FreePint publishes newsletters, websites, magazines and resources for the information industry. The FreePint Family of publications publishes practical tips, product reviews, expert tips, research collections and hands-on tools to support information work of all kinds.
This twice-monthly free FreePint Newsletter serves as a guide to the latest content, including discussion at the Bar, tips articles, vacancies, professional development events, product reviews, editorial commentary and more. Subscribing is free and connects you with the information community around the world. Subscribe today.
The FreePint Bar provides the latest announcements, including publication contents. Subscribe to an RSS feed for the FreePint Bar for the fastest updates.
Please share FreePint with others by forwarding this newsletter.
Editorial
By Robin Neidorf
It's hard to believe that only 12 months ago, we started collecting data for the first Economic Impact report. We're now recruiting participation in FreePint Research: Economic Impact 2010. Take a few minutes to complete this anonymous survey now »
When we launched the 2009 version of the survey, the economy was still shaky, at best. 448 respondents used that survey to tell us about changes in their staffing and budgets, and what tactics they were using to address shortfalls. Although responses reported the expected painful cuts, we also identified a number of opportunities: new ways of working, refocused efforts on higher-level information work, and canny information workers using current conditions to make convincing arguments for increased investment in the right information.
What will we find this year? I expect to see more stability in budgets and staff than last year, but no reduction in creative responses to challenging times. Add your opinions and perspective now -- all respondents receive a free copy of the full report upon publication.
Other research efforts have us now examining the role of mobile content in the enterprise. Initial interviews with FreePint customers in the consulting and financial fields have not yet yielded many cases of mobile-savvy enterprise, however. If you're organisation is delivering content to your staff's mobile devices, please contact me at robin.neidorf@freepint.com as I'd love to include you in our research!
As often as we try to press forward into new areas of information work, it's equally important to hone skills in the basics, That's one reason I'm so delighted with our current special offer: 50% off the FUMSI Volume: Essential Collection of Finding Information -- four reports with a total of 22 in-depth, expert-written articles on the art and science of finding information. Each report stands on its own as a training and professional development resource. Together, they comprise a mini-course on research skills. And with the current discount, the Essential Collection on Finding Information starts at only £78 for single-site use. More detail in the FreePint Shop »
Every month, new FUMSI articles add to the wealth of knowledge FreePint is proud to be able to share with the global information community. But we surely have missed a topic or two that YOU are the expert on. If you have a bit of quiet time in the summer, why not use some of it to write for FUMSI? Our editors make it easy and fun to reflect on and share your expertise. Send your ideas for topics to support@fumsi.com, or contact any contributing editor.
Here's hoping that you're enjoying a pleasant summer.
Robin Neidorf
General Manager
FreePint
FreePint is a Registered Trademark of Free Pint Limited (R) 1997-2010
My Favourite Tipples
Submit your list of up to five favourite tipples to support@freepint.com for publication with your byline and photo in the FreePint Newsletter. Have a single tip to share? Post it to the FUMSI Forum.
By Scott Brown
MeetWays
I feel like I had been looking for an application like MeetWays for years, and I almost cried with joy when I finally found it. Enter two geographic locations - cities, addresses, etc. - and enter a point of interest - coffee, restaurant, hotel, bar - and MeetWays finds the perfect middle point to meet. Extra cool because it provides global coverage.
Yauba
Yauba is one of many social network searches, but try a search on a company like Oracle. It will tell you "what Yauba knows" about Oracle, and suggest a more targeted search for Oracle Corporation (which is what I was looking for). Yauba breaks the results into categories, and pulls an amazing array of information, including documents, social information, and people.
Information is Beautiful
This blog provides - truly - beautiful and striking data visualizations, thanks to David McCandless, a London-based author, writer and designer.
Almost.at
Almost.at allows you to follow real-time events via Twitter, photos, videos and links. For example, I'm looking at the streams from Comic-Con - and I didn't need to track down any hashtags, tags or sites. Almost.at provides international coverage as well - currently, besides Comic-Con, I can check out the Forum Internacional do Software and the Melbourne International Film Festival. I can also find streams from recent events, such as the iPhone 4 Press Conference, Tri Nations Rugby, and the World Cup Finals.
PostSecret
PostSecret feels like my secret Sunday indulgence, though, in writing this, I guess that secret is out of the bag. PostSecret describes itself as "an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard". Not a Sunday goes by without reading something that really touches me. PostSecret also raises a lot of money for suicide prevention.
Scott Brown is owner of Social Information Group, an
independent information practice that focuses on the effective use of social
networking tools for sharing and finding information. He has spoken
and written on a variety of topics, most recently on eBook adoption,
personal branding, and using social tools for competitive intelligence. He
holds a Masters of Counseling from Regis University, and provides coaching,
counseling and psychotherapy services. He has 20 years of experience in public,
academic and corporate library and information organizations.
You can follow Social Information Group on Twitter @socialinfo (for social networking
news), and follow Scott @scbrown5 (for
information, coaching and other thoughts).
Would you like to add your Favourite Tipples suggestions for the FreePint Newsletter or write an article for FUMSI (Find, Use, Manage or Share Information?).
Company Watch's H-Score tracks the financial health of any company, helping to ensure you can trade with confidence.
Powerful interactive functionality enabling:
Financial modeling for "what-if?" experiments
Stress testing
Evaluating management accounts
Forecasts
Use the search engine to identify targets, establish benchmarks or make industry comparisons. Our portfolio management system allows you to create an alert process, tailored to your own precise requirements.
"We've been delighted with the flexibility of the programme, which
enables us to pay a single fee and have the FT content delivered through multiple channels." -- CIO of Clifford Chance
The FreePint Bar is where we publish information about the latest content from across the FreePint Family of resources.
The FreePint Bar is sponsored by:
Latest posts at the FreePint Bar:
[FreePint] PIC 2010 Special Report Published As a proud media partner with Perfect Information, FreePint has just published the FreePint PIC 2010 Special Report. This report includes commentary and discussion from the recent Perfect Information Conference and provides valuable insight from content buyers and information managers on the trends and issues facing all of us today.
Request your free copy of this report:
http://www.freepint.com/events/pic-2010/ Read posting online »
[FUMSI] Latest popular articles The following are the most popular FUMSI articles over the last 30 days:
* From Sumo to Samurai: getting your taxonomies fighting fit: Part 1
* Part 2: How Do THEY Use Information? Investigating the user information process
* Wolfram|Alpha: Simple and Not So Simple Computations in One Click
* The social intranet fires-up knowledge sharing
* Social Networking: A Research Tool
Free uses of FUMSI articles are supported by our sponsors. Read posting online »
[RS] Resource of the Week - Library of Congress Science Tracer Bullets The Library of Congress SCIENCE TRACER BULLET SERIES contains research guides that help you locate information on science and technology subjects. With brief introductions to the topics, lists of resources and strategies for finding more, they help you to stay "on target."
These pathfinders from the Library of Congress Science Reference Services have been for quite awhile - as far back as 1972, according to Reference Services Review - but in our humble opinion, they don't get enough love. Covering a wide range of subjects in the natural and physical sciences as well as technology, they are updated from time to time, and the collection keeps getting larger and larger. Those available online date back to about 1990. Read posting online »
[VIP] Latest popular LiveWire posts There's a lot of valuable comment at the VIP LiveWire. The following are the most popular posts from our contributing editors over the last 30 days:
* EIU Global Forecasting Service Mini Review: Part 1
* Web 2.0: just hype say researchers?
* Time to rethink legal information training?
* Pile it high and sell it cheap
* EIU Global Forecasting Service Mini Review: Part 2
Subscribe to the free VIP Wires Weekly to stay informed. Your comments on any posting are always welcome. Read posting online »
We add new articles to the FUMSI database in each practice area every month, which are free to read, browse, email, print or save. Here are the most recent additions:
For records management, SharePoint 2010 has brought to fruition all that was hoped for when MOSS 2007 was launched. In this detailed comparison of the two versions, John Wise shows that, subject to suitable configuration and support, SharePoint 2010 is a serious option for a compliant ERMS solution.
WHAT'S INSIDE: 'Properly configured, it appears SharePoint 2010, integrated with Office 2010, will be able to deliver on the promise of providing business focused information and processes, while at the same time supporting transparent compliance and records management.'
With the increasing ease with which users can access consumer data via their mobile devices, the pressure is now on companies to provide business data and applications to staff this way. Marcus Austin looks at the double whammy this presents to companies in that not only do they have to open up their networks to the outside world, they also have to deal with the challenges presented by the range of mobile devices being used.
WHAT'S INSIDE: 'Consumers are used to downloading data on their mobiles and now want to do the same with their business data and applications. This means that businesses not only need to open up their networks to mobile users, they also have to deal with all the problems that accessing mobile devices entails such as detecting the type of device that's accessing their site, the variety of screen sizes and the variation in connection speeds.'
The law touches many aspects of information work, and legal work is about as information-intensive as business gets. For both of these reasons, information-related law and resources to serve legal information professionals come up regularly in VIP. Two recent features examine UK-based resources in particular, and upcoming features explore even further afield to international legal resources.
In June, VIP returned to an in-depth comparative review of Westlaw UK and LexisLibrary. Reviewer Diane Raper noted that both of 'The Big Two' cannot afford complacency with regard to their customers or market-share. 'We all have to look very carefully at what we spend our budgets on. Is it really necessary to have both of the major legal online services?' she comments in her LiveWire posting.
In Raper's opinion, both vendors are pushing forward with next-generation features, but '...Westlaw UK currently seems to be further down this path and have dropped the print legacy and are developing a very clear interface that links different parts of their data offering well.'
July's VIP takes on the UK market for legal products with a more intimate look at users' perspective. An executive summary of the FreePint Report: UK Law Library Preferences highlights the findings of research on the top 200 firms in the UK (by revenue) in terms of what their libraries want and need in products. In addition to satisfaction ratings on The Big Two and Practical Law Company, we asked respondents for information on their budgets, internal challenges for making purchase decisions, and ratios for fee earners compared with information professionals.
Although both of these research projects home in on the UK market, they are more broadly relevant. Any international firm with a UK presence will find them useful, and further, they provide a focused view of a single market that can serve as a basis for comparison in other markets.
Looking beyond the United Kingdom, though, is essential for VIP: Future editorial plans call for an in-depth review of Bloomberg Law, the latest entrant into the marketplace for comprehensive legal information. Initial comment from VIP subscribers has been very positive, and we're anxious to get a researcher digging into the product.
In a field where time is literally money, greater efficiency leads to greater revenue. Workflow-embedded products like Practical Law Company's offerings and Lexis PSL address the need to provide legal professionals with resources that do more than deliver information. A comparative review of the two is in the works for later this year as well.
VIP contributing editors comment daily on what's happening in the industry. Visit the LiveWire for their insights, and subscribe to the free VIP Wires Weekly for regular alerts.
VIP Wires Weekly is generously sponsored by Company Watch.
Most Read Postings on the LiveWire Recently...
Copyright - where should the buck stop? As if Goldman Sachs weren't in enough trouble already, they're now being sued in the United States by investment data provider Ipreo for alleged copyright infringement. But, as new United Kingdom rules for dealing with comparable offences go out for consultation, the evidence continues to build up that policing copyright raises more problems than it solves... Read posting online »
Thomson Reuters strengthens compliance offering Thomson Reuters yesterday announced its eighth acquisition of the year. The company is acquiring London-based Complinet Ltd, a provider of risk and compliance information and technology solutions.
As we all know, regulatory compliance is a hot topic at the moment, and so this acquisition makes sound sense for Thomson Reuters. (see http://www.freepint.com/go/b530870 for Freepint's initial results of its Compliance Research Project )... Read posting online »
Bad info wastes time - official It's pretty obvious that bad information can lead to bad decisions - but a survey by Dow Jones and the Special Libraries Association spells out just how serious that risk can be. Around 40% of the respondents cited its impact on decision making, and 17% the risk of missed business opportunities - but by far the biggest impact of bad information seems to be the sheer amount of time it uses up... Read posting online »
B2B Social Media Participation Grows According to a report released this week from eMarketer, B2B marketers may have been late in jumping on the social media bandwagon but are now making up for lost time. The report, which aggregates research from Forrester and Business.com among other providers, points out that 73% of B2B respondents who were using social media as of November 2009 had less than two years of social media marketing experience... Read posting online »
High time to change copyright laws The British Library's announcement of its ambitious programme to digitize the UK's newspaper collection was swiftly followed by an attack from James Murdoch, accusing the organization of exploiting news which publishers were obliged to hand over in the first place, for commercial gain... Read posting online »
Always feel free to comment on any item on the LiveWire, and if you do not yet have a free subscription to the VIP Wires Weekly, you can sign up now »
Outstand Service Award
Dr Sandra Fielden receives Emerald Outstanding Service Award for Gender in Management: An International Journal. United Kingdom, July 2010 - Emerald Group Publishing Limited has presented Dr Sandra Fielden of the Manchester Business School with an Outstanding Service Award in recognition of her contribution to the success of Gender in Management: An International Journal. During her ten-year tenure as editor, Dr Fielden has guided the journal through several major phases of development. Read Press Release online »
London Libraries Consortium uses RFID for self-service, stock management and extended opening
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is being extensively used by members of the London Libraries Consortium for self-service, improved stock management and to facilitate longer opening hours. Around a third of London is served by the consortium's library services. The most recent RFID installations are at Tooting (Wandsworth), Wandsworth Town, Clapton (Hackney), John Jackson (Enfield), Enfield Town and Gants Hill (Redbridge) where public library technology specialist Axiell has provided Bibliotheca Venus machines which offer easy-to-use self issue and return facilities in over 1,000 libraries worldwide. Read Press Release online »
New CILIP Chief Executive Appointed
CILIP is pleased to announce that Annie Mauger will be the new Chief Executive.
Annie has worked in a variety of management roles in England and Scotland, most recently as Acting Chief Executive for Bradford Action for Refugees. Previously she has worked as a consultant to charities and public sector bodies on governance, change management, organisational development and libraries. She held the post of Chief Executive of the Museums, Libraries and Archives (MLA) Yorkshire until its closure and was Head of Libraries and Heritage for the City of York Council. Read Press Release online »
FreePint is updating our research on budgets, staff and approaches to information management. Participate in our anonymous survey and learn:
If budgets are stablising yet
What tactics information managers use to cope with change
What to expect for 2011
All contributors receive a free copy of the full report.
Comment on last year's edition: 'This is a superb report from which information professionals can apply opportunities and findings.' -- Gilberto Morales, MLS, Information Resource Specialist, Baker Hughes'
Jinfo is the central location for supporting your information career. The Jinfo Jobs database lists vacancies, and the Jinfo Events database lists workshops, conferences, training, webinars and other professional development opportunities.
Start a free subscription to receive the weekly Jinfo Update, with a complete list of the latest vacancies and events, or search the databases at any time (free).
Jinfo Jobs in the FreePint Newsletter are supported through our partnership with Quantum2, an innovative skills development programme offered by Dialog. Learn more at <http://quantum.dialog.com/>.
Jinfo Jobs:
Here is a selection of the latest featured vacancies in the Jinfo database:
Copyright Officer
Copyright management experience? Licensing and rights management skills?
Recruiter: Sue Hill Recruitment and Services Limited
Country: United Kingdom
Research Analyst
Experienced Research Analyst - Financial Services, London, £Neg - Depending on experience
Recruiter: TFPL Intelligent Resources
Country: United Kingdom
Lead Analyst - Banking & Capital Markets
Banking & Capital markets Senior Analyst for newly created vacancy to undertake Market Intelligence and Analysis on global trends.
Recruiter: Glen Recruitment
Country: United Kingdom
Business Research Assistant
Business Research Assistant to work with Business Development team.
Recruiter: Blake Lapthorn
Country: United Kingdom
Writing for the web
This course shows how to write original content for the web, and to adapt text to work as effectively online.
Organiser: CILIP
Date: 15th Sep 2010
Country: United Kingdom
Mobile Cloud Computing Forum
1 day conference and exhibition on Enterprise Mobile Cloud Computing and Enterprise Apps
Organiser: Keynote
Date: 2nd Nov 2010
Country: United Kingdom
Jinfo - the best place for information-related job vacancies and professional development opportunities.
RECRUITING? - Advertise a vacancy for just £195 - 10% discount for agencies - 50% discount for registered charities
RUNNING AN EVENT? List it on Jinfo to reach a targeted audience seeking professional development opportunities
- Get started at <http://web.jinfo.com/events/load/>
- Partner events listed for free; enquire at <support@jinfo.com>.
DocuTicker publishes citations of full-text, free reports available on the web. Visit daily for new postings, or subscribe to the weekly DocuTicker Newsletter.
It has become increasingly acknowledged that not everyone has the same learning style. Butterscotch is a website which, through many free video tutorials, instructs in the use of all kinds of hardware and software. Its visual emphasis also allows for a quick comparison between your computer or device and the tutorial. And of course the video can be replayed as many times as necessary.
The Tutorials section is tailored to accomplishing specific tasks or examining the possibilities of certain software. The presenters/narrators have a common style, concise and using everyday language. Topics that need to be covered in more depth are usually broken down into a series of short videos rather than one long one. The Tutorials section also shares with the Shows section the quality of there being something for everyone, no matter their level of technical knowledge.
A look back at what the FreePint Newsletter covered at this time in previous years:
FreePint No. 282, 23rd July 2009 "Information in the Cloud: 10-Point Check List for Choosing a Hosted Provider" and "Copyright and Content: Sharing in a Digital Age"
FreePint No. 234, 26th July 2007 "RSS Update: It's RSS, Jim, but Not as We Know It" and "Calling in the Specialists: Enhancing Your Services with Subcontractors"
FreePint No. 210, 27th July 2006 "Embracing the Wiki Way: Deploying a Corporate Wiki" and "Job Trends in the Information Market: A Q&A with Hazel Hall"
FreePint No. 187, 28th July 2005 "Plain and clear: Resources on Plain English" and "Local Search, The Search Engines and Yellow Pages"
FreePint No. 164, 29th July 2004 "Artificial Intelligence" and "Money Laundering new regulations - implications for information provision"
FreePint No. 141, 24th July 2003 "The Psychology of Corporations and Corporate Officers" and "Automotive Industry Sources: What Forest? All I See Are Trees!"
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your subscriptions or password, visit <http://www.freepint.com/subs/> or forward this email, with your request and registered email address, to <support@freepint.com>. For details about contributing, advertising or to see past issues, please visit the Web site at <http://www.freepint.com/>.
Please note: FreePint (ISSN 1460-7239) is a registered trademark of, and published by, Free Pint Limited. The publishers will NEVER make the subscriber list available to any other company or organisation.
The opinions, advice, products and services offered herein are the sole responsibility of the contributors. Whilst all reasonable care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the publication, the publishers cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions.
This publication may be freely copied and/or distributed in its entirety. However, individual sections MAY NOT be copied and/or distributed without the prior written agreement of the publishers. Write to Robin Neidorf, General Manager, <robin.neidorf@freepint.com> for more details. Product names used in FreePint are for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners. FreePint disclaims any and all rights in those marks. All rights reserved.
FreePint is published by Free Pint Limited, registered in England and
Wales. Registered Number: 3754418. Registered Office: Delaport Coach
House, Lamer Lane, Wheathampstead, Herts, AL4 8RQ
Special Offer: The FreePint Volume: Business News Sources brings together recent high-value reports to help you better understand the options available, how they compare and how other organisations evaluate them. These publications normally sell for £39 or more each. Get the entire collection for only £97.50 (single site).
What will we find this year? I expect to see more stability in budgets and staff than last year, but no reduction in creative responses to challenging times. 
By John Wise
Visit the FreePint Shop!
