Digging Deeper into Staff Size
5th September 2012

Following high-level discussion of staff sizes for information services and configuration of those services, we take a closer look at the data from 20 interviews and analyse them in terms of average and median staff sizes, average and median numbers of supported staff, and FTEs in information services as a percentage of supported staff. A number of distinctions by tiers emerge as well as industry differences.

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"Just a few moments of electronic idiocy"
4th September 2012

When is it safe to rely on big data and automated analytics, and when should you trust to your insights? Hopefully we can learn a lesson from Knight Capital, which admitted that it had lost millions at the start of just one day’s trading because new software had sent into the market a number of erroneous orders.

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Putting information on the map
3rd September 2012

According to an article in Technology Review earlier this year, we are very much in the midst of the “indoor positioning era”.  GPS has permeated its way in into our day-to-day lives by allowing us to effectively navigate and add value to the outside physical space.  It was inevitable that at some point someone would ask the question: why can’t we do the same with indoor space?

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Mendeley's app platform - a vindication of open access data?
31st August 2012

Mendeley, the self-styled “Wikipedia for academic data” also described as “science’s iTunes”, has recently reached a milestone, according to the company’s blog. The crowd-sourced database, containing around 65 million scientific papers, was set up to liberate research from behind entrenched paywalls. Over 100 million queries per month now come from 240 different apps, with a sharp increase between January and July this year.

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FreePint Report: Information Services Management Monthly Update (August 2012)
30th August 2012

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Winning the social media Olympics
30th August 2012

With the Olympic Games just finished and the Paralympics just starting, it would seem remiss to not take a look at the big winners and losers at what are being described as the first social media Olympics. So which social media tools won gold, silver and bronze at London 2012, and what were some of the lessons learnt?

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FreePint Report: Monitoring and Mining Social Media and News
29th August 2012

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Paywalls and intelligence gathering
29th August 2012

Paywalls have implications for those involved in press monitoring and intelligence gathering. 10 years ago it was possible for users to search comprehensively across content using a single third-party service, but what has changed?

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FreePint Report: Research - Part 1 (Information Practice)
28th August 2012

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FreePint Report: Research - Part 2 (Information Content)
28th August 2012

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