Resources of the Week: E-mail Newsletters That Are Still Worth It
Resources of the Week: E-mail Newsletters That Are Still Worth It
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
I don't subscribe to very many listservs anymore, and I've gone to RSS in lieu of most e-mail newsletters. Dealing with e-mail in general can be tedious and time-consuming. And yet it remains useful...and popular as a information delivery mechanism. Case in point -- our e-mail newsletters for ResourceShelf and DocuTicker go out to more than 22,000 folks every week.
But e-mail newsletters are not only an info delivery mechanism. They can also serve as "ticklers" to remind you to check certain websites for content updates you don't want to miss. Our newsletters here, for example, present just a tiny fraction of the content we've added to both of our websites in the course of an average week. Both ResourceShelf and DocuTicker are updated continually throughout the day, all week long.
At any rate, here are some other newsletters I still look at regularly, which you may or may not find useful as well.
+ The Mighell Marker: A Legal Technology Weekly - This newsletter is an offshoot of Inter Alia, a legal technology weblog maintained by Tom Mighell, senior counsel and litigation technology support coordinator at Cowles & Thompson in Dallas. It focuses mainly on websites and other resources of particular relevance to attorneys and legal researchers, but almost anyone will find something of interest each week. The current issue, for example, provides pointers to the research area of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute website, as well as a post from makeuseof.com on about the Top 5 Tools That Will Help You Locate Your Lost Cell Phone. Sign up here.
+ Brookings Alert -- This is a weekly update that provides a summary of new reports and other resources on the Brookings Institution website. Brookings is a venerable think tank that does work in a wide range of public policy areas -- and a reliable source of interesting items that we post regularly on DocuTicker. Sign up here, where you'll also find a listing of all the specific topic-oriented newsletters offered by Brookings, on everything from China to health care policy.
+ INFOMINE Alert Service - INFOMINE, a ginormous scholarly internet resources collection, has been around since you had to connect to the Internet with Dixie cups and string. Created and maintained by academic librarians, it offers "useful Internet resources such as databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information." Why would you NOT want to be made aware of new additions to this valuable collection? Sign up here. You can even specify an area or areas of interest so you'll receive only updates to those categories. You can also specify how often you wish to receive these alerts.
+ The Scout Report - Another venerable resource, this weekly newsletter is the "flagship publication" of the Internet Scout Project. It's been around since 1994, and more than 250,000 folks read it every week. "Published every Friday both on the web and by email, it provides a fast, convenient way to stay informed of valuable resources on the Internet. Our team of professional librarians and subject matter experts select, research, and annotate each resource." Enough said. Sign up here.
+ Uncle Sam, meanwhile, pumps out a wide range e-mail newsletters, for just about any kind of information you can imagine. You can sign up for as many as you want from this central location. Some newer offering include:
DisabilityInfo Connection
Social Security eNEWS
Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Network News
Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Progress Alerts
Go Green
International Environmental and Climate Change Issues
Democracy, Human Rights, and Refugees
State Department Highlights
FEMA Disaster Declarations
Pandemic Flu Updates
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Updates
3-1-1 for Carry-Ons ("Timely alerts about Carry-On items.")
Looking for e-mail newsletters on a specific topic? Give the New-List directory a try. Search or browse through more than 9,200 e-mail newsletters, organized by category. It can, however, be somewhat tedious to pick through here; it's up to you to separate the wheat from the chaff. For librarian-oriented info, check AcqWeb's Directory of Journals, Newsletters and Electronic Discussion Archives. (Note: there are plenty of things here that will interest non-librarians, including pointers to other news/newsletter directories.)
Oh, and we'd be remiss if we didn't point you to the sign-up pages for the ResourceShelf and the DocuTicker weekly newsletters.
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? 
