Keeping Up and Keeping Ahead: A Strategic Approach for Library Leaders
Steven Bell, Philadelphia University
Began with a poll about how kept up everyone was, how much time people spend keeping up, etc.
Bell talked about a survey, and I really wish I knew when he did it. I think he said, but I got a phone call as he introduced the topic. At the time, most people kept up with journals, conferences, and colleagues. Not much with blogs or websites. He referenced that it was a while ago, so it might have changed.
He talked about just fitting things into your routine. Web sites are easy, print is good while at the desk or eating.
There was a really big push to read outside the library literature (which I’m a big fan of). Education, technology, business, marketing, subject area literature can all be useful in keeping up.
Pointed out that librarianship is a complex field, so there are a number of fields that would be important to stay current in: higher ed, internet searching, web development, distance ed, marketing, computer technology, etc.
Keeping up technologies include e-newsletters, websites (with change detection), TOC/search journal alerts, aggregators, alert services, organizing what you find.
If you’d like to try website change detection you can do that through infominder (cost is about 25 dollars a year) or Watch That Page (free).
An audience member suggested using MailBucket to have emails redirected to RSS. I need to try this out!!
Traditional time saving tools were discussed like email filtering for frequent email/updates, news aggregators, etc.
Top 5
- LIS News
- Resource Shelf
- Chronicle
- University Business E-Business Report
- Peter Scott’s Library Blog
- (Also Inside Higher Ed)
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Comments 1
Thank you for mentioning InfoMinder. There is a version (25 pages) available for $9/year. There is a free trial for users to evaluate the product against the free version. Then they can decide whether the small price is worth it.
Posted 27 Apr 2006 at 10:34 am ¶Post a Comment