Confession time.  When I walk into the room where we hold OOM meetings, I am on Twitter.  I start from the moment I leave my office (or the archive, depending on where I’ve spent my morning) and I read it until either Michael or Lauren comes in and we chat.  Now, knowing that I have the coolest job which I love and that all of my bosses read my blog posts, why would I confess that?  Because Twitter is one of the ways that I manage my flow of information. 

Many people have declared this a new golden age of information.  Information has never been easier to obtain.  (That’s something our CEO and Chairman, Dick Robinson, talks about in our Reading Bill of Rights.) There is just so much of it — but is there too much?  The folks at Salon.com asked this very question in their article entitled Are We on Information Overload?

After reading this article, I looked around the table at my fellow OOMers, all information professionals in varying definitions and thought, is anyone else overwhelmed?

The other thing I understand all too well?  It is not cool to admit it if you are.

I organize, manage, cultivate, and disseminate information for a living.  I think about how other people will search to fulfill their information needs.  I am surrounded by people who do the exact same thing every day within not only Scholastic but my profession at large.  I can’t be the only one who gets overwhelmed.  What I have been given, however, are the advanced tools on how to manage my personal flow of information (and not just from library school, though it was invaluable).  The idea of using Twitter to help me with what I write for OOM came from Ivy and Morgan in the “social media university” course they teach Scholastic employees.  (Thanks, guys!)  Regardless of the skills I have cultivated, it can be overwhelming.

We are starting a new series on how to sort through all of the information streaming into our lives every day. As always, we want to hear from you. 

• Do you feel overwhelmed by information? 
• Do you ever just tune out everything to get a little peace and quiet? 
• What ways do you keep up with and organize the information you read?

In this series, we’re going to be talking to parenting and education experts about information overload, how to help kids deal with it, and of course, how we can deal with it, too. We can’t wait to hear from you.

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