The Survey of Academic Librarians: Usefulness of Leading Internet Tools & Sites (Survey Highlights)
A new fee-based report from Primary Research. However, some interesting info from the findings is available for free.
This study presents the results of a survey of academic librarians about their use of leading internet tools and sites such as Ebay, Google, Bing, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, YouTube, SecondLife, Amazon, Wikipedia, Google Books, FLickr, Yahoo Groups, Twitter and others.
Here are a Few of the Findings From the Report:
+ Librarians between the ages of 31 - 39 found Facebook the most useful Conversely, 65% of librarians over the age of 60 had little use for Facebook.
+ Librarians in special collections and archives used Bing the least, while librarians working in circulation and public services were the most likely to say that it was useful to them,
+ 59% of respondents felt Google Books was more than a little useful; only 13% found Google Books to be of no use. Librarians working in administration and in acquisitions, collection development, and licensing found Google Books to be of the most use.
+ Librarians with either an associate's degree or a BA/BS degree indicated that YouTube was not particularly useful (64% and 57% respectively) while almost half of those with an MLS and additional degrees felt YouTube was useful.
+ Librarians from PHD granting institutions found Twitter to be the least useful (76%) while approximately 40% of staff at community colleges felt that Twitter was of use.
+ 90% of librarians under the age of 30 found Yahoo Groups not useful whereas approximately 33% of librarians in their 50s felt Yahoo Groups was a little useful to very useful in their work.
+ Contrary to stereotype, Men were more likely than women to find that Yahoo Maps was useful in their work.
+ Women were less likely than men to find Ebay useful in their work; librarians at public colleges were less likely than those at private colleges to find Ebay of use.
+ 68% of all respondents indicated that Amazon.com was useful to them in their work. 80% of librarians working in administration found Amazon to be of particular use whereas only 53% of their counterparts in special collections and archives found the same.
+ Librarians with an associate's degree were more likely to think that the use of Wikipedia should be strongly discouraged whereas those with a doctorate were most likely to feel it is an acceptable source of background information.
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? 
