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.

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.

____

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.

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.

App Happy

Unfortunately I had to miss "60 Apps in 60 Minutes" at SLA 2011, but Scott Brown and Joe Murphy have posted their presentation on SlideShare.  Yay!

First, an aside about apps.  According to Flurry (via TechCrunch), time spent on apps daily has now surpassed time spent on the Web (on a computer).  There are more sessions using apps, rather than longer sessions.  What a revolution.  And I bet its not all Angry Birds.  Business Insider, however, questions Flurry's analysis.  Take a look at both and see what you think.

The apps they include are listed in categories for easy findability, and librarians/info pros have a section all their own.

Some of what they covered:

Buzz Deck:  updates from social networks and other sites

Reuters News Pro:  news, company, and financial info

GoodReads:  book recommendations and discussions (app here)

Instapaper:  save web pages for reading later

Wi-Fi Finder:  does what it says it does

MobileRSS:  Google Reader for the iFamily

TweetDeck and the more robust HootSuite for managing all those Twitter messages

 

What are your favorite apps?  And which do you use for info center services?

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.

 

The best intranets

Don't you love "best of" lists?  Top 10/25/101 lists?  From the writer's perspective, it's a concise and eye-catching way to communicate ideas.  From the reader's point of view, it's "I-can-scan-this-easily" time.

The 4 January issue of Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox lists the top ten intranets for 2011.  After the list, trends and common themes are explored.  Some findings:

• Better tools and greater investment in intranets (even in small companies)
• More and better mobile intranets...a captive, defined audience makes it easier to create highly-functional intranets
• Better management of knowledge on intranets through targeted repositories, encouragement of innovation, easy-to-use commenting tools, user rating systems, and customized content collections
• Task-centered information architecture aids usability
• Search capabilities are of utmost importance
• Page templates and content management systems are key to information organization and consistency

Where else can these ideas be applied?  Certainly for websites more generally.  And, we could all use better tools and greater investment in many aspects of our work. 

The full report is available from the Nielsen Norman Group.

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?

 

Ethics and critical thinking

As the deadline for SLA 2010 advance registration approaches (fees go up on May 8th!), I hope you are thinking about what sessions and CE courses will inspire your day-to-day work, build upon your existing knowledge, and enhance your resume. I'd like to recommend one course in particular, "Information Ethics and Critical Thinking for Info Pros." We know information ethics are important, but how many of us know how to handle a sticky situation in the workplace?

SLA's Information Ethics Advisory Council has been working on guidelines for professional ethics for SLA members. The need to reach SLA members at the instructional level became apparent to the council's co-chairs, LIS professors and ethics experts Toni Carbo and Tom Froehlich, and a CE course at the upcoming conference was planned to complement SLA's recent work in the ethics arena. 

In this full-day course, offered on Saturday, 12 June, the instructors will introduce the principles of information ethics to participants and foster discussion about ethical challenges and the resolution of issues. Toni and Tom will use lectures, case study examination, and small group discussions to explore information ethics as it relates to privacy, intellectual property, freedom of expression, and the proliferation of newer techologies and the information explosion. 

The knowledge you take away from this course will help make you better-prepared to navigate ethical issues, and set you on a course to thinking critically about the difficult situations we are increasingly facing in the information setting.

A full list of SLA-sponsored CE courses can be found on the Click U Web site. Register for CE courses today, as classes are filling up! Please send any questions to clicku@sla.org.

We look foward to seeing you in New Orleans at SLA 2010!

News from Dialog and ProQuest

Three cheers for Dialog and ProQuest!

Dialog is offering some discounts for access to its services for laid-off librarians and information professionals.  A press release from early October announced that the company is waiving standard Dialog start-up and service fees, offering free Dialindex, and discounting Dialog usage by 10% for librarians who have become unemployed since September 2008.  The company hopes it will help info pros find jobs and maintain their search skills during a difficult time.  Sign up for the program here.

And, for SLA members, here's another program to take advantage of:  free trials of Dialog and ProQuest resources.  Ninety days of complimentary access to databases will be offered on a rotating basis.  During the first 90 days of the program, the featured products are Environmental Impact Studies (full-text) and Papers Invited.  What's up next?  Conference Papers Index and Illustrata.  What better way to evaluate products than through a free trial?