If you’re one of our regular readers, you already know how fond we are of government documents. So you can imagine how our virtual pulse quickened when we encountered this large and beautiful collection of government-oriented subject guides covering everything from Acronyms to Worldwide Demographic Information.
Mixed in with the actual guides are links to such key resources as The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance and earthquake/seismic info from the U.S. Geological Survey. But sometimes, when you expect a direct link to a resource, you get a nice surprise. For example, click on the link for the Government Accountability Office, and you are taken to a page that explains what it is, what it does, and how to use it, including integration with the local OPAC.
The subject guides themselves comprise collections of links to agencies, databases, reports and other items, with brief annotations. There are some unusual collections here, including:
+ Ask an Expert!, including links to “Ask an Expert” pages at many different agencies, including the Census Bureau, the National Park Service, and NASA. This unusual aggregation is a clever idea.
+ Kids Pages from various agencies (including the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Who knew?)
+ Declassified Documents, from the U.S. and other countries.
+ Statistical Information by State
+ Technical Reports — a nice compendium, which also includes links to subscription databases accessible to the university community.
Just cruising through some of these guides, we reacquainted ourselves with valuable resources that we haven’t visited for awhile. For example, in the Charities guide, we found a link to the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics, which we’d quite forgotten about. And the Religion Statistics guide is an excellent compendium of sites we know about and use regularly — e.g., Adherents.com — and The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, which we think is new to us. (Look at this collection of “in-depth profiles of individual religious centers,” which can be sorted by state or by religious tradition.)
Be aware that not every link in every subject guide is to an official government agency. But research institutions, think tanks, etc., also provide valuable information, and we’re glad to see that they were included as well.
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? 
