Firefox extensions for Research

Recently I have found an interesting website

100 Essential Firefox Add-Ons for Librarians and maybe our very own LL

It contains different categories of extensions:

• Communication
• Organization
• Research and Citation
• Bookmarking
• Development
• Mdeai
• Search
• Superchanged browsing
• Privacy & Security
• Patrons

One category concerns research & citation

Research & Citation
Corral your notes, get help with answers, and more, all with these useful add-ons.

1. Clipmarks: Capture important bits from around the web using Clipmarks.
2. Google Notebook: Using Google Notebook, you can take notes right in your browser.
3. Fleck: Fleck allows you to add notes and comments on web pages for yourself and others.
4. Googlepedia: When you use Googlepedia, every time you search with Google, you’ll see a relevant Wikipedia right alongside your results.
5. Taboo: If you keep lots of tabs open for reference later, use this add-on that allows you to save them elsewhere.
6. Endnote: Endnote allows you to easily download a citation from Firefox.
7. Copy Plain Text: Using this add-on, you can turn all web page text into plain unformatted text.
8. Yoono: Start a scrapbook of resources, or just see what others have discovered by using this add-on.
9. Screengrab: Save pages for archiving and sharing with this add-on that will save entire pages or portions of a page as images.
10. Answers: Get answers as fast as one click using this add-on.
11. Fireshot: Take snapshots of pages, annotate them, and save them in a number of different formats with this add-on.
12. Who is this Person?: Using this add-on, you can highlight any name on a web page and find their information on Wikipedia, LinkedIn, IMDB, and lots more.
13. Surf Canyon Search Engine Assistant: With this add-on, you can find what you’re looking for faster.
14. Hyperwords for Firefox: Get access to references, searches, conversions, translations, and lots more using Hyperwords.
15. 1-Click Answers: You can click any word to get definitions, facts, and more using this add-on.
16. Dictionary Search: This add-on looks up selected words in an online dictionary.

40 Sites You Might Actually Use

There is anumber of web sites lists you should use.

Steve Spalding proposes one more list that includes sites of such categories:

• News and bookmarking (Twine and other)
• Conversation (Twitter and other)
• Multimedia (Voxant and other)
• Productivity ( I Want Sandy and other)
• Blogging (Sitemeter and other)
• Feeds (Google reader and other)
• General interest (TextOnPhone and other)

Author writes that he use any of them at least one a month.

100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner

You can find an interesting  list of 100 tools.

Categories of tools:

• Visual Learners

  Visual learners learn through seeing and retain more information when it’s presented in the form of pictures, diagrams, visual presentations, textbooks, handouts and videos. Here are some Web resources that cater to those needs.

  Mind Mapping

  Get your ideas charted out in a visual format with these easy-to-use online brainstorming and organizational tools.

• Charting and Diagrams

  Love to put information into charts and diagrams? These tools can help you do that.

• Videos and Photos

  Find everything you’ll need to learn through videos and pictures with these tools.

• Auditory Learners

  Auditory learners do best in classes where listening is a main concern. These learners prefer verbal lectures and discussions. Auditory learners can get a leg up on their learning with these Web tools

• Podcasts

  Get all kind of supplementary education materials through these great podcast tools.

• Presentation Tools

  Put your notes or classroom information into an audio format with these handy apps.

• Audio Tools

  Listen and edit your sounds and music with these tools.

• Text Readers

  Understand material better when it’s read out loud? These Web tools can do that for you.

• Audio Books

  Those who have trouble retaining information from printed words can listen to their assigned reading instead with help from these sites.

• Kinesthetic Learners

  Kinesthetic learners do best when they interact and touch things. They prefer a hands-on approach to learning and enjoy interacting with classroom materials and those around them. These tools can help keep these inquisitive learners busy.

• Note Taking Tools

  No matter what you’re reading or watching you can make it more interactive by taking notes and these tools can help.

• Bookmarking

  Mark references for later while you’re researching with these tools.

• Interaction

  Get involved with the material with these online applications.

• Collaboration

  These chatting and networking tools can make it easy to interact with classmates and friends

You can find and other lists of tools if you click buttons on the left or right of the title.

100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of

Look at an interesting list of search engines:

“This list features a huge variety of search engines that can be useful to students, including tools that find photos, sound effects, summer internships, health and medical information, reference guides, and a lot more.”

Search engines are located in categories:

Extracurricular

Search blogs, games and even forum postings for non school-related information and fun.

Quick Answer Guides

Head to these search engines when you have a specific question that needs to be answered quickly.

City Guides and Travel

Get to know your college town a little better, or plan a vacation or study abroad trip with these search engines.

Shopping Search Engines

Find customer reviews, product information and shopping sites with these search engines.

Business

Business students and those interested in staying current on business news and trends can take advantage of these niche search engines to help them prepare for class and life after graduation.

Academic and Reference

Find reliable and authoritative sites here to help you with homework and class projects.

Social Media and People

User-generated content and user-driven sites like these often result in more relevant search results for you.

Multisearch

These search engines offer more than just ordinary searches. Enjoy using features like shared searches, saved memory and specific search options.

TV, Video and Radio

Look up video clips for class presentations or discover new radio sites and web streams through these search tools.

Medical Students and Health Search

This list will not only help medical students research authoritative journals and publications, college students wanting to do more than just Google their symptoms can find health advice and medical resources by using these search engines.

Law Students

Law students gain access to court rulings, history and political sciences resources, and other law material here.

Metasearch and Megasearch Engines

The following search engines work extra hard to bring you information from other search engines at the same time, including Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and others.

Photos, Images and Visual Search Engines

Make your search a more visual experience by checking out these tools.

News Searches

College students need to stay current on business, technology, cultural and political news, so use these search engines to guide you through homework discussions, projects and more.

Jobs and Real Estate

Turn to these search engines to help you with your search for a summer internship, your first apartment or a job post-graduation.

In each category you will find a list of search engines.

50 Google tools

When researching on the Web it may be useful to use some Google tools.

There is a list of 50 Google tools that include such categories of tools:

• basic tools
• maps and travel
• Web browsing and development
• Social networking and Communication
• Custom search tools
• Miscellaneous Google tools

iBreadCrumbs - free and nice tool for Web research

A few days ago I have downloaded very interesting  free tool for Web research iBreadCrumbs. Users - students, teachers, professionals and researchers.

A short extract about this tool

iBreadCrumbs.com (www.ibreadcrumbs.com) was founded by two California State University Fullerton (CSUF) graduates, Reuben Fine and Rey Marques, who, as students, became extremely frustrated at the inefficiency and redundancy of gathering research. They created this site to empower students and researchers worldwide to save and share their research with others in a fast, free and easy way. Users simply download the free iBreadCrumbs toolbar, search the Internet as usual and click on the webpages visited to share with others. Users can also add notes and references to every page visited and save the web history for colleagues to see the sites and review the content they viewed – saving time and reducing redundancy in gathering research.

Personal information / knowledge / document management software Ultra Recall

Ultra Recall helps you easily capture, organize, and recall all of your electronic documents and information across all the applications that you use.

It is paid software and you can free try it. I have downloaded it and shall try it.

Key Features

1. Web Page and Document Capture
Easily capture website data from the internet or content from the local file system, including web pages, Microsoft Office documents, email messages, contacts, notes, appointments, newsgroup posts, images, text, and more. In addition to storing the original document location, the page’s icon and the full content of the document can be permanently stored and keyworded so that no information will be lost even if the document disappears from the internet or is deleted.

2. Keep Everything in One Place
Any web page, document, message, image, note, or text can be added to Ultra Recall and then easily organized, edited, annotated, and recalled when needed.

3. Easy Navigation
A host of capabilities are provided to quickly navigate your data: a complete forward/back history of recently viewed items, favorites for defining and accessing frequently used items, auto-completion and history for input fields, searching on popular or recently used items, and more.

4. Flexible Linking
Rather than being limited to a single hierarchy of information, link items in multiple locations, create internal links between items, and link to other web pages and files, allowing information to be organized however you desire.

5. Tagging, Flags, and Reminders
Items can be categorized with tags, visually highlighted with flags, and regular reminders displayed so that nothing gets lost or forgotten

6. Undo/Redo
As personal information and documents are added and modified in Ultra Recall, unlimited undo and redo is available for all changes that are made.

7. Automatic Management of Metadata
Attributes about each piece of information, such as its icon, creation date, last access date, access count, source URL, summary properties, etc., are automatically managed by Ultra Recall.

8. Advanced Search Capabilities
Extensive search capabilities are provided, including Quick search as well as Advanced search, with AND, OR, grouping, and much more.

9. Outlook/PDA Sync
Two-way synchronization between Ultra Recall and Outlook/PDA is available, which allows creating or editing tasks, contacts, and appointments in either application, then synchronizing changes in either direction.

10. Encryption
Secure everything stored in an Ultra Recall Info Database with a single password.

Download Ultra Recall and become more productive today!

Powerset - more nice feature

Today we can  access Powerset.

Yesterday I wrote about some nice Powerset features.

Today I should like to pay attention to one more feature.

When you select one of search results on the right you see a box “Article outline“

Below is the SWITCH “Show outline - Show Factz“

and at the botoom of the box you see other box with text of your query and button “Go“

It is interesting to  analyze content when you select and click either one of the items in  the Outline

or one item in Factz .

Powerset - natural language search - coming soon

During a few months I have participated in testing on a new natural language search engine Powerset.\

It is coming soon - today or tomorrow. I shall not be able to have internet access tomorrow therefore I write preliminary comments.

The engine has a number of very interesting features:

1. You enter a query in natural language. It means that you do not need to think about keywords and can get more relevant search results. It means more deep search as well.

2. When you get search results you easy see not full document or webpage but highligted sentences that are relevant to your query.

3. You see semantic environment of your search results. It means that you see a content of the document and you see both related terms and actions you can do for more relevant search.

4. You can select and click the new term or action and then you will see the relevant part of the document or webpage in the content at the right of the document.

5. Powerset team used very nice friendly and interesting tool for collecting feedback.

Best wishes for Powerset team.

Blog as a Web research tool

Image via Wikipedia

My colleague Andraž Tori in Twine has nicely proposed to try product Zemanta.

I have downloaded www.zemanta.com and test how it helps me to create a new post.

It’s the first post for testing.

At the right is the suggested image from the Gallery

Below is an extract from the suggested article

http://www.blogherald.com/2008/03/27/zemanta-for-bloggers-good-idea-bad-idea-or-great-idea/

Previously reviewed by TechCrunch, Zemanta offers itself as a useful tool to help make blogger’s post “more vibrant.”

Currently available only in Firefox and Internet Exploer (the latter still in beta testing), Zemanta’s main goal is to provide to help bloggers find relevant links to their articles by suggesting related content through words and images on the side (after you install it).

One of the great things about Zemanta is that it actually scans the web for Creative Commons content, so bloggers will be able to post useful images without the fear of being sued by an angry photographer/artist (provided they link back that is).

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