★ VRM and Information Management

So I’m a wee bit late posting this, but I was working on a poster presentation for this year’s IA Summit when I came across the notes I took for my presentation at InfoCamp Seattle 2012. It’s now posted here for internet posterity.

InfoCamp intro to VRM (PDF)

I thought this might be interesting for two reasons. First, I think the central message of the presentation is still relevant: information management professionals should be at the forefront of thinking about how people identify, store, and manage their own data in a VRM-enabled world. The PDF roughs out the main ideas of VRM and suggests how information management professionals might contribute to this emerging movement.

(Update 3-22-13: Holy smokes! I didn’t realize that Tracy Wolfe, the Mod Librarian, posted a nice writeup of this presentation back in October. I really need to start paying attention to this whole internet thing. I hear it’s really taking off.)

Secondly, (and a bit more prosaically) I drafted these notes in Scapple, an awfully interesting brainstorming program under development at Literature and Latte (the fine folks who make Scrivener). Scapple basically lets you enter free-form bits of text on a canvas of whatever size you choose. You can move the bits around to regroup them, and you can drag one text bit over another to relate the two with a dotted line. It was truly one of the best brainstorming experiences I’ve had on a computer. I ended up using the Scapple document as both my presenter notes and my presentation slide.

If you’re like me and you’re really not into the linear process of outlining, but you still want to do something like outlining on a computer, I encourage you to give Scapple a try. It’s free for a limited time while in Beta. But watch out: you might get hooked.