Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope With Information Overload
Sarah Houghton-Jan, Digital Futures Manager, San Jose Public Library and the LibrarianInBlack blog, has published an excellent article in the Ariadne Web Magazine called “Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways To Cope Cope With Information Overload”:
“What is information overload? 27 instant messages. 4 text messages. 17 phone calls. 98 work emails. 52 personal emails. 76 email listserv messages. 14 social network messages. 127 social network status updates. 825 RSS feed updates. 30 pages from a book. 5 letters. 11 pieces of junk mail. 1 periodical issue. 3 hours of radio. 1 hour of television. That, my friends, is information overload.”
“It is also my daily average amount of information received, sampled over a two-week period. That’s right—that much in every category every day. I suppose that is why I was called upon to write an article about coping with information overload (IO). I am still here, I am still alive, and my brain has yet to explode, so somehow I must be finding a way to make it work. At least, that is what other people tell me.”
“There is a unique relationship between librarians and the concept of information overload. Processing information appropriately is key to the success of our profession and key to the success of each of us as professionals. People look to us to help them process information, to pick what information on which to concentrate, and to discard irrelevant information. Librarians are trained to evaluate information, and to choose the best of the best. One would think, therefore, that we would be more adept in dealing with the problem of information overload. We have the skills necessary for evaluating, organising, and collecting information in ways that allow for efficient processing and retrieval. Those skills are central to the success of many of our colleagues, librarians or not.”
“John D. Halamka describes how, at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, they have replaced libraries with information commons and renamed the librarians ‘information specialists’ and the libraries themselves were renamed as the ‘Department of Knowledge Services.’ [6] The renaming itself was most certainly a superficial symptom of the reorganisation and reprioritisation in the institution’s libraries (pardon me, the Department of Knowledge Services). The key was the new emphasis on the importance of information—the focus on the content. As more and more information floods into businesses and other organisations, we information professionals, or whatever we are called, will be indispensable in helping our co-workers and users to process their data, thereby helping the institution overall.”
Sarah mentions Ten Techniques to Manage the Overload:
1. General Organisational Techniques
2. Filtering Information Received
3. RSS Overload Techniques
4. Interruptive Technology Overload Techniques
5. Phone Overload Techniques
6. Email Overload Techniques
7. Print Media Overload Techniques
8. Multimedia Overload Techniques
9. Social Network Overload Techniques
10. Time and Stress Management
For the whole article:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/houghton-jan/
Info via LibrarianInBlack:
http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2008/09/being-wired-or.html
Posted by Rich
