Tools for Fighting the Information Flood

Obviously, I have been thinking a great deal about curating the content that you want from the vast seas of information available online. I think I was running an errand when a thought about digital curation occurred to me. As librarians in the 21st century, we are charged with helping people discern “good” from “bad” information, as well as the information they seek from the information that is unnecessary. If we cannot do this in our own (for lack of a better term) “information lives” then how can we be expected to do it well for others?

To this end, I want to share with you some of the tools and such that I use to see and use only the information I want to see online. If you want to know more, please let me know!

My first attempt at some form of digital curation was my use of Google Reader. It’s simply an online RSS feed aggregator that allows you to see all your favorite websites’ updates on one page. Here’s a screenshot of mine:



Of course, the problem with this is that one can add far too many feeds to the Reader, as I have done several times. If you consistently don’t read something (like news sites, for example) delete it! There is no point in constantly clicking the “mark as read” button if you don’t read the feed.

My next tool grew out of my deletion of my news feeds - the New York Times Editor’s Choice App for the iPad. I know I have mentioned this several times before, so I won’t harp on it here. I’ll just say that the app is my only source of news during the day, cutting down on my feeds and “website checking.” And, because I can, here’s a screenshot of the front page in the app from this morning:



Another relatively new tool in my toolbox is the app and service called Evernote. (Thanks, Sam!) As we go through information, how do we save the information we want to reference again? Web links are, frankly, unreliable, and it’s environmentally irresponsible to print everything out that one might want to save. That’s where Evernote comes in. And rather than have me blather on about the service, I’ll give you this nice video description:









http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlOLXWvaIy0












And here’s a screenshot of my Evernote, as of this morning:



It’s actually how I save most of the content I want to share with you on this blog, so it’s an integral part of that creation system.

Of course, you already know about my effort to cut down on the number of friends I have on Facebook, which is going well. Another suggestion is to use the “hide person from newsfeed” or “hide app from newsfeed” tool in Facebook. This helps my to have my newsfeed on Facebook cut down to the stuff I want to read from the people I want to know about. I tried making a screenshot of this, but once again, the video is better:








http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7wBqyw_LGs













I think that’s about it for now. I will be sure and share new tools with you as I use them! Any questions, please ask!