Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

The Too Much Information problem is certainly one where a good reference librarian can make a difference. Having a quick place that you can go to that not only has information on a topic, but actually categorizes the information as introductory (with links back to topics that are prerequisites to understanding the current topics), advanced, or related can be a big time saver. Often I find that when I'm searching for information on how to do something that I don't have much background in, half of my time is spent doing wide-ranging searches just to build up my jargon vocabulary to the point that I can do a good search.

Somewhere like Wikipedia can be very useful in handling this problem, but as you hit more esoteric subjects... Well, it's still likely that Wikipedia will cover them. Still, that is not always the case.