Joel Berger, C. Berger Group

It's a phone call no one on the Planning Committee or the Board ever wants to hear: The featured speaker for the Chapter meeting, Gary Price, could not fly to Chicago because of bad weather. The meeting was that very night, Tuesday, Sept 12.  Not one to let a little thing like no speaker spoil the kick-off meeting for the Chapter's new season of activity, President-Elect Laura Ikens picked a rabbit out of her hat. The result was a stand-in speaker and program that taught members how to change the way they work, for the better.

Thanks to Catherine Sanders Reach, Director of the American Bar Association's Legal Technology Resource Center, in a half hour and 23 PowerPoint slides, Chapter members learned about a handful of software and internet tools which can make anyone the master of her email, documents, bookmarks, and indeed her projects.

A New Chapter Season

For the first time, the Planning Committee utilized a new, online registration apparatus for a membership meeting, SurveyMonkey. Members seemed satisfied with the new efficiencies of the system. After pre-dinner networking, members sat down to dinner. Then, opening the meeting, Union League Club of Chicago General Manager Jonathan McCabe took members on a seated tour of the many paintings surrounding the second floor hall, site of the dinner meeting. He also presented a history of the Union League Club of Chicago. It was founded to support the regiments of the North in the American Civil War. Their doors were open to Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, making it a unique social club.

Members were urged to attend the upcoming Student Outreach meeting on Oct. 24, devoted to a creative hour of members getting to know other members and what they do, or "Peer to Peer for YOUR Career!" The gathering was generously sponsored by the Copyright Clearance Center [1].

After announcements, Reach began her highly illuminating presentation, "PC Productivity." [1] The remainder of this report sketches, with a little commentary, her very helpful survey.

Powers of Outlook

She uncovered powers behind the seemingly innocuous Microsoft Outlook, powers to back-up emailboxes, attach reminders to messages, and automatically deal messages into mail folders reflecting one's very own classification system. She also explained that disposable email addresses can hide us from spammers. These can be created with an application called Spamgournet.

The appetite of Special Librarians for meetings and team work was fed by Reach's survey of collaborative software from Pointment.com, MeetwithApproval, SurveyMonkey, and WorldClock Meeting Planner. These facilitate virtual meetings by notifying, registering, and synchronizing the virtual attendees.

Wiki is the name for a new wave of online collaborative tools which allow users to mount documents visible and editable by other users of their choosing. Reach suggested the members check out Jotspot, TWiki, Confuence, TikiWiki and Perspective. Most require the user to download client software to enhance their ease of use. TWiki is an industrial strength knowledge management tool. The TikiWiki site supports several communities of interest. The lowdown on the world of wikis can be found at WikiMatrix.com.

Organize Thyself

The detritus of one's productivity online, saved bookmarks, can be turned into an organized, online library with Del.icio.us. And NetSnippets allows one to gobble up just about anything from web text and images, word processors, spread sheets, even sound files, and arrange and find it easily among scads of other objects.  

Items of information seem to breed uncontrollably in our computers. For help in bringing order to this chaos, we can use the family of tools which perform desktop searches. As we know, results count—search results—and pros like Google and Yahoo! and lesser known Copernic provide free mini-versions of their muscular search engines. These are just for your own hard drive. Reach explained how they sort and order your computer files and their contents. Fee-based Ser GlobalBrain, DT Search, and X1 throw muscle and features into this local searching.

Getting organized is one thing. Having something to organize is a horse of different color. Creating content for display and transmission is the mission of Adobe Acrobat which handily transfers a host of file formats into the Portable Document Standard, so loved for its ease of use and emailing. When words aren't enough to convey meaning, images or anything appearing on your computer screen can be captured with Snagit and used in presentations.

The News about News

Special librarians have lived through the evolution of news delivery, from UseNet's bulletin-board style to slick MIME email messages. The growth of information services demands tools to handle the volume, and perhaps to reduce it to manageable proportions. Applications called "news readers" gather discrete items from news services and point you to the complete stories residing on the web site of those services. One may choose, or subscribe to, a news "feed" of choice by downloading a reader like FeedReader or by using one online like Bloglines, MyYahoo!, Feedster, and Syndi8. These also help one locate feeds that serve a particular interest or whimsy.

Email, of course, has not gone away. Again the brains at Google have devised a novel convenience, a way to send subscribers news reports as soon as they show up on Google's own news page. Other services like InfoMinder and WatchthatPage track changes on web pages—designated by the user—and send an email message when the content on those pages changes. Building on that, GoogleAlert, which has nothing to do with Google Alerts, is a tool for competitive intelligence which will track the user name, the user's company name, or another company's name, website, location, projects, industry, or anything else.

Clicker Control

Reach also reviewed tools which reduce mouse clicks and keyboard taps, bringing us a step closer to our dear information. A search engine toolbar provides a permanent little window in one's browser, ready to receive a search term. These are flagged with the icons of their bigger brothers Google, Yahoo!, Dogpile, and Findlaw.

Other tools finish the job of data field entry for the user. Roboform eliminates the need to reference passwords, addresses, phone numbers and other repetitively entered data. A-fill whisks one through required fields which most anyone would rather avoid spilling sensitive information into, by filling in "Anonymous" and "Anonymous@example.com" where needed. IESpell saves  someone filling out forms from the committing spelling errors.

Sometimes the right tool and timesaver is one's own common sense. Yet no one is born knowing how to cope with the often perplexing Windows operating system. Here, too, thoughtful programmers have stepped in with applications like BelArc Advisor which collects information about a computer for the dreaded time when a support person may ask for it because your PC is very ill.

Virtual Toolbox

This brief overview does not exhaust Catherine Reach's "PC Productivity" presentation, but all the resources mentioned by her are listed in the sidebar. Members who are ready to work smart are encouraged to try them and let us know how they worked out. For those of you who have a few tricks and tools of their own, let us hear from you too.

Get in touch with Catherine Sanders Reach at sandersc@staff.abanet.org [2] or 312 988 5053.

Jim Obst can be reached at james.obst@chi.frb.org [3].

Scenes from the season-opening meeting of SLA Illinois