Facebook shows its professional side: well known for its personal uses, Facebook offers several tools that have applications for working professionals.

Facebook

www.facebook.com

You probably already use Facebook to keep up with friends, find former classmates, share pictures, and play a random word game or two, but have you explored the ways to use it professionally? SLA and many of its divisions and chapters have Facebook groups, so you might want to start there. Connect with others who work for your company. Create a group or page for your own organization and use the tools to promote events, make blog posts, and organize programs. Wall posts may seem frivolous, but it's a great way to learn about what others are doing in their information centers, which products they're using, and what publications and blogs they're reading. Reminder. Be sure to investigate the privacy settings, and consider the openness of your Facebook activities.

Mednar

http://mednar.com/mednar/

Rated tops in health-related search engines by AltSearchEngines, Mednar is a federated search tool that helps you reach the resources of the Web, blogs, wikis, and deep Web through one interface. Duplicates? Removed. E-mail results? Sent. Alerts by RSS? Received. In the advanced search option, choose from approximately 50 sources, including U.S. government organizations, PubMed, associations, dissertations by WorldCat, and the World Health Organization. Most sources are free, and it's possible to link your own database subscriptions to Mednar. Results are clustered by topic, publication, source, date and author, so it's easy to narrow the results without having to rerun your search.

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Zoho

www.zoho.com

You've heard of cloud computing, but have you tried it? Zoho offers a host of products (pun intended) to keep you connected and organized, from e-mail to document management to an online presentation tool. There are also several business applications (a limited number of users are free) that support Web conferencing, personnel tracking and customer relationship management. The products are integrated, so using them together is uncomplicated. The number of applications and capabilities is a bit daunting, but there are forums to help you through problems and give you ideas about how to use the services. Start with one, and grow from there.

Cities around the world

www.uwm.edu/Libraries/digilib/cities/index.html

This digital repository, created and hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is an extensive collection of photographs depicting more than 450 cities across the globe, from Abidjan to Zurich. The images, from slide collections at the university's American Geographical Society, were recorded from the 1940s to the 1990s and show the architecture and street life of those times. The photos are available for purchase for fair use and for reproduction purposes. If you use the site often, you may want to indicate your preferences for display and save your favorites for closer inspection. Each image is accompanied by descriptive information that includes the location, subject and date. Use the advanced search or browse by subject type (plazas, aerial photos, workers, etc.) to find what you want.

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BY CAROLYN J. SOSNOWSKI, MLIS 

CAROLYN J. SOSNOWSKI is SLA's information specialist. She has 12 years of experience in libraries, including more than five years in SLA's Information Center. She can be reached at [e-mail] or through the Information Center Connections blog at http://slaconnections.typepad.com/info_center_blog/.

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