The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/230349
wiki is a website that can be edited by multiple people at the same time, and no technical knowledge is necessary to create and edit pages. Wikis also have what's called "version control," which means the website saves every version of every page, and you can always revert back to a previous version if desired. This feature is especially helpful during collaborative team projects, as everyone can work on the same page without worrying about permanently overwriting something crucial. We're using a private PBworks wiki as our staff intranet; we can collaborate on projects, post meeting notes, share files and information, and even work on documents together. Individual staff members have their own "projects" pages where they keep track of what they're currently working on, and we post holiday schedules, press releases, agendas, research guides, etc. We also have one central "Technology Documentation" page where we post instructional technical documents and videos. PBworks wikis are free and quick to set up. I've been using them for nearly seven years and have yet to experience any significant down time. www.pbworks.com 7. DROPBOX FOR SHARING LARGE FILES to be fed into. At NYLI, we've set up our Twitterfeed to create a tweet from the title of our blog posts and the link to the full article. These tweets are posted automatically to Twitter within two hours of an article's publication on our blog. www.twitterfeed.com 10.PROTOPAGE FOR TRACKING SOCIAL MEDIA Protopage is a customizable start page that can be used to read news via RSS feeds, add widgets and create bookmarks, to-do lists, sticky notes, etc. These free personal pages can be made public or private and are easy to set up by dragging and dropping widgets and news feeds onto the page. At the New York Law Institute, we're using a private Protopage start page as a social media monitoring dashboard. We did this by conducting searches for NYLI on various search engines such as Google, Google Blog Search, Social Mention, IceRocket, etc., and then creating widgets with the RSS feeds for those searches. We now use our Protopage dashboard as a quick way to track online sentiment about The New York Law Institute. www.protopage.com Dropbox is a hosted storage application which offers 2GB worth of space for free. This one might cause some controversy among ILTA's members, but it is an excellent way to send and share large files with people without maxing out their email inboxes. At NYLI, this is how we do a lot of our document delivery services — especially with large files. We simply upload a file to our Dropbox account and then grab the link to send to the patron. The best part about sharing files in this way is that the person receiving the file doesn't need to sign up for an account with Dropbox in order to be able to download it. www.dropbox.com 8. WUFOO FOR FEEDBACK Wufoo is an application for building online forms to collect information in surveys, applications, event registrations and more. Forms are set up easily by dragging and dropping fields and elements within the form builder. Responses can be viewed online, emailed, printed and searched, as well as exported to a spreadsheet. For forms with a large number of responses, you can use the Report Manager to set up queries to filter submissions. We used Wufoo at NYLI to collect feedback during the beta test of our new e-books initiative, in which we asked our testers about the usability and interface, as well as their preferences for ways to find information. www.wufoo.com 9. TWITTERFEED FOR TWEETING FREE NEVER GOES OUT OF STYLE Twitterfeed is a helpful utility that will feed blog posts automatically into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social platforms. Once you set up a free account, you simply add the RSS feed of your blog and specify which services you'd like your posts Whether your library is striving to increase collaboration, hoping to market library services and resources, or just trying to stay organized, there are free applications you can employ to further your goals and budget. Peer to Peer 61