Blog - Improve your Current Awareness Strategy

None of us like to admit that we don’t know the answer to something. Yet, it can be incredibly frustrating (and, at times, a great hindrance) when others also fail to do so. In the professions, where the entire sector has been built upon the concept of knowing what your clients do not, the propensity to not admit your lack of knowledge is even higher. (1)

For Librarians and Information Specialists, efficiency is absolutely paramount. Budget cuts (that I’m sure we’re all tired of hearing about by now) combined with a lack of understanding of the work and value of the library by decision makers only exasperates this.

We all know that to succeed at work one must be constantly innovating - keeping up with the latest technologies, aware of the freshest trends, and looking forward to what might be coming in the future. If we are not innovating we are stagnating.

As technologies develop further, transport links make our world seem smaller and global business transactions become the norm, we are seeing more and more dispersed and distributed teams come into being. Writing for AALL, Doug Southard speaks of fifteen Researchers, located in nine different offices across four different countries at law firm WilmerHale, showing just how geographies and time differences seem to no longer be a boundary when it comes to international business.

For us, AALL drew to a close with a discussion between two prominent leaders in the Law Librarian community - Jean O’Grady, Senior Director of Research & Knowledge Services at DLA Piper LLP and founder of Dewey B Strategic, and John DiGilio, Senior Director of Research & Intelligence at LibSource and founder of On Firmer Ground. Up for discussion was the subject of “disruptunity” and the legal research revolution - a more topical theme there cannot be.

Mid-July can only mean one thing - time for AALL! Last week saw 1400 Law Librarians descend on my former home of Chicago for 2016’s American Association of Law Librarians Conference. With such a packed sessions program and a busy booth, choosing which talk to attend was a challenge enough in itself but a happy one to have. Over the coming weeks we’ll be bringing you our recaps and reviews, featuring the best of AALL, meaning that even if you couldn’t make it to Chicago you won’t miss out (too much).

On the banks of Lake Michigan sits the windy city, home to Barack Obama, Harrison Ford and, for a weekend this July, a lot of Librarians. Renowned for its food and architecture, Chicago plays host to this year’s American Association of Law Libraries Conference, taking place at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. Our very own Marketing Manager Nico Watson lived in Chicago for six years, so we sat down and grilled him for all his local tips to give you your best AALL experience yet.

Every minute, Google receives over 4,000,000 search queries, and email users send 204,000,000 messages. To say that we are living in an age of information overload where we are bombarded by white noise is, quite frankly, an understatement - but I’m sure you’ve heard all that before. What we’re more concerned about here is the evolution of content curation to enable Librarians to rise above this sea of information.

Librarians are facing an explosion of new technology resources, leading to pressure to move away from traditional operation practices into a fresh wave of innovation, all coupled with tighter budgets and financial pressures. To quote Maria Collins, in her foreword to The Librarian’s Guide to Negotiation: “This constant flux within the library environment makes it ripe for negotiation. With each negotiation, a Librarian gains an opportunity to influence change”.

There’s no rest for the wicked, or so the saying goes. That’s certainly true for us here at Linex, as soon as BIALL finished Matthew - our CEO - and I were on a plane bound for Philadelphia and SLA, excited to catch up with our US colleagues. We were looking forward to reacquainting ourselves with a conference full of such a broad range of attendees - from the Knowledge Manager to the Information Analyst - and SLA certainly didn’t disappoint.