This week’s thing is tools to keep up-to-date and aware of things going on in the library and information world – sounds great.
I joined Twitter after I signed up for Library Camp Leeds, but still haven’t made full use of it. Speaking to other Twitter users at Library Camp convinced me that it was a useful tool for professional development, networking and staying up-to-date. I also felt that it was important to get to grips with Twitter, as a growing number of library users are Twitter users. On the downside, I find 140 characters restrictive!
RSS
I worked with RSS feeds in my first library job, which was in an NHS library where RSS feeds were used for current awareness. I used Bloglines, which I loved, and I found it very easy to navigate and to organise saved blog posts. The layout and approach are very different now that it has been taken over by Merchant Circle and it just doesn’t do what I want it to. I set up a Google Reader account, but I don’t find it suited my purposes and I got frustrated with it and gave up. At the moment I monitor feeds on my laptop through the browser and save anything I want to revisit as a link. This kind of works for me, but isn’t half as useful as the set-up I had with Bloglines was. There are lots of other aggregators out there, so I may have to spend some time finding the right one to suit my needs. Any suggestions would be welcome!
Storify
Storify is something that I hadn’t heard of until today. It looks interesting, but I’m not seeing any immediate uses for it within my day-to-day work, so I’m going to leave it for the time being, along with Scoop.it Paper.li and Pulse News and revisit these things as I need to.
At the moment, the tool I find to be most useful is RSS feeds, and the main reason I like them so much is that I can look at them in my own time, can organise them and can save them for when I want to. I can see that Twitter has great potential and I’m investigating ways to make it work for me, but the hardest part for me is keeping up-to date with it and the worry that I’m going to miss something important on there!
Bound to Unravel 