Blog - Improve your Current Awareness Strategy

Working directly with news content can feel overwhelming due to the sheer quantity of information. As such, two recent (unrelated) conversations struck a chord when they imagined the abstract concept of information flow using ‘firefighting’ imagery*. Here I revisit some ideas about how information people - and content providers - act as intermediaries to help their end-users avoid the information deluge.

A quick LinkedIn search reveals that there are 158,455 Librarians, 71,224 Information Officers and 10,479 Knowledge Managers on the professional networking site. Whilst industries such as legal and academic tend to have more Librarians, and accounting and banking more Information Professionals, we are seeing a growing trend of library job titles shifting away from the traditional Librarian, towards a broader information role.

Whereas the world historically used to depend on visible capital in the form of land and labour, as economies have developed we see ourselves moving over to a knowledge economy (1). We are less concerned with what we have and instead think more about how we use it.

For lawyers as for everyone, information is more readily available than ever before. But it has also never been more difficult to locate that one vital piece of information that will transform a lawyer’s interaction with their client.

Earlier this month we were lucky enough to attend the first BIALL (British & Irish Association of Law Librarians) Knowledge Management Group Event kindly hosted by Shearman & Sterling at their London offices. The key speaker for the lunchtime discussion was Jane Bradbury, currently Slaughter & May’s Head of Knowledge and Information, who gave an inspirational and engaging lecture exploring "An Evolving Landscape: From Information Gatekeeper to Knowledge Professional”.

British company C24 Ltd have publishes a short write paper about business intelligence:

PKM was the subject of the latest SLA GA chapter luncheon, held on Oct. 22nd at the lovely new Hyatt Fork & Juniper. In particular we were offered a presentation by Crystal Renfro and Mary Axford who write the blog http://www.academicpkm.org

Another session I attended at the ILTA 2014 conference was Ways To Succeed or Screw Up Your Legal Tech Deployments, and while there were several points of interest in this panel discussion, I want to point to one in particular.

A little bit of wordplay does a body good. I am, of course, referring to the ILTA 2014 session tagged as #INFO06: Content-ment: One Step Beyond Content Aggregation.