Blog - Improve your Current Awareness Strategy

I had the privilege to speak at the KMInsight conference recently and thought that it would be helpful to publish an excerpt from my presentation. My overall theme was ‘how can we use tech to empower the legal librarian role and unlock value’ and my 3 case studies illustrated some of the challenges that organisations are facing due to information overload.

Maintaining and building trust with end-users remains an important issue for information professionals so this is my focus here. In my role at Vable I regularly share information so I need to know that my sources are reliable, trustworthy and well researched. The conference was an excellent opportunity to discuss ‘trusting one’s judgment’ in the face of a growing amount of 'fake news'.

Content curation has been the epitome of cool for some time. From collections of fashion and literature, to online shopping and YouTube channels, anyone can curate anything. If the curator is an influencer, they can disrupt traditional marketplaces. For instance, the art world once believed that collectors would never buy paintings based on an online image.

As the Vable team look forward to an exciting new year of current awareness and premium news aggregation developments, we take a brief look back over our most popular 2018 blog posts. It was an exciting year when information awareness went mainstream from the GDPR implementation, as well as the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The information industry has never been more aware of the importance of current awareness provision. Keeping up to date with news, markets, clients, and industries is central to the success of all types of organisations - from legal, financial services, health, or the third sector. Information and research services, or equivalent, are generally responsible for managing and delivering accurate, reliable, and targeted updates for their end-users.

We tend to think of fake news¹ as a modern problem, thanks to the increased focus on fake news generated by events like the 2016 American presidential election. But the spread of misinformation is a concern that dates back much further. In 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote,² “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.”

I have two goals for this blog post, dear reader: to persuade librarians who are already tweeting to join a community using #iamalibrarian and to persuade librarians who are not on Twitter to at least read the tweets ofthis community.

Those social media fans amongst you may well recognise the hashtag in the title of this post - #iamalibrarian. Exploring this feed on Twitter enables you to see a small snapshot of the lives of Librarians across the globe, certainly fascinating reading in such a varied and often misunderstood profession.

In an environment so fast-paced as the information sector it’s all too easy to get caught up in your day-to-day, leaving little time to focus on your own professional development. For Information Professionals, the value and importance of information sharing is clear - so be sure to do it for yourself too!

This is how Ev Williams, one of its founders, describes Twitter, taking its impact slightly beyond “social media” or “microblog”. Bearing in mind this definition: what do we make of Twitter as a research tool?

There is somewhat of an oxymoron in this title. Social Media - as the title suggests - is public and far-reaching. "Internal" automatically puts limits on the reach of a message. Many of us use social media tools precisely for this vast reach, so we can learn from others, network and hold virtual conversations about topics of interest. All of which we want to do within our organisations as well.