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• Big Data, FreePint-Style
  
• Context is King in the Research Sphere

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By Emre Hasan Akbayrak

I think that technological advances will keep on forcing librarians to redefine their job descriptions and their roles. There are several critical skills that librarians need to thrive in today's digital world and it's really important for librarians to stay abreast of the latest trends in web communications and social media. That will help when planning and executing programmes for mobile technologies.

• Vizify is a social media website that works in concert with other websites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to create a unique, unified social media profile for users and turns your social network into an infographic about your life. Vizify uses the data you share on social media sites to automatically create visualisations explaining who you are. Vizify lets me organise the information in my social media accounts in a way that makes it understandable, even meaningful.
  
  
• Pixable helps you discover the photos that matter. See the top photos shared by your friends on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in one place. Pixable ranks and sorts your friends’ photos and videos based on popularity and your connections, giving you a more personal viewing experience. Pixable lets me find the best photos and videos shared on my social media accounts, it's a really useful tool.
  
  
• Daily Infographic features the best information design and data visualisation from the internet every day. Data visualisation, when done correctly, is an effective way to analyse large amounts of data to identify correlations, trends, outliers, patterns, and business conditions. Daily Infographic curates the most interesting, visually stimulating, mind blowing infographics and helps me to discover new things.
  
  
• ResearchGate is a social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. The site has been described as 'a mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn' that includes profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and ‘like’ and ‘follow’ buttons for the purposes of crowdsourcing research. ResearchGate helps me to stay informed and connected with the scientific community.
  
  
• Learnist is like a Pinterest for education, as it allows users to collect web resources and add them to "Learnboards" to educate an audience about a particular subject. It takes an innovative approach to learning that "takes the best bits of existing social media platforms and forges them into a powerful informal thinking and learning platform". Learnist allows me to to collect web resources and add them to "Learnboards" to educate our library users about particular library services.

Emre Hasan Akbayrak is the Associate Director of the Middle East Technical University Library. Between 2005 and 2006, he held the position of Head of Serials and E-Resources Department at METU Library, and between 2001 and 2005, he was reference librarian in the Library. Emre has been working for the ANKOS (Anatolian University Libraries Consortium) since 2002. You can reach him at akbayrak@metu.edu.tr, connect with him on LinkedIn at http://tr.linkedin.com/in/emrehasanakbayrak, follow him on Twitter @bluesyemre and his blog http://bluesyemre.com/.

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FreePint Features offers the latest commentary on trends, issues and opportunities in the information world, as well as examples of how organisations use FreePint resources to raise the value of information.

Selection of the latest FreePint Features articles:

• Content and Compliance Challenges Deliver Opportunities for Info Pros
  By Tim Buckley Owen on Monday, 18th February 2013
  Tim Buckley Owen reviews the recent FreePint articles on the theme of content and compliance and mulls over the signficant role that information professionals can play in ensuring that their organisation's current and historic information is easily discoverable. There are also opportunities for demonstrating how information professionals are essential to the compliance process as the importance and regulation of compliance increases.
  
  
• Big Data, FreePint-Style
  By Robin Neidorf on Monday, 18th February 2013
  "Big Data" is the buzz word du jour, but what does it mean and what can it do in B2B environmments? FreePint intends to find out and share the insight to help with the questions we've been hearing from information managers and strategists. Starting in April 2013, watch for a special series of articles, reports and webinars under the heading of "Big Data in Action"; learn more about this FreePint approach to support your education.
  
  
• Key Note Reinvents Itself as a Business Intelligence Tool
  By Andrew Grave on Tuesday, 12th February 2013
  Market report publisher Key Note was acquired by Alistair Pauline in 2009. Its strategy subsequently has been to broaden its content and functionality, positioning it firmly in the business intelligence tools area. Andrew Grave investigates how successful Key Note has been in achieving this goal.
  
  
• Product Report: CODiE Finalists - Best Science and Technology Information Solution
  By Robin Neidorf on Tuesday, 12th February 2013
  Three products were named to the final round for the CODiE category of Best Science and Technology Information Solution. All three demonstrate understanding of the workflow and content needs of researchers that require scientific information. FreePint reviewers provide a good look at Safari Books Online, Udini from ProQuest and Infotrieve's Mobile Library Rx. Only one can take the CODiE, but all three deserve kudos for excellence.
  
  
• Context is King in the Research Sphere
  By Jan Knight on Monday, 11th February 2013
  As a commissioning editor for FreePint, Jan Knight develops articles and reports to support the corporate research function. Her orientation within research is to define the 'why' and the 'how' as well as the 'what'. She explains why context makes all the difference in the value and efficiency of research.
  
  
• Increase Your Productivity - Just Get it Done!
  By Jo Alcock on Thursday, 7th February 2013
  David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity system can help you clear your mind, organise incoming information, and decide what to focus on at any given time. Jo Alcock provides an overview of the GTD system and recommends tools to help you improve your productivity.
  
  
• Open and Closed Cultures
  By Robin Neidorf on Thursday, 7th February 2013
  An emphasis on sharing and openness often seems hardwired into the psyche of librarians and information professionals but not every organisation's culture is as receptive. Robin Neidorf reflects on the benefits that open dialogue and shared experiences can bring to businesses and their customers.
  
  
• Inbox overload from FreePint?
  By Robin Neidorf on Wednesday, 6th February 2013
  Reduce inbox overload and your own frustration by learning which FreePint Updates are most relevant to you ... and then ditch the rest.
  
  
• ... More ...

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Articles and reports included in a FreePint Subscription provide customer organisations with practical insight to support information practice, content purchasing and usage, and strategic planning.

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Selection of FreePint Subscription articles and reports:

• Mini Review: IA Watch
  By Penny Crossland on Tuesday, 19th February 2013
  Penny Crossland reviews IA Watch, an information portal for compliance practitioners, containing news on more than 200 compliance-related topics as well as up-to-date information on guidelines, laws and best practices. The portal is enhanced by a community forum, collaborative features and links to IA Watch-sponsored webinars.
  
  
• Enliven Your Communications with Multimedia
  By Pila Martinez on Tuesday, 19th February 2013
  Without any visual elements, most types of written communications are just rows and rows of black letters that blur into a grey mass. Multimedia not only can make your communications more visually appealing, but it can also convey information in ways your words never could. Pila Martinez provides some tips to help you make your communications more captivating and highlights some of the latest tools to achieve this.
  
  
• FreePint Report: Content and Compliance
  Published on Monday, 18th February 2013
  Tim Buckley Owen reviews the recent FreePint articles on the theme of content and compliance and mulls over the signficant role that information professionals can play in ensuring that their organisation's current and historic information is easily discoverable. There are also opportunities for demonstrating how information professionals are essential to the compliance process as the importance and regulation of compliance increases.
  
  
• Mini Review: Web Preserver
  By Barbara Fullerton on Monday, 18th February 2013
  Barbara Fullerton reviews Web Preserver, a sophisticated yet easy-to-use product which not only allows you to preserve webpages in their native technology format but also to archive and tag them, and to monitor and compare website changes.
  
  
• To SharePoint or Not to SharePoint?
  By James Mullan on Monday, 18th February 2013
  At the end of 2012 SharePoint announced that it was releasing SharePoint 2013. SharePoint 2013 promises much both in terms of content authoring and the social experience, but whether organisations choose to upgrade to the latest version of the application will depend on many factors.
  
  
• Why You Should Take Time Out from Technology
  By James Mullan on Thursday, 14th February 2013
  James Mullan has written two posts recently which looked at some of the issues caused by our lives being dominated by digital activities. Now he's stumbled across a new, yet related, term called "technostress". The question is, are you suffering from technostress and, if so, what can you do about it?
  
  
• FreePint Report: CODiE Finalists - Best Science & Technology Information Solution
  Published on Tuesday, 12th February 2013
  Three products were named to the final round for the CODiE category of Best Science and Technology Information Solution. All three demonstrate understanding of the workflow and content needs of researchers that require scientific information. FreePint reviewers provide a good look at Safari Books Online, Udini from ProQuest and Infotrieve's Mobile Library Rx. Only one can take the CODiE, but all three deserve kudos for excellence.
  
  
• Sorry Bosses - You Can't Shut Down Twitter
  By Tim Buckley Owen on Tuesday, 12th February 2013
  Management's ill-considered reaction to rogue tweets by staff at HMV indicates how far many bosses still have to go in understanding social media. Twitter's acquisition of Bluefin Labs, alongside its acknowledgement of recent security breaches, show how high the stakes can be, yet Gartner suggests that management still needs to learn how to deal with issues such as exploiting internal networks or getting to grips with social media-based identity and access management. Nevertheless, a recent report from Weber Shandwick suggests that chief executives are becoming more social, and it offers some tips from which information professionals could profit.
  
  
• Product Review of Key Note: Executive Summary
  By Andrew Grave on Monday, 11th February 2013
  Key Note has a single web platform through which it delivers its services. Until recently, these were just its well-known Market Reports. In the last three years, it has added Business Ratio Reports, credit reports, Companies House filings, a list generator tool and, this January, a company benchmarking tool. In this executive summary, Andrew Grave outlines the highlights of FreePint's first review of the product.
  
  
• FreePint Report: Product Review of Key Note
  Published on Monday, 11th February 2013
  Best known as a market intelligence source, Key Note now provides company information through Companies House filings. Andrew Grave provides an in-depth report of the product and its evolution.
  
  
• Key Note: Introduction and FreePint's View
  By Andrew Grave on Monday, 11th February 2013
  Best known as a market intelligence source, Key Note now provides company information through Companies House filings. Andrew Grave provides an in-depth report of the product and its evolution.
  
  
• Legal Knowledge Management Blossoms in 2013
  By James Mullan on Friday, 8th February 2013
  The legal sector has a long tradition of having well-established knowledge management strategies, so it came as no surprise when I read a discussion on LinkedIn about the "Top 3 KM trends in 2013". So what are the trends and issues that knowledge managers in this sector should tackle, asks James Mullan.
  
  
• Mini Review: Safari Books Online
  By Yulia Aspinall on Friday, 8th February 2013
  Electronic reference materials such as ebooks and videos can present businesses with a time, cost efficient and environmentally friendly way to keep up-to-date with business and technology developments. Yulia Aspinall reviews Safari Books Online, a comprehensive digital library designed to help business, creative and technology professionals to easily access information relevant to their business and career.
  
  
• Big Data Creates New Opportunities for Collaboration
  By James Mullan on Thursday, 7th February 2013
  James Mullan has previously written about how big data provides opportunities for information professionals who manage intranets. This post looks at some of the challenges and opportunities for organisations which manage and use big data and how such data can provide valuable insights into collaboration and communication.
  
  
• Decimate Your 'To Do List': Get Things Done
  By Jo Alcock on Thursday, 7th February 2013
  This article provides an introduction to David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. It discusses each of the five stages in the GTD process, and provides tips to help you integrate the system into your workflow to improve your productivity.
  
  
• ... More ...

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• Overcoming the Distance Divide: Moving Instruction from Classroom to e-Classroom
  Begin to move from classroom to e-classroom with an exploration of student-centered distance learning principles... | Organiser: FreePint Webinars | Date: 26 Feb 2013 | Country: Online/webinar
  
  
• SLA Europe - Essential Apps and Websites Event
  Selection of essential apps and websites that all modern information professionals should know about. | Organiser: SLA Europe Events Team | Date: 19 Mar 2013 | Country: United Kingdom
  
  

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