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!

Just a Bit More

If you read my post regarding recommendations for alcohol consumption by women yesterday here is a bit more to go along with that.  I found this yesterday:

"The United States, as a nation, has great confusion concerning drinking. It does not appear to be able to come to a consensus regarding alcohol consumption or what constitutes moderate and responsible drinking. More awareness concerning the importance of religion in shaping aptitudes towards drinking may shed light on this ambivalence. Different religious backgrounds along with differences in cultural attitudes that originated "in the old country" among the ancestors immigrants of many Americans today, still shape every day thinking and assumptions concerning alcohol. Numerous studies from both the United States and Europe have suggested that Protestants consume less alcohol but perceived great problems with the substance. In contrast Roman Catholics consume more alcohol but do not perceived its consumption as problematic. The reason for this may be based in the distant past. Recent research (Engs 1991a; 1995) has suggested that in antiquity different drinking cultures developed in the Northern and in the Mediterranean areas of western Europe. This was due to a number of factors including the ecosystem, seasonal variations, climate, and socio-political structures."

http://www.indiana.edu/~engs/articles/cathprot.htm

Have a great weekend!  (wink, wink)

Fighting the Deluge

As I told you yesterday, I tried an experiment seeing what life was like a bit more off the grid on the weekends. Honestly, it was pretty nice. So nice, as a matter of fact, that I am trying a variant of that same experiment in my online realm.

I read a great deal of information (and I wish I had a citation for you) about the deluge of information we as internet users are faced with every day. A cornucopia of choices, each with massive amounts of information presented each day. This presents me (and I presume, internet users more generally) with many choices. First, what sources of information online do we look at, or aggregate? How do we put these together in one place? How do we “keep” things we find to be significant, or important? And, how do we filter out the things which are, as Nero Wolfe would say, “pfui,” like he does here:














http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAKjT4GizS8







For me, I added far too much to my Google Reader to be able to digest. I deleted all of my news RSS feeds and now read the New York Times on my iPad. If it’s not in the Times that morning, I probably won’t read it. I think this is how newspapers can be relevant - their curation of news events. Picking out the key and significant stories from the flummery that fills up much of the news sites on the internet.

This virtual spring cleaning extends to my email inbox as well:


See that? Nothing in my inbox. My aunt told me long ago about paper mail that you touch it once. You reply, file it, or throw it away after you open it. This is perhaps a bit utopian, but I try and apply it in my email inbox, and tends to work. However, the last few weeks have been very busy, and so mail accumulated in my inbox - requiring me to sort through the messages and deal with them appropriately. I have also been proactively unsubscribing from distribution lists, as well as postal mail catalogs.

And finally, this spring cleaning applies to Facebook as well. If you are reading this and are no longer a friend of mine on Facebook, feel free to send me another friend request. However, if you were deleted, it means we had no contact over the past year, so please do make an effort to keep in touch. This part was brought about when I was reminded about Dunbar’s Number, which I read in one of Malcolm Gladwell’s writings. Dunbar hypothesizes that we can only really “know” 150 people (or so) and so I wanted to reduce my friend list on Facebook to meet that number. I’m at 121 friends now:


So if you made “the cut” thanks for being a good friend and keeping in touch. If you didn’t, let’s try and catch up!

Facebook and Privacy

Before I get into today’s post, I do want to wish you a happy Memorial Day holiday. Jen and I are really enjoying our three day weekend, and I hope you are as well. Also, thanks to all the veterans, and those who are no longer with us, for serving our country.

I feel confident in saying that by this time you have heard about the uproar over the changes in Facebook’s privacy settings. Many people strenuously objected to these changes, and many threatened to leave Facebook. However, some mass exodus did not happen, and Facebook responded (in a way) to the complaints of its users. Still, the erosion or privacy rights on the internet is a topic getting a great deal of attention in libraryland, and so I thought I might share a few things here.

First, as an information professional, privacy and anonymity on the internet are incredibly important to ensuring net neutrality as well as allowing the internet to be the “sandbox” of ideas that it is today. Privacy on the internet also plays a part in “future-proofing” the internet, as the FCC wants to do (if the courts will allow it). So, before we go further, maintaining the privacy of internet users from anyone is incredibly important.

However, there are a few strong objections I have to people complaining about privacy concerns, specifically on Facebook, and more broadly on social networking sites. Facebook, by its very nature, is designed to share personal information with others. I would presume, perhaps erroneously, that people understand this when they sign up. Why, then, should you put all of your personal information on the site? Why share more than you are comfortable with sharing and being in the public eye? To be fair, maybe I am making something out of nothing, but it seems apparent to me that people should think about what is shared online before they put that personal information out there in the first place.

In addition, something that people of my age and younger need to understand is self-editing. Maybe you went out and had a wild night on the town last night - and maybe Aunt Edna and your boss should not know about that. Also, complaining about your workplace, or sharing confidential information, should never be done on Facebook, or in a public forum for that matter. Once it’s on the internet, you really have no control over what happens to what you post.

One of the overall ideas librarians are trying to foster in the public is the concept of information literacy. For many librarians, this is simply helping patrons determining what is and is not “good” information on the internet, but to me it is a broader concept, helping people determine how to function in out information environment today - including best practices for social networking and such.

Anyhow, here’s a great link if you want to check your privacy settings on Facebook, as recommended by the ALA:

Facebook Privacy Scanner

Librarians in Second Life

I just finished reading Marilyn Johnson’s new book This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. It’s a great read, and if you are interested in the future of libraries and librarians I would recommend it to you. In the book, Johnson discusses librarians who are on the Second Life website, answering reference questions and representing their respective libraries in that virtual world. While reading this, one word arose in my mind:

Why?

Before I explain myself, I understand that many of my fellow librarians are actively “doing librarianship” on Second Life, and I feel sure they have a different, and equally valid opinion about this. (If you are familiar with Second Life, let me hear from you in the comments!)

That being said, I do not understand why there is such a push for librarians to practice our craft on Second Life. Three things come to mind when I questions this:

First, Second Life is only a duplication of services widely available through library websites. Electronic reference services are available through many library websites, as are the catalog of items in the library’s collection (OPAC, if you want the acronym). In addition, many libraries offer their digitized assets in a much more pleasant virtual environment than Second Life offers. Of course, this idea of library websites could really be a post unto itself - meaning a list of things that all library websites should have, and how many of them are not really that great.

Second, the user interface of a website is far more user friendly than the interface in Second Life - meaning people in general know how to navigate a website as this is a commonly used form for the presentation of “virtual objects.” The Second Life experience requires the user to install the program, sign up for the service, learn navigation, and also assumes a high speed internet connection. For people already on Second Life, these things are not a problem - but for the people not on Second Life (the majority of internet users) these hurdles prevent them from using the library services on Second Life.

Third, why is so much focus and effort spent on such a small user group? I know Second Life was pretty popular at one point (and I’ll talk about that in my fourth and final point) but the numbers just don’t seem to justify all the money and effort spent by libraries on their presences in Second Life.

Finally, one rarely hears about Second Life after the initial media blitz of a few years ago, and so I suppose my question is, what does the user base look like now? What do the users do? How long do people spend on there? There really needs to be some studies done about usage on Second Life.

Still, though, I ask “why?”

Aardvark

Hello readers,

Just a quick word to tell you I am on Aardvark, which is like a social reference question answering website. It’s pretty cool if you need a good answer pretty quickly. Here’s a link to my Aardvark profile, and feel free to join up and add me, check it out, etc!

http://vark.com/s/KWAT

Have a great weekend!

Aperture 3

Friends, I have not fallen into some abyss, nor has any malady befallen me. I was simply trying to use the trial version of Aperture 3, released earlier this week. Well, to make a long story short - the program is a computer vampire, and only now can I really use my computer. So, my purchasing advice for Aperture 3 is: don’t buy it.

Jason

New Fun Photos from the Library of Congress

One of the most interesting things that the Library of Congress has been up to over the past few months is their Flickr uploads. Their most recent uploads from the New York Herald are wonderful, and I’ll share some of my favorites below. Here’s a link to their photostream, where all these images come from:

Library of Congress’ Flickr Photostream

Have a great weekend!! (PS - These images have no copyright!)

Top 10 Things That Are Being Killed Off By Digitalization

One of the most interesting library-related lists I have seen recently is this list:

Top 10 Things That Are Being Killed Off By Digitalization, by Richard.

That’s all I have today - you might also want to look at the discussion in the comments beneath that post - some good thoughts there. What do you think is being killed off by digitalization?

The Social Media Revolution

It seems to me that one of the information needs that we librarians can help our patrons with is social media and social networking online. Before thinking about this more, I felt that social media is a pretty simple and straightforward topic, but then I watched this video, and I was quite wrong. Enjoy!