Resource of the Week
by Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
It's not news that Hispanics are the fastest growing minority group in the U.S. Certainly, the business community has recognized this trend. According to our Resource of the Week, "In the next decade, the U.S. Hispanic market will be a $1.5 trillion market." Not surprisingly, data about the Latino market is a hot commodity these days. Read on and learn about a new site that supplies plenty of it.
Hispanic Americans--Marketing Data
Source: American Family Insurance, the City of St. Paul, the James J. Hill Reference Library, Aguilar Productions, and Latinocreative.com HispanSource.org
HispanSource bills itself as "your one-stop source for credible, objective, and relevant information on the U.S. Hispanic/Latino market. The information sources featured in HispanSource have been chosen by the top experts in Hispanic marketing and practical business information." Once you register, everything here is free. (Although if you need professional help, fee-based research services are available from the Hill Library, a private business research library in St. Paul, MN.)
One you log in, you'll see a simple directory interface that allows you to choose from various categories of information, covering Hispanic marketing, consumer behavior, media, associations, events, and related research and white papers. Also here: general business resources, online training and downloadable tutorials. Live virtual reference help is available from a "master information specialist" during the hours of 8 am and 5 pm (CST) Monday through Friday.
When you click on a directory category, you'll find a collection of links to information located all over the web, each one succinctly annonated and rated by Hill Library research professionals. The breadth of information is staggering -- government reports, university research, association and think tank studies, rankings and lists, online directories, websites of print and electronic media outlets and more.
Under the General Business Resources category, you'll find the "Biz Site Recommender," a database of invisible web resources culled by Hill Library Business Information Specialists. The database is keyword searchable, or you can browse via a dropdown menu that allows you to choose from an alphabetical list of business-related categories, from Accounting to Web Directories. Again, all links are annotated. This, alone, is a stellar resource even if you don't need information about the Hispanic population. Great job, guys!
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.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
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
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
