The Information Innovation Exchange is a blog in development under the publishship and editorship of Rachel E. Watstein, Learning and Knowledge at IBM and a MSLIS degree graduate of the Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Long Island University.
The core of the Information Innovation Exchange are 20 to 40 weekly posts with annotated links to news in the information and innovation areas selected after a thorough evaluation process involving daily reviews of hundreds of items from high-quality sources including online and print resources, databases, lists and rankings, and multimedia. Additionally, periodically there is original content of observations about news in the information and innovation with authors coming from within Long Island University (faculty, administrators and students), scholars outside of LIU and industry experts.
The core areas of focus for the Information Innovation Exchange includes:
- Industry Updates (hardware, software, applications including search and web 2.0-oriented applications)
- Usability (user experience, forms of measurement)
- Digitization and Copyright/Intellectual Property
- Library-Related Information and Techniques
- Education/Learning/Research
Within the above core areas, there are deeper dives into such things as:
- The Process of Making Innovations
- The Process of Applications of Innovations
- The Process of Introducing Innovations
- The Marketing of Innovations
- The History Behind Changes which Drives Innovations
- Cultural Trends and Societal Aspects Affected by the Innovations
Since information and innovation are such fluid topics, at times posts go beyond the core focus into deeper dives to engage the user in more of a “discovery” mode.
The Information Innovation Exchange makes extensive use of tags and classification schemes to enable it to act as a central searchable repository. A deep archive of all previous posts is easily searchable via an internal search engine. A tag cloud visibly shows all tags being used as well as which tags are the most prominent via the font size of the wording of the tag. By clicking on a tag in the tag cloud, the user is brought to all items classified with that tag. The blog also classifies all posts by day, thus a user can see all items posted on a particular day.
All posts are interactive allowing readers to comment on posts as well as allowing readers print posts and to email posts to colleagues. Several RSS feeds and emails of highlighted posts compliment the blog in order to “push” information to users.
Relevant metadata is incorporated within the Information Innovation Exchange coupled by the blog’s submission to the major search engines so users outside of the LIU arena are pulled in via search engines as well as relevant linkages.
The base technical platform for the Information Innovation Exchange blog is WordPress, a highly acclaimed blogging application. The layout is customized to include a core blogging page as well as an “About Us” type of page and an interactive email form. 60 posts will be visible on one page by scrolling, thus allowing for all posts of one week to be on one central page.
