CIL 2012 Day 1 - Free & Cheap Tools & Apps

Like other sessions today, this session was divided into two presentations.  Also like other sessions today I found the first presentation more interesting and valuable than the second.  The session was an odd one for the track theme of "web presence" as it was largely a review of free tools which may or may not be important for ones web presence, but there were some useful tidbits nonetheless.

Nicole C. Engard, Vice President of Education at ByWater Solutions gave the first presentation focusing on open source software.  She covered several tools that I've used many times and am quite familiar with like Scribus, CamStudio, PortableApps, and Pidgin.  She covered a few tools that I have no interest in or use for at the moment like Omeka (a digital collection manager) and the catalog discovery interfaces VuFind, Blacklight, SOPAC & Scriblio.

However she also covered some projects I'd heard of, forgotten, and are probably worth a second look.  Notably LibKi, Zotero, Spark and LibX.

And most importantly she brought to my attention several tools, that if I have heard of them in the past I've completely forgotten them, so they are new to me: LimeSurvey (a survey tool you can host yourself), LibStats (a reference statistics collection tool) and SubjectsPlus (a subject management tool of some sort) that all sound interesting and worth a look.

The second half of this session was a presentation by Louise Alcorn of West Des Moines Public Library and Christa Burns of the Nebraska Library Commission.  They seem to be mostly concerned with small libraries with very few resources that aren't familiar with some pretty common free tools which are well known to me.  Being at the end of the day, it wasn't too exciting, and they were rushed to finish their presentation so everyone could leave an go to the vendor reception.  For the record the five free resources they mentioned were: Pinterest (the hot social networking site this year), MeeboMe, xtranormal, Skype, QR Codes, and Wordpress (the hosted site version, not so much the open source software).