INFOdocket and FullTextReports

Gary Price alerts me.

I’ve been following his work as editor of ResourceShelf for more than ten years   Now, he and his scouting and writing partner Shirl Kennedy, continue to feed me tasty information leads, in two new information spaces:  INFOdocket and FullTextReports

Still shy of two-months old, these prodigious infant sites are engaged in some big-time walking and talking and sharing.

The parents here are two librarians, who transport their traditional selection and evaluation skills to this new web-taming enterprise.

For instance, their growing, hand-selected guide on resources relating to the disaster in Japan is different from the other guides.

Says Gary,

as we build it, we are not pulling everything everyone is putting in their lists of resources.  We are leading people to the stuff the media is using. The first materials we selected were links to English language news sources in Japan and real-time alerts coming from Tokyo Electric Power Company.  Japan’s NHK Television, presents the national broadcast 24 hours a day in English. You simply couldn’t get to this content a few years ago.  And now, you can carry it around on your iPhone.  We allow our readers to go directly to the source.  To get quickly to the reports.  And we try to post them within a day or two of their release. There’s a lot of great material out there that is free, but if it takes forever to find it, you might as well forget about.  If we can help people take full advantage of the free stuff, we’re providing a very important service.

The two sister sites are,

INFOdocket, a blog rich in the news of the information and news industries.  It’s a site I now rely on to discover new search tools and portals and resources to share with content area teachers.  Just today at INFOdocket, I discovered the real-time search tool Topsy and its new realtime video search and NOAA’s Significant Earthquake Database.  Subscribe to the INFOdocket RSS feed

for web resources; reference material we find interesting (lists, rankings, infographics, and factbooks, and other materials); web search tips; relevant news items from the information industry and library community; and some occasional commentary.

FullTextReports, searchable by tag/keyword or subject or geographical area.  The site now feeds my need for new, big, fat, white-paper-type content from universities, the private sector, interest groups, professional societies, research institutes, think tanks, and more.  It’s not for everyone here at our high school, but it has already come in handy for our honors students, for our seniors and their very focused culminating research projects, and for our teachers’ planning and  research.  To give you a bit of the fulltext flavor, over the past couple days, Gary and Shirl’s many FullTextReports discoveries included Where are the best opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the food system (including the food chain)? (Source: Food Policy) and Building a High Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons From Around the World (Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Subscribe to the FullTextReport RSS feed.

Gary and Shirl plan to update INFOdocket and FullTextReports several times a day, seven days a week.

I look forward to watching these babies grow!

Filed under: research, search tools, social networking, websites