Catching up on a world of change
5th September 2012

Global events provide a context for observing the scope of change in the information world: Social media was an essential component of coverage of the 2012 London Olympics, unlike the Beijing Olympics only 4 years before. FreePint Reports published this month provide a similar opportunity to step back from the busy desktop and consider the full range of tools that impact how we go about research, news and media monitoring, and gathering intelligence about this world around us.

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What Is Hidden Will Be Revealed
4th September 2012

As researchers, we are continually learning about new tools, exploring new topical areas and finding new sources of information - subscription, free, or otherwise. Traditionally difficult-to-find information is increasingly becoming accessible. 

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FreePint Report: Monitoring and Mining Social Media and News
30th August 2012

The rise of Web 2.0 has opened virtual gold mines of new forms of data that can be mined and analysed for an organisation’s purposes. The days when almost all the sources analysts could rely on were one-way sources, from the creator to the consumer, are over. The articles in this report examine the implications and impacts of this change on organisations, analysts and their work.

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Expanding the borders of information access and analysis
29th August 2012

Twice a year, FreePint publishes a compendium of articles supporting different areas of information work. This report collects six months’ worth of articles tagged with the category of research. Our guest editor Rachel Bates Wilfahrt looks at the spectrum of research topics, with a particular eye to emerging information sources.

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Unique content, big content
28th August 2012

What challenges do unique content and "big content" create for us as information professionals? We take a look at a review of Thomson Innovation, a patent research tool, and rumours of a Dun & Bradstreet sale.

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How Vendors Reach for Excellence in a Changing World
23rd August 2012

We often comment on how information practitioners adapt to a changing world of new tools and technologies influencing their work. Vendors of content products also have to contend with the speedy evolution of their environment, or risk becoming irrelevant. Recent FreePint Reports offer two examples of vendors successfully incorporating new expectations of functionality and content sets. But would buyers and users consider them successful? FreePint also takes on and contributes to industry dialogue on what any of us means by "product excellence".

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Benchmarking on Information Services: Methods and Participants
22nd August 2012

How are information services configured in today's organisations? Who "owns" work relating to information? How do organisations manage and support different priorities with regard to their information strategies? What principles drive spending of content budget? These are large questions in our industry, but they can be answered by conducting one interview at a time. This introductory article explains the background, methodology and respondent pool of FreePint's Benchmarking on Information Services, with more in-depth chapters to be found in the FreePint Subscription.

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Getting to know private equity sources
22nd August 2012

Like many information-intensive industries, the private equity industry offers a range of sources, with a range of price tags -- from free to costly. This is a short version of a longer FreePint Subscription article on the same topic.

The longer article provides more detail on specific suppliers and how to vet them; identifying the best tool for a particular task; and developing skills for creative approaches to PE research. FreePint Subscribers can login to view the article now.

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Digging into the information mine
21st August 2012

Scott Brown looks at the themes of information mining. The featured articles look at the reality of working with big data; mining competitive information in social tools; information "scent"; and plagiarism.

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Visualising Search Results in Thomson Innovation
21st August 2012

When researching a full review of Thomson Innovation, David Whelan was most impressed with the innovative data visualisation tools incorporated into the product to help researchers make sense more quickly of large and complex results. This brief article provides a taste of the analysis included in the full FreePint Report: Product Review of Thomson Innovation.

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