Resources of the Week
Two entries this week.
1) Art--Online Images
Source: Allan Kohl, art historian and Visual Resources Librarian at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. Art Images for College Teaching
"The express purpose of this database, which offers 1,100 images personally photographed on location by the site's creator, is to freely disseminate images of important art and architecture. The collection is organized into five categories: Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance & Baroque, 18th - 20th Century, and Non-Western, but lacks a search for specific images. Each photograph is concisely described and accompanied by cross references to discussions in one or more of 20 widely used art history survey textbooks. Emphasizing that the site is a "Free Use Educational Resource," Kohl encourages any use that is both educational and non-commercial, which will help college, community college, and high school AP faculty without the resources to license expensive collections.
This ROTW entry was written by Nicholas Tomaiuolo. Nick's own site was a Resource of the Week in March.
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2) Business Research
OPIC Information Gateway
One of the best places to seek global information by country or region is the Information Gateway provided by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) , "a self-sustaining federal agency that sells investment services to small, medium and large American businesses expanding into approximately 150 developing nations and emerging markets around the world.
OPIC's Investor's Information Gateway Country Link Database can connect you with more than 20,000 documents and other sources of economic, business, political and social data for all of the countries and areas in which OPIC can currently do business.
The links are conveniently grouped into 20 major categories such as government, business promotion, health, human rights, infrastructure, natural resources, trade, travel, press, diplomacy, etc. There are typically 140 to 150 links available for each country and region.
Information sources include various federal agencies such as the Department of Commerce, the CIA and the State Department, multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, foreign government agencies and embassies, non-governmental organizations such as chambers of commerce and various trade and investment promotional organizations, travel information web sites, and many others.
This ROTW entry was written by Stuart Basefsky, a librarian at Cornell University and proprietor of the IWS News Service.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
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Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
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The fallacy of information overload
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