+ “Digitization is transforming the communication systems of the modern age without replacing print,” consoles Darnton, noting that the death of the book is predicted all the time, but more books appear in print each year.
+ “Soon one million new titles will be published annually throughout the world. The codex — a book you read by turning pages as opposed to the volumen, a scroll that you unroll to read — is one of the greatest inventions of all time. Two thousand years old and still going strong, stronger than ever in print form.”
+ Darnton’s own book is part history of the form, part plan for the future. He argues that the value of the book cannot be surpassed, though digitization has its rewards.
“In an e-book, you can provide endless supplementary material in various formats — archives, photos, films, and hyperlinks to other sources.”
+ But this library leader also has concerns about the difficulties of preserving digital works: “Their hardware and software will become obsolete; they are fragile; their digits can unravel, and their metadata may not be adequate to locate them, years hence, in cyberspace.”
Darnton agrees that the physicality of books provides irreplaceable pleasure, saying, “They delight the eye, feel good to the touch, and even smell good.” He tells of a French producer of e-books who “offered its customers a sticker that they can put on their computers and scratch to produce a musty smell like that of an old volume.”
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? 
