SLA Europe - 60 apps and websites in 60 minutes

On Tuesday 19th March, I travelled almost the entire way down the Metropolitan line, from Uxbridge to Moorgate, to City Business Library where Anneli Sarkanen and Simon Barron were holding their SLA Europe session entitled 60 Apps and sites in 60 minutes.

Inspired by similar sessions from SLA Chicago, we were told these were going "to improve our lives immeasurably". I couldn't wait!

It was split neatly up into productivity, communication, legal, technology, business, social networking, lifestyle, travel and fun and games.There were actually more than than 60 apps and websites and I am not going to go into each and every one, however, you can discover the entire list in the slides of the presentation. Having had a little time since 19th March to try out some of the apps and websites the following are some I am going to be using in the future:

• bit.ly - I tend to use bit.ly and tinyurl interchangeably however a reminder that I could record the statistics has encouraged me to use this one more regularly, especially at work, to assess their impact
• Doodle - I love Doodle and already use this regularly to arrange committee or work meetings
• Howstuffworks.com- I haven't used this for years but looking at it again has reminded me how fantastic it is. It is a useful tool I can use to brush up on my own knowledge as well as  point out to all my students
• Ifttt.com - this looks like it could potentially be very useful, however I'm struggling for good ideas to put it to use. I don't want to post things automatically to Twitter from any of the accounts I look after as I like to assess the benefit of everything I send
• Pocket - I'd never heard of this but it looks great. I usually save articles from Twitter by saving them as favourites but then need the internet to read them. Using this means I can access them anywhere, even when underground, as I no longer have to rely on the internet
• Goodreads.com - I have been using Librarything to record my reading over the last year and liked it, however, the site is not very mobile friendly so as Goodreads has an app, which scans barcodes too, I am going to try converting to this.

Those are the main ones, however, I will also be going through the legal websites as quite a number of these will prove useful in supporting my students, for example, http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/index_en.htm supplies summaries of all the European union legislation which would be of value to both my Economics and my Politics students. I will also be highlighting changedetection.com, which monitors website changes to my Masters students when I deliver my 'how to keep up to date' session. These, as well as several websites mentioned in the Business section, will also be welcome additions to my subject pages at work.

I thoroughly enjoyed the evening; Anneli and Simon were well-prepared, humorous and engaging and the event provided a good chance to catch up with people I like. Definitely looking forward to attending more SLA Europe events.