Type in anything that interests you into PubMed’s free database access and spend some blissful time pouring through academic full text articles that are free for anyone on a computer.

Google Reader – using an RSS reader is liking hooking yourself up to a information IV and you pick what sites go in the bag. Seriously, why waste your time, get your list of headlines and go from there. GoogleReader’s science bundle was a fun place to start for me, finally a way to access the latest science article for free from a variety of sources.

Use Delicious.com to bookmark all your favs (add a tag to make them searchable). This makes expanding your horizon online feasible, retrievable, organizable from any computer.

Write your docs on GoogleDocs and they will back it up for you. For me it is very helpful to access all the folders of docs from anywhere.

Great tool for training and answering reference questions – Jing allows you to create a short video of your mouse moving on your computer screen and gives you a URL to paste; 2 gigs are free, and there are plenty of other options.

Lastly pandora.com will create and play ad-free “radio” stations for you – great way to expand your music enjoyment.

One of our articles for a library class I’m taking mentions LibraryThing and having heard of it before, off I went to make a visit. Well I lost a lot of my weekend finding it pretty addictive and wanting to upload more and more of my library and using “power edit” to add metadata to multiple books at a time, looking at other peoples libraries of people who had books I had, reading their reviews, writing reviews, it was a blast. It was like a little book party.

Last Friday someone asked if I knew of a book about drawing, well I thought yes I have a lot of them and yet none of the names or titles were popping out at me, if I had been able to log on to LibraryThing, voila. Now I can do this and hopefully put links on blogs pointing to my library within LibraryThing.

Whenever you are not near your entire library you can access it, in some way. If you lose books for whatever reason, you still have a record.

Reference others suggestions about similiar books, communicate with others.

You get to add private or public comments like I really like this chapter or this thing about this book or its index is terrible, there is a favorite recipe on p.129; so years later it is all right there for you.

Wiki has some great info on LibraryThing and how fast it has grown, its working with OCLC, cooperative metadata generation, etc.

Some libraries have widgets on their sites linking you to LibraryThing.

It has many social networking features.
It is free, however after putting in ~150 books I decided to pay the little bit for a lifetime membership in order to be allowed to have over 200 books catalogued.

Wow, I just rediscovered some .gov sites via the Library of Congress. From there you click on Librarians and then Digital Reference and then Virtual Reference Desk. Talk about a wow list, link farm fun; especially scroll all the way to the bottom to:

“Other Reference Sites
Librarians’ Internet Index (Very Comprehensive) “

That is where the real fun begins…the complete list looks like this:

Librarians’ Internet Index (Very Comprehensive)

* Alcove 9: An Annotated List of Reference Websites (Library of Congress, Main Reading Room)
* Homework Center by Info Please
* Internet Public Library Reference Center
* Internet Resources From the Learning Page (Library of Congress-Great for Educators)
* LibrarySpot
* Refdesk
* Research Tools
* Today in History (Library of Congress)
* WWW Virtual Library
* Xrefer (that is really called “Credo” now)

Take a minute to click on each link; it is quite a list.

I always knew it lay out there something this beautiful, ah. What are librarian’s favorite spots to sun themselves…don’t forget to click on the heading of the list too “Librarians’ Internet Index” that is a link too! YIKS and a big thanks to librarians.