Webcasts: Building Academic Library 2.0: Presentations by Meredith Farkas and James Neal
Presentations from the recent Building Academic Library 2.0 event (November 2, 2007) at the UC Berkeley are now available as three webcasts/podcasts (audio and video are available).
See Also: An Open Letter to the World, From Your Local Librarian
A couple of notes from RS.
+ All of what Jeanne has to say is true. Of course, Worldcat has been available for decades to librarians. Now, it's available to the general public. Question is, how many people know about it and/or use it?
++ The rest of Jeanne's comments, especially how she ends the article, are quite interesting and important to read. RSS? Text Messaging? Perhaps she is correct. However, the info pro needs to know about these services and should also brainstorming about other ways to use them. We would also argue that in this "info age" info pros can bring massive amounts of extra value to their organizations by having knowledge of a wide variety of info tools, even some that might not be used daily. Example? Zoho's Suite of tools.
1) Note from Gary, Ask Maps and AskCity offer useful mapping features unavailable elsewhere.
Our point here is to know about and use more than one resource when necessary and it doesn't have to be Ask.
For example:
+ Ask Maps offers both driving AND walking directions and dynamic recalculation
+ AskCity allows you to mark an area and search "inside" it.
+ Ask images works well offering both the ability to narrow/focus and in some cases find image results directly from a web search results page (where most people only look). Here are two examples:
A) Watercolors of flowers
B) Van Gogh Paintings
*Gary is Director of Online Info Resources at Ask.com
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? 
