New Tools for Librarians - Not the Sharp Kind

I totally stole this from the Hack Library School website. There is a Library School named Hack?

It is a big-ass list of tools, and if there is one thing I like, it's a good tool. Before the Freeze, when I was still roaming the younger Earth as a cave humanoid, my people relied on many tools to survive in a harsh landscape riddled with steaming tar pits and blood-fanged beasts. So I know all about the value of a good tool that can save you from having to use your teeth. You don't have to tell me.

So here, copied and pasted directly from the librarian hacks are tools I wanna try:

Online collaboration and presentation tools (slides, videos, etc.)

• SlideRocket:A presentation tool that also includes interactive features like polls for the audience. (Note: free version available for students.)
• Prezi: I think many people have heard of Prezi, the zooming presentation tool that offers a dynamic variation of the slideshow. Some people experience vertigo with the more extreme zooming, though, so use with caution! The site provides more features for users who sign up with a school email account (ending in .edu).
• Storybird: For the visually-oriented, Storybird provides lots of illustrations that you can use to create a presentation or a story. This site is particularly wonderful for storytelling classes and other youth-oriented presentations.
• PBworks (wiki): This site allows you to create wiki workspaces for collaborative building of content on webpages. I used the site with a group last fall to build a site of information about the technology we used to communicate and construct our group presentation over the course of the semester: MLIS Tech Toolkit (includes some other online tools like QR code generators and faux-Facebook wall pages). All of the student groups in my program also use this site as a communication tool to post meeting minutes, draft letters, plan projects, and otherwise share information.
• Piktochart: This site offers templates for creating infographics.
• Mindomo: Mindomo is a concept mapping tool that helps you visualize connections between ideas. It is useful as a planning tool for group projects and can also double as a presentation platform. You can see the concept map my group created while putting together a presentation on technology and libraries: Technology Presentation.
• Google Drive and Google Sites: Google of course has many tools for communication and other things. I’ve used Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) to write papers and make slideshows collaboratively with classmates. Google Sites allows you to build simple websites quickly.
• WordPress: Though primarily a blogging platform, WordPress also has templates that make for good multipage websites.

Live communication and social media

• TodaysMeet: This site allows you to create backchannel chat rooms that you can use in various contexts to allow people to carry on a conversation during an event (like a presentation, a class lecture, a workshop, etc.).
• Poll Everywhere: This site offers real-time polling via text message, tweeting, and online web interface. You can set up a poll that updates in real time on a projected screen to show audience feedback, for example.
• Storify: There a number of these second-order types of social media sites that help repackage social media feeds.

Library-oriented sites

• Library Thing: Library Thing allows you to build collections of books, essentially creating a catalog that also has social media features (ability to connect with other users/collections and to access reviews across the site). We briefly looked at this site in a class to talk about the interface between traditional catalog metadata and social media tagging.
• Omeka: Omeka allows users to create digital collections and provides substantive metadata features for organizing digital objects and making them accessible.

Open Library: This site aims to be a universal library catalog with a page of information for every book ever published.

Thanks again to the Hack Library School for these. Very smart and helpful people. Though if you ask me, they really ought to change their name.