What follows is a superb column that we wish was longer even though the title says plenty. It's a keeper (print, bookmark, whatever you do). It was published in Forbes and was written by Mark Moran, CEO of Dulcinea Media.
A year ago The New York Times presented a multimedia, packaged gift to school librarians everywhere. With its profile of Brooklyn, N.Y., school librarian Stephanie Rosalia, at long last, a major newspaper had chronicled the 21st century school librarian’s role as Web curator and information literacy specialist.
The article made the Times’ "most e-mailed" list for days and was featured on more than 100 blogs, as educators and parents everywhere recognized the need for media specialists to guide students.
[Snip]
Cut to the present, and librarian blogs tell a different story. Many absolutely clueless administrators still believe that a search engine is an adequate substitute for a trained research teacher. With the nation's schools budget-strapped, librarians--and even libraries--are being cut from coast to coast.
To use the Internet as a library you need new research skills: the ability to pick out reliable sources from an overwhelming heap of misinformation, to find relevant material amid an infinite array of options...
[Snip]
And as the founder of a company whose mission is to teach the effective use of the Internet, I have pored through dozens of studies, and recently oversaw one myself, that all came to the same conclusion: Students do not know how to find or evaluate the information they need on the Internet.
All of this mess falls in the sad but true category. Almost daily, we come across news stories or discussion list postings about schools letting many of their librarians go. Of course, this doesn't only apply to school librarians. Browse our blog or just head to your favorite news search engine, enter your keywords, and (as you know) you'll see cuts at all types of libraries to all types of librarians.
-- Quick Comment/Small Rant Follows After a Click --
As we've pointed out before, an idea we credit to Karen Coyle, watch what could happen if the Google Books program is approved and moves forward. These administrators, trustees, superintendents, and the others who "pay the bill" could say, "Why do we need to be building a collection and purchasing books, e-books, serials, etc? It's all on Google (wrong) and it's free. If it's not in Google Books we can live without it and use something else." They're letting staff and resources go now what happens if this massive and free database goes live? Plus, issues like the number of terminals and the utility of the text on the page (can it be printed, copied into a report) come into play
We would like to know what the info industry is doing now to illustrate (a better term would be "sell") end users (most librarians already get it) on the value of their products and why they need to pressure the appropriate people to keep them in their collection.
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? 
