Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Steven Cohen points to an article by Roland Tanglao on avoiding information overload caused by excessive use of RSS.

Steven points out that he himself doesn't believe in information overload - "We are not forced to subscribe to over 500 feeds, or have thousands of messages coming into my inbox every day from electronic mailing lists. If we didn't read anything, we wouldn't suffer from IO"

I'm not so sure. It's true that much of the information we take in is discretionary. But it's also true that the amount of scholarly literature has increased vastly in the last 50 years or so. This, I think, makes it impossible to read everything that is relevant to our area of interest. At best, we can hope to read a few key sources thorougly, and skim through others.

That said, I'm going to take a close look at what both Steven and Roland have to say, and see if I can be more efficient as I try to keep current.

| posted by Simon at 8:42 pm