What: Cool Tools Day
Where: Terrace lab @ SLAIS
When: Tuesday October 4, 2011 noon-1pm

Cool Tools Day is an event we put on to share some of the neat tech tools that are useful for infopros like ourselves. Last year we talked about DropBox, bookmarking accounts, podcasts, visual search engines, visualization tools, screencasting software, and loads more.

You can sign up to present on our ASIS&T wiki-page. (It’s really informal and a good way to practice explaining technology in a short amount of time.) If you don’t want to present and are just interested in learning about tools, come on down. There will also be coffee and some sort of snacks.

IMPORTANT: You do not need to be a tech-nerd to attend or even to present at Cool Tools Day. Please come and share your knowledge.

Just a reminder that our first Cool Tool day of 2011 is coming up on January 25th from 12:30-1:30 in the Terrace Lab at SLAIS.

What is a Cool Tool Day? I am glad you asked. You know those little bits of technology you use that make your life easier? That’s a tool that is cool. Would you like to tell other people about this fascinating little gem? That too is cool. Come and share with your colleagues!

Generally we’ve been doing web-based things or little bits of software that are easy to demonstrate in a computer lab (if it’s software that needs to be installed it’s generally easier if you bring it in on your laptop but we can figure it out if you let us know what you need), but we’re open to any short information-technology-type presentations.

So come and share, or come and learn about the tools other people use! They’re just 5 minute presentations (we have a strict timekeeper) and good low-pressure practice for presenting information to a bunch of interested people.

We’ve got a signup sheet on the ASIS&T wiki. (Also on that page is a brief list of the Cool Tools from last term. You can get more information about those previous tools here and here.)

If you want more information about Cool Tools day and how you can participate, you can also come to our regular ASIS&T meeting this Tuesday January 18 from 12:30-1:30 in the Trail room. We’ll be discussing more than Cool Tools and we’d love to see people from the new cohort. All are welcome, technophiles and technophobes alike.

So January 4th is almost here and we’ve got a new cohort arriving, and hopefully checking out this website here. If you are new, welcome! Just so you know, ASIS&T@UBC is the student group for all you techy kinds of archivists/librarians, but it’s not intimidating. I mean, we have a few programmers hanging around, but there are lots of history majors and the like too. Basically, if you know or don’t know about all the latest technology type things that affect information science and like to learn about them, we’d love to have you come to our meetings and participate in our events.

Our next meeting is going to be January 18, at 12:30pm, and then a week later (that’d be January 25th at the same time but a slightly different place) we’ll be having our first Cool Tools day of 2011. (For future reference here’s a handy calendar showing when all the SLAIS Student Groups have their meetings/events and such. See, this is what ASIS&T@UBC does: helpful things.) We’ll post more information here about both of those January events (and more) as time keeps dragging us into the future.

Until then, welcome and we hope you’re ready to scowl at the overused suffix “2.0″ (or maybe it’s just me who’s hoping that). In any case, don’t scowl at Susie for having to teach you about it, okay?