Wikiasari, Community Search Engine; What About Info Pro Community Constructed Databases and Search Tools?
Wikiasari, Community Search Engine; What About Info Pro Constructed Databases and Search Tools?
Barry Schwartz on SER summarizes several posts about a new "community" powered web engine from the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. We were sad but not surprised to see that any mention of several (any) "librarian/info pro community" (compiled, annotated, maintained) search tools weren't mentioned in most of the discussions.
As we've said in many posts since the first days of RS, these resources aren't the largest (in overall size) but they have clear collection development policies and focus on quality of the underlying content versus overall size. It would take many posts to list all of them, but here are a few examples to review, know about, and use.
+ Intute
A collection of many subject focused databases, formerly known as the Resource Discovery Network. Intute is also home of The Virtual Training Suite.
Subject Focused
+ GlobalEDGE
Global business resources compiled by the team at the Center for International Business Education and Research at Michigan State University.
+ MedlinePlus
An amazing set of resources compiled, updated, and maintained by the information professionals and subject experts at the National Library of Medicine. You'll find an encyclopedia, directories, interactive tutorials, and over 700 health topic pages loaded with links to quality material and much more. The MEDLINEPLUS-NEW mailing list is also very useful.
Again, these are just the tip of the iceberg. If you've never visited or used these resources, MORE THAN worth a look.
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? 
