Managing current awareness in a noisy, pushy world
Keeping up with the latest in the profession (or your particular corner of it) is an important part of professional development. It’s good to know what’s happening across the sector, whether that’s the latest news and relevant product updates or a useful post from another library pro.
But when library professionals are busier than ever, how do you find the time and energy to stay informed without drowning in information overload?
And how do you cut through the noise to find what actually matters for your work, now and in future?
From push to pull information approaches
Information overload can contribute to stress and general feelings of overwhelm which is the last thing anyone needs in this shouty and pushy information world.
To avoid this, we recommend switching to more of a pull than push approach to professional development. By this we mean approaches that give you more control over when and how you engage with information.
This includes approaches like:
- Scheduled browsing – setting aside specific times to review sources rather than constant interruption
- RSS feeds in a reader – you check when convenient, rather than being interrupted by alerts
- Bookmarking/favourites – manually visiting key sources on your own schedule
- Curated newsletters (digest format) – while technically push communications, weekly/monthly digests can be a lot less intrusive than daily alerts
Our recommended approach
This is something we do tend to bang on about. But, in our defence, it’s something that we continually revise and review as new tools develop or our subject requirements shift over time. And the way we’ve found that works the best is using a combination of:
- Filtering and prioritisation – being highly selective about sources
- Digest formats – consolidated summaries rather than individual alerts
- Lower frequency – weekly or fortnightly rather than daily/real-time
- Hierarchical information – scanning headlines first, diving deeper only when relevant
- “Just-in-time” learning – seeking information only when you need it for a specific purpose
RSS to the rescue
We still maintain that RSS is the way to go to create a passive and manageable way to keep up with the latest information in your sector.
Did you know that many versions of Outlook have an RSS Feeds feature? Look for it under File > Options > Advanced.
This means you can subscribe to feeds for library blogs and other RSS-supporting websites and receive updates directly in your Outlook.
But you don’t have to stick with single RSS feeds from each source. If you want to exercise a bit more control over your information feed, there are tools that let you filter out topics that aren’t interesting to you and customise your feed accordingly.
Although it can be tempting to take a ‘more is more’ approach to feeds (we use tools like ReadKit and FreshRSS to curate our fortnightly libraries newsletter), there are always benefits to filtering the information to make sure you’re keeping up with what matters to you and cutting out all the other noise. Information overload is no joke and feed readers, if they’re not well managed, can contribute to this.
So, let’s say (hypothetically, of course) you wanted to keep up with technology in libraries, but you didn’t want to include posts about AI. Or even, that you’re interested in new AI-based search tools, but don’t want to hear about other kinds of vendor updates.
With tools like siftRSS, you can create an RSS feed that excludes or includes keywords in the title or description field to ensure you’re only getting the content that interests you.
RSS to email digests
And if you prefer to receive your information updates directly to your inbox (or you don’t have a Feed Reader app), then there are tools available to convert RSS feeds into a digest email newsletter.
Feedmail is one example of an RSS to email tool, with a decent free tier available.
Admittedly, this is still more of a push notification, but combined with a scheduled time to read your email digests, it can still be manageable and not overwhelming. And that brings us to…
Scheduling your professional development reading – Lowering the frequency
The best way to lower the frequency of information alerts and reduce the feeling of overload is to schedule a regular time to check in with your professional reading and current awareness alerts.
This doesn’t have to be a huge time commitment, just setting aside 15-20 minutes a week can be enough to scroll through your selected information sources and review the latest news and updates.
Start a new current awareness habit
We’ve started sharing our RSS feeds via feeds.libraryskills.io to help identify great blogs and other information sources from the library sector.
This is something that we will keep adding to and refining but we thought it may be useful as a way for others to discover and share library blogs. And we will be adding more topics and more features here to help discover new feeds as well as create your own.
So if there’s a library (or library adjacent) blog that you’re enjoying that we don’t currently include as a source, please let us know.