Blog - Improve your Current Awareness Strategy

This post has come out of an initiative to improve communications with our clients here at Vable. As a client you need to talk to us, and we want to make it as easy as possible. After all, everyone values an organisation with which they can communicate promptly and efficiently.

August doesn’t mean holidays for many library and information services. All professional service providers - banks, accountancy, consultancy, and law firms - as well as educational establishments will be preparing inductions and training for September’s new starters. So how can we ensure that end-users are equipped with the right research skills to carry out their work?

This is the fourth in our BIALL 2018 Conference series, and I can recommend you read it in conjunction with our other piece on agile working. Vable uses agile methodology to manage workflow, and it requires a mental shift if you are accustomed to a more traditional workplace. The more we collaborate and share experiences, we can make new ways of working possible in a corporate/legal library environment.

At Vable we believe that business skills for librarians are as essential as research skills. Through conferences and workshops together we can learn from each other and share best practice. Practical, immediately applicable sessions are always the most popular events at BIALL, and Claire Fox’s session was full. She focused on business planning and how we can assist our organisations in ensuring future success.

These notes are taken from a most satisfying CLSIG event with Alex G Smith. It was a timely wake up call for how machine learning is being perceived; instead of the marauding AI robots of horror movies, it should be the thought of messy misused data keeping us up at night. Above all it confirmed what most of us already know; that information professionals have been designing and providing ‘AI’ for years. Many things currently being touted as such are nothing more than data and algorithms. Analytics and automatic documentation is not AI.

Nothing should be read in isolation. As I was putting together notes from Robert’s recent webinar, this article about busy managing partners caught my eye. It said ‘[i]n 2018, the legal industry has more communication channels than we did even five years ago. Some are high in quality. I worry, however, that our communication channels are splintering the industry into sharper and more brittle factions.

This is the second in a series of blog posts which will come out of the recent BIALL conference in Birmingham. There were a couple of sessions which demonstrated that law firms and libraries are on the same page when it comes to working agile. But with a twist...

This is the first in a series of blog posts which will come out of the recent BIALL conference in Birmingham. The theme of ‘Designing our Future’ has never felt so full of possibility and excitement as we head into the third decade of this century. The session on ‘the career revolution’ spoke to us all in a particular way; a show of hands demonstrated that none of us had been unaffected by changes in the sector. No more is there such a thing as a job for life.

As an information professional, you’re essentially managing the current awareness component of the email inboxes of your entire organisation. It’s no easy task - but at least you can be grateful that you probably deal with more digital sources than hard copies.

As information professionals we play important roles in their organizations’ competitive intelligence program, but often neglect applying that same rigor to our own information environments. Just like others in our organizations, librarians must understand precisely who their competition is, the library “owned” products and services provided to a client base, the words and mechanisms employed to persuade prospective clients, the degree of product/service satisfaction, and most importantly, the value your clients place on each.