Information Center Connections

The rise of infographics

Infographics have become ubiquitous, and with good reason.

For one, they are very often pretty to look at. I've seen all sorts of designs...flow charts, circles, rainbows, maps.  Easy on the eyes. (That's the "graphic" part.)

And the information that's presented is in bite-size portions, easy to scan and digest. Concise. A way to combine and display data to show results and/or tell a story. And, importantly, the information is cited.

Have you thought about how your information center could use infographics to present industry or research information? To market to your clients? To explain a new process or service (either for internal use or for clients/students)?

Here are a few that I found particularly striking and relevant:

+ Anatomy of a librarian

+ A librarian's worth

+ The metadata universe (zoom to view the detail)

+ Usability guide

+ The importance of online training

+ Looking forward to Thanksgiving

 

Now, how to create them? Here are a few resource lists to get you started, plus step-by-step guidance:

+ Suggestions from Problogger

+ Suggestions from Social Networking Librarian

+ Suggestions from Stephen Abram

 

If you see interesting infographics during your travels (or search for them; Visual.ly is a good creating and finding tool), file/bookmark/save them. Let them serve as inspiration for your own storytelling and information sharing.

Have you used infographics to tout your services or present information? If so, tell us the results and how you did it.

Librarian Bakes Cake

It's a fact:  attendance at training sessions, open houses, and lunch-and-learns will be higher if you serve food.

Did you use National Bundt Day to call attention to your information center's services? I did!

Mary the Food Librarian baked 30 bundts in 30 days for National Bundt Day.  Take a look at her baking adventures (with recipes!) on her blog.

Mary the Food Librarian and the Bundts

Food Librarian and bundt-lover Mary (@foodlibrarian) is celebrating National Bundt Day, November 15th, by making 30 bundt cakes in the days leading up to that landmark day.

Mary's blog was featured in the Info Sites column in Information Outlook a while back, and I've continued to enjoy her food adventures.

Will you join me (a chocolate bundt for sure) and many of Mary's other followers in baking a bundt for November 15th? Mary is offering an "I Like Big Bundts" button for participants who submit their information and a picture of the celebratory bundt.

I like big bundts...I cannot lie!

Federal library world updates

The Federal Library Directory is a new resource of incredible value.

The directory, organized by FLICC, is searchable and provides detailed information about more than 1,000 U.S. federal libraries worldwide. Contact information, available services, and welcome audiences are listed, among many other characteristics of interest.

Read more about it in the press release.

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As you may know, GPO Access, the federal government's site for documents and reports, is being replaced by FDsys.  The transition has begun, and no new materials will be added to the old site. That site will be "retired" during the 2012 fiscal year, specific date yet undetermined.

FDsys stands for "Federal Digital System" and it is also a product of the U.S. Government Printing Office. The system provides access to information products from all three government branches, including fulltext documents and metadata.

Learn more about this resource on the FDsys site.

Add the HBR Blog Network to your reading list

You may not sit down to read each issue of Harvard Business Review (although we should), but I suggest making time for the HBR Blog Network.

Recently, I wrote about an HBR post on procrastination, and I've been tempted a few times since to write about other topics that have been featured on the HBR site. I find the posts to be informative, interesting, and not so long that I can't spare a few minutes to open myself to the wisdom of the HBR blog writers.

You'll find topics that span the organizational experience. Not all will be 100% relevant to your situation, but the posts will give you a glimpse of the wider world in which we live, work, and negotiate.

Posts on customer service and business practices and their implications (let's reflect on the recent activities of Netflix and Bank of America) instruct us about how business behaves (or doesn't). We can learn how to work productively with others (amidst dreaded office politics), and how we can successfully (and without bloodshed) evaluate the performance of our direct reports. We all need to know how to communicate and work most effectively.

Updates from the HBR Blog Network are available through e-mail and RSS.

Whom do you follow?

Do you tweet?  Do you want to tweet?  Or, would you prefer to just follow?

Twitter is a great way to keep up with industry developments, find resources, and pick up a tip or two from colleagues.  I like the immediacy of it.

Here are some suggestions for those in the info industry world:

@mashable:  social media stories and tips
@graubart:  Barry Graubart, smart and witty digital media guru
@copyrightclear:  Copyright Clearance Center, for news and other developments
@jill_hw:  Jill Hurst-Wahl, LIS professor, author, speaker; she seems to be everywhere!
@jafurtado:  Jose Afonso Furtado, for an international perspective on the information world
@librarycongress:  Library of Congress.  Enough said.
@lisnews:  All the LIS news that fits into 140 characters
@scottabel:  Content strategy

 

And other tweeters I enjoy:

@ebertchicago:  Roger Ebert, movie review guy and social commentator
@nilofer:  Innovation evangelist Nilofer Merchant
@James_Kane:  The guy who knows everything about loyalty
@chrisbrogan:  Business consultant with some great ideas
@davidlebovitz:  American chef living in France with keen observations about people and food 

 

What are your follow suggestions?  Besides me, @triviachick, of course.

Technical Standards and You

Standards are part of our daily lives. They can be found at home, in our car, at work and in cyberspace.  We wouldn’t have email without standards.  Standards not only formally document technical criteria, methods, practices and practices, they allow companies and individuals to save money, accelerate projects and make better solutions.

Technical standards are up for review every five years which makes the revision process long and slow. Different organizations focus on reviewing, enhancing and proposing standards on different topics. In the library world, NISO, W3C, and Library of Congress are the standards organizations helping to define epublication, metadata, linked data, and CSS standards (to just name a few).

SLA has a Technical Standards Committee whose focus is to share standards activities from various organizations and provide educational opportunities about the standards, as well.  In the past, this committee has also voted on NISO standards on behalf of SLA. 

If you are interested in technical standards or tasked with implementing them in your organization, join the open SLA Technical Standards discussion list.  Subscription instructions are at the bottom of the committee's page. 

Look for educational opportunities about technical standards in the upcoming months. If you have suggestions for a specific technical standard you would like to learn more about or standards topics you think are important to information professionals, let us know by contacting any committee member.

This and that: some resources to check out

A few items of interest to info pros and friends:

The Webby Awards have been around for 15 years.  Review the latest list of nominees and winners in almost 70 categories.  Any familiar sites on there?  How does your organization's site measure up?

Zanran is a search engine for data and statistics.  Why not try it if you are looking for that type of information...let's broaden our search horizons!  Looks promising with pop-up results and solid sources of data.  Search Engine Land published a review that's worth a look.

Have a topic and need to find a feed?  Take a look at RSS Search Engine.  Use Google search syntax to limit your results.

Info overload revisited

Did you see the Newsweek article "I Can't Think"?  Information overload can get the best of us to the point of what author Susan Begley calls info-paralysis.  Yep.  Excellent article...take a look when you have a few minutes.

This blog actually started with a post on information overload (aside: I now have 135 messages in my inbox with little hope of seeing my eternal goal of 30 anytime soon), and it seems only to have gotten worse across the board. Twitter, anyone?

Last August, Click U offered two webinars that promised some hope.  Sarah Houghton-Jan (@TheLiB), now the assistant director of the San Rafael Public Library and also known as the Librarian in Black, presented two webinars called "Battling Information Overload."  She offered techniques and tools to get you through the deluge.  Check them out in the replays section of the Click U site, under the 2010 heading "Personal Improvement."

Get to it...don't let info-paralysis get to you.

 

New ventures for Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy

Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy, formerly of ResourceShelf and DocuTicker, have launched two new not-to-be-missed resource sites.

INFOdocket brings us industry news, and a whole lot of resources and tools.

FullTextReports...well, it's just what it says!  Reports from think tanks, scholarly organizations, industry analysts, and more.

Each site has an RSS feed and a Twitter feed (@INFOdocket and @fulltextreports), so it's easy to keep up with what's new, and each site is accessible on your mobile device.  How's that for great information service?