LISNews: Librarian News

HOW often have you wasted time searching through page after page of e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds and YouTube videos on your computer, trying to find an important item?

If the answer is “too often,” a San Francisco company, Radar Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, that may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving documents.

Twine (twine.com) can scan almost any electronic document for the names of people, places, businesses and many other entities that its algorithms recognize.

Then it does something unusual: it automatically tags or marks all of these items in orange and transfers them to an index on the right side of the screen. This index grows with every document you view, as the program adds subjects that it can recognize or infer from their context.

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Eight steps to thriving on information overload: "There is no quick fix; enhancing our skills requires effort and is an ongoing process. Implementing the following principles can make a real difference to your effectiveness in dealing with the new reality of information overload..."
1. Set information objectives.
4. Filter aggressively.
8. Sleep on it!

madcow writes ""[T]here's no doubt that libraries have embraced technology. But speakers said that there was a larger split between students - who are "digital natives," in one popular way of classifying people based on their experience with technology - and librarians, who are more likely to be "digital immigrants." They may have learned the language, but it’s a second language." So says the article at Inside Higher Ed.

"So if this hierarchical model doesn't reach today's students, what will?

James Paul Gee, a linguist who is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul, argued that librarians need to adapt their techniques to digital natives. A digital native would never read an instruction manual with a new game before simply trying the game out, Gee said. Similarly, students shouldn't be expected to read long explanations of tools they may use before they start experimenting with them.""

Peter Morville says Next year, after the bubble bursts, we will enter the era of Information Architecture 3.0. This won’t surprise Tim O’Reilly who slyly positioned the polar bear atop the #1 Google hit for Web 2.0 and commissioned the third edition just in time to clean up the mess.

In fact, this future is self-evident in the undisciplined, unbalanced quest for sexy Ajaxian interaction at the expense of usability, findability, accessibility, and other qualities of the user experience.