We are big supporters of nonprofits in general both here on ResourceShelf and over on DocuTicker, our sister site. Thus, we are huge fans of the Foundation Center. This is a venerable institution; in operation since 1956, it's currently supported by roughly 550 foundations and is widely recognized as a pre-eminent authority on "organized philanthropy."
There is an avalanche of useful information on the Foundation Center's website, and most of it is free. We thought we'd give a little love to the Catalog of Nonprofit Literature -- formerly known as Literature of the Nonprofit Sector (LNPS) -- this week.
The Catalog of Nonprofit Literature is a searchable database of the literature of philanthropy. It incorporates the unique contents of the Foundation Center's five libraries and contains approximately 28,000 full bibliographic citations, of which nearly 20,000 have descriptive abstracts. It is updated daily.
The basic search form offers a standard keyword search that allows for the use of standard boolean operators. Use the radio buttons to either search everything or restrict your search to full-text resources only. To the right are links to more information and/or help, including a guided tour, a bibliography of periodicals, and a quick look at recently added items.
The "standard search" is actually an advanced search form offerings several more options that facilitate a more precise query. If you click on the buttons labeled "Index," a window pops up with a directory of relevant subject terms. Nicely done!
Though there are full-text resources in this database, many other items are not available online. They can be viewed at the Foundation Center's headquarters in New York City, its national collection in Washington, D.C., or its field offices in Atlanta, Cleveland, and San Francisco. These libraries are freely open to the public; no appointment is necessary to use them. If none of these locations is convenient, you might want to try one of the center's 400 "Cooperating Collections" -- most located at public or academic libraries around the country, as well as in Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, South Korea, and Thailand. (If your institution is interested in housing a cooperative collection, The Foundation Center is currently soliciting applications.)
By the way, don't leave this website without a look at the wonderful collection of Links to Nonprofit Resources. The navigation links on the right make it easy for you to browse by subject category; major subject headings are:
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? 
