Introduction

Keeping track of particular subjects or areas of interest, and then letting specific library users know about the information that you have found, is not new – it's one of the staples of being an information professional. In ‘the old days’ you may well have e-mailed someone when you had found something new for them, or it might have been information that was squirrelled away and put into the monthly newsletter update. Or you may have decided on a more informal approach, by catching someone when you saw them in the corridor to let them know about the next new thing that they would find interesting.

However, social media – user-generated content – is changing the way in which we let people know what we have found, or to distribute it to specific individuals according to their interests. We have already looked at a few of those in previous chapters – it's easy to create a home or start page widget with a search phrase already in it, so that a user can simply click on it to see the latest information. Alternatively, we can remind our users to look at our bookmark resource in order to find the new content. Those options are useful, of course, but there is a whole raft of other tools that allow us to take this activity to a new social media-enhanced level. Rather than simply link to a resource, tweet it or bookmark it, we are now in a position to pull in an entire story to read, or to allow others to do so. Furthermore, when it comes to finding information that's necessary for each of us to do our own jobs effectively we no longer need to go out and seek the information that we need – the content comes directly to us with very little hard work on our part.

Let the networks take the strain!

One of the questions that I am asked a lot as an internet consultant is ‘How do you keep up to date?’ and it's a very fair question. There is so much information flooding onto the net on a daily basis – or even on a minute-by-minute basis – that it can be hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff and just focus on the really important material.