For this project, Ithaka S+R staff interviewed more than 80 individuals from 30 libraries, the Government Printing Office (GPO), and a number of other key organizations. The FDLP serves a variety of needs across a number of communities, and in this project Ithaka S+R has taken a systemwide perspective in an attempt to understand the needs of all stakeholders. This summary presents a high-level overview of the project’s interim findings and recommendations.
Here are a Few Key Points from the Report:
+ In order to effectively serve user needs, our interviewees emphasized that government information must be made freely available and preserved for the long-term in digital form.
+ The historical print collection must be preserved, even though it will play a significantly reduced role for access by users.
+ To make the rich historical collections useful, they must be digitized comprehensively and at a sufficiently high level of quality.
+ GPO should coordinate the preservation of born-digital government information.
+ FDLP must ensure the integrity and preservation of born-digital and digitized collections, using FDsys as a key platform and aggregator
+ Libraries, non-profits, and vendors should develop new and revamped discovery environments based on the anticipated needs of specific groups of users
+ In this transition, librarians should take on an expanded role as government information librarians rather than government documents librarians
+ For many participating libraries, the services provided by their government information librarians in helping users and other librarians work effectively with this material will be their principal contribution to permanent public access.
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? 
