On being resourced
Tomorrow I’ll be contributing to an Information Services training session at the University of Nottingham for PhD students in Engineering, Medicine and Science. Its theme is ‘keeping up to date’ with resources, and I’ll be presenting how social media might be used to augment the use of database search and alert systems for sourcing formal publications. In particular, I want to emphasise the role various social media can play in accessing and managing more informal genres of academic content, and explore how these emerging practices are challenging the notion of what it means to ‘be resourced.’ I’ve put together a few preliminary slides to help establish context.
I’m particularly pleased to support this session as it is an example of integrating social media practices into core doctoral training programmes; something which I argued for in a recent post.
February 6th, 2013 at 3:29 pm
Thanks Andy for a very useful contribution to our training session. Setting the mechanics of keeping up to date in a practical case study context worked very well and the social media side complemented the other email alert and saved searches mechanisms existent in research databases.
As many of these services also offer RSS technology as a mechanism for keeping up-to-date this dovetailed in nicely with RSS feeds offered by websites (publishers, organisations, professional bodies, blogs etc.) as the tool of choice for tracking and monitoring this type of publishing activity. Social bookmarking, blogging and the usefulness of Twitter for sharing resources/content by ‘word of mouth’ so to speak gave us an altogether different perspective on filtering content through people.
February 6th, 2013 at 8:52 pm
Thanks Alison. It was a nicely balanced session and I was happy to contribute. I hope everyone who attended found it useful.
June 12th, 2013 at 12:46 pm
[…] a recent workshop, I explained how participating in academic-oriented networks (such as through Twitter or Facebook) […]
January 17th, 2014 at 11:20 am
Hi Andy
we are running this session again shortly and are hoping you can contribute again. You generated such a lot of discussion last time its a valued and effective part of our session.
Alison