The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/230349
Ellyssa Kroski is the Director of Information Technology at the New York Law Institute. She is an award-winning editor and author of 22 books, including "The Tech Set," the 10-book technology series for which she won the ALA's Greenwood Publishing Group Award for the Best Book in Library Literature in 2011. Ellyssa is also an adjunct faculty member at Pratt Institute. Contact her at ekroski@nyli.org. Law libraries continually face the challenge of making the most of their ever-shrinking budgets, while also progressively increasing efficiency and improving services. One way to keep that balance is to leverage free applications to improve internal operations, market library services and encourage staff collaboration. I'm a huge proponent of free and open-source technologies and have implemented many of them within my library at The New York Law Institute (NYLI). We're making use of gratis applications for electronic resources management (ERM), a private intranet, library statistics tracking, email management and more! The use of cloud computing and application services really took off in 2013 — and when they're free, can you afford to overlook them? 1. ZOHO CREATOR FOR A STATISTICS DATABASE Zoho Creator is an online application that allows users to drag and drop database fields easily onto a blank form in order to build their own custom database applications, without any technical knowledge. Zoho offers an array of elements that can be added to databases, such as text and number fields, radio buttons, drop-down lists, checkboxes, multiple select fields, dates and notes. At NYLI, we're using a Zoho database that took about 15 minutes to create in order to track all of our library's statistics, including librarian time spent on reference questions, patron electronic resource use, book loans, e-book loans, webinar attendance and document delivery. Zoho allows us to create robust reports from our data — in either table or chart Peer to Peer 59