TOP 10 TOOLS 2007 & 2008
Edwin Mijnsbergen

Edwin is a librarian in the Netherlands. His blog is Digitaal Inlichtingenwerk Zeeuwse Bibliotheek and he  contributes to www.searchcowboys.nl and www.livre.nl too.  Three months ago he started the Dutch Library 2.0-community on Ning.

Edwin's Top 10 Tools as at 27 January 2008

1. Still Netvibes. The Ginger edition makes it even better and more social

2. Still Ning. The community had grown to 660 members. I implemented Ning in my library too: for invited members only (colleagues) to share knowledge regarding reference work.

3. Still Blogger - but Wordpress is a good runner-up!

4. Still Firefox and extensions

5. Sourceforge. An amazing collection of open source software and tools. It's a gift

6. Google search

7. Google Docs

8. Wigetbox. This website makes widgets fun to use and makes it easy to enrich webpages easily

9. Library Thing. A social community and catalog in one. They are ahead of libraries and show us the right way: an open system is better than a closed one. A community can and is willing to improve data in catalogues

10. Wikipedia. Gets better all the time when it come to reliability and content. Can't imagine a web without it anymore.

Edwin's Top 10 Tools as at 29 July 2007

1. Netvibes makes it possible to digest the daily dose of newsfeeds and other resources and does that in a beautiful way. It allows me to use external widgets, keeps it all organised in tabs en even allows me to share all my feeds with others. The Netvibes Universes just rock. Could not imagine an online life without it.

2. Ning allowed me to set up a social network for fellow librarians in just 15 minutes and the features were enough to attract 245 colleagues from all over the Netherlands and Belgian, mostly people I do not know in real life. I love this application

3. Blogger has been my publication-platform since November 2005. User-friendly, easy to set up, well found by search engines. Hardly any troubles or bugs. Brilliant.

4. Firefox and extensions Never used IE anymore, when I discovered the Fox. I love the tabs, I like the background of this Browser and all those keen add-ons and extensions make my online navigation-life SO much easier. Thumbs up!

5. Google Search How could a librarian/information specialist live without it?

6. YouTube  It's not especially YouTube, it's embeddable video's. Visual information's much better than plain text. All these sites make sharing easy. Good for entertainment, even better for education and learning.

7. Ask.com  The best after google. Use Ask X for a while and see for yourself. They managed to integrate search results even better than Google. Deserves more attention and users!

8. Zoho  You're office online for free. Zoho offers good features, like plugins for MS Office, online collaboration, etc. More complete than Google Docs and easy to use just the same

9. Google Maps  The possibilities of searching and finding through maps are almost infinite. Read Google's Geospatial Organizing principles and you will get the idea.

10. Blogmusik (now Deezer)  Embeddable music makes your message more lighthearted, cheers up your visitors and, well, makes it swing!