Highlights Only: Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Evaluation of Library Efforts to Index, Preserve and Catalog Blogs, Websites, Email Archives and Other Cyber Resources
Primary Research has published (fee-based) a new report, The Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Evaluation of Library Efforts to Index, Preserve and Catalog Blogs, Websites, Email Archives and Other Cyber Resources.
...presents data on how higher education faculty in the United States and Canada view the usefulness and quality of academic library efforts to further scholarship based on internet sources such as websites, blogs, listervs, social networking sites, online ads and other internet resources. The report presents highly detailed data on how faculty use blogs, websites, social networking sites, email archives, listservs, webcasts and podcasts, ezines, online ads and other cyber resources in scholarship. It also highlights how faculty rate the efforts of academic libraries to index, preserve and catalog these resources. In addition, the report discusses other pertinent trends, such as the degree of use of web archiving software.
The report presents the results of a survey of more than 550 higher education faculty in the United States and Canada. Data is presented in the aggregate and for 12 criteria including academic field, size of college, type of college, academic title and other factors.
Here are a Few Findings from the Report:
_ More than 53% of faculty in the sample refer to websites in scholarly papers. Research university faculty were the most likely among faculty at all types of institutions to refer to websites in their scholarly papers 62.5% of them do so.
+ 15.34% of faculty sampled refer to listserv or usenet postings in presentations. 31.25% of faculty in colleges with fewer than 1,000 students refer to listserv or usenet postings in presentations, the highest among all types of colleges defined by size range in the sample.
+ 14.71% of faculty sampled had ever used a web archive in their scholarly work. Faculty in psychology/counseling, religion and philosophy, and English and other language oriented majors were the most likely to have used such sites.
+ More than 14.5% of scholars in psychology and counseling have used web archiving software, as have 12.5% in biology and medicine.
+ 14% of faculty in the sample thought that it was important or very important to index and catalog social networking sites. Scholars in art and the performing arts were the most likely to view these sites as important to index and catalog.
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).