"What is the Center for Research Libraries?" & Two Recent CRL News Items
An important institution for "hundreds of research libraries" is located at 6050 South Kenwood Avenue in Chicago, not far from the Museum of Science and Industry and the University of Chicago.
[CRL] serves a consortium of hundreds of research libraries, mainly college and university libraries, amongst which it circulates 3,000,000 volumes of “rare research materials.”
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In March of 1949, it was founded as the Midwest Inter-Library Center (MILC) by the founding ten consortium members: the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois, the State University of Iowa, Indiana University, the University of Kansas, Michigan State College, the University of Minnesota, and Purdue University.
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Initially the MILC’s chief function was to accept, store, and process monographs, journals, college textbooks and catalogs, dissertations, state documents, and other materials deposited by member universities. The CRL’s present collection of more than 5,000,000 items came about through subsequent acquisitions that supplemented those original research materials.
Many of the materials that were originally deposited were thought to have outlived their usefulness by donors, yet nonetheless were considered worth retaining for historiographic purposes.
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In 1965, the Mid-West Inter-Library Center became an organization of national scope, with a new name: the Center for Research Libraries.
Redesigned CRL online catalog, based on suggestions from the recent usability study. It features an easier-to-use interface and highlights like Focus on Global Resources newsletter articles, as well as information on research consultations, how to borrow CRL materials, and more: http://catalog.crl.edu/.
This year CRL added 11,000 new volumes and 223 new titles to the JSTOR collection. CRL currently has 46,200 volumes in 1,706 titles. The JSTOR digital archive currently holds 1,841 titles in their digital collection.
+ determine what JSTOR print volumes are currently included in the print archive at CRL, and
+ identify what volumes are needed to complete the CRL 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? 
