Dealing with Information Overload (Part II)

Last time I talked about Dan Messer’s great post on Dealing with Information Overload.  To recap, Dan says don’t try and don’t stress about not trying because it’s very likely that even if you “miss” something, you’re not really going to miss it or you’re going to find out about it in another way.  I talked about how in my past life (and sometimes currently) I’d provide advice on how leadership could make staying on top of their subject matters more manageable. 

Now I’m going to talk about why that doesn’t work for the embedded librarian.

I’ll admit to a little obsessiveness when it comes to checking my feed reader.  Some people obsessively check their email and texts.  For me it’s Google Reader.  I look at everything.  The more the better.  I don’t necessarily read it, but I want to review it.  I want to be Lucius Fox standing in front of a huge interactive display monitoring everything like in The Dark Knight. 

I make my trade as an information broker.  I’m paid to obsess over catching snippets of competitive intelligence that helps my masters obtain a business advantage.  Because in business and war, having key intelligence before the competition is critical for success.  Even the smallest bit of arcanum helps clients out. 

In the business world, I think one of the most influential roles a librarian, especially an embedded librarian, can play is that of curator/filter.  The beauty is, as search experts, embedded librarians know how to aggregate and filter the information much, much faster than the average mortal. 

This is where my last piece of advice to leadership holds for all my clients: “rely on your librarian.”  Yes it’s self-serving and mercenary.  That’s the point.

Dealing with Information Overload (Part I)

Dealing with Information Overload by Dan Messer (The Cyberpunk Librarian)

When I was part of a traditional library setting, I was sometimes asked to help managers deal with information overload, particularly when it came to keeping up on information in their subject field or the field which was important to the area of the business they governed.  I knew these people weren’t going to have a lot of time on their hands to truly be the subject matter experts they wanted to be.  (And occasionally, I’ll still get this question.) So my answer was similar to Dan’s in his post:

Don’t try.  And don’t stress about not being able to absorb everything because it’s impossible.

There are just too many sources of information to keep track of.  At certain levels of the organization, it’s more important to have a general idea of major news than trying to process all of it.  Instead, here’s what I’d advise:

• Choose 1 print or online newspaper to scan every day.  Just scanning the headlines can be useful to keeping information on the intellectual radar.
• Choose 1 magazine to scan on a regular basis that relates to the subject matter topic for deeper reading engagement.
• Choose 1 blog to scan daily.  Blogs are a great way to get a perspective slightly off what the mainstream media is saying and they are often quick to read.
• Choose 1 pop culture source to check in with on a semi-regular basis.  Yes, I actually recommended US Weekly and People to executives.  You’d be surprised on how often the material in these sources ends up as cocktail party fodder.  Additionally, items that may seem silly and faddish may also end up influencing business.  (Example: video games.)   
• Rely on your network of friends and colleagues to feed you information of interest.  You can’t watch everything, but your friends will probably send you items they know you are interested in when they see them. 
• Rely on your librarian as a curator.  This is where I’d often pimp my services to set up alerts for clients on topics of importance to them. 

I’d also provide them with a list reliable sources that would help get them started, although many people often already had their favorites.  And I’d show them how to set up a feed reader, but I doubt many of them did.  (In my opinion, most feed readers are not intuitive to set up and most of these folks didn’t have that much interest in learning new technology.) 

I thought this was a pretty good strategy both for helping clients keep up-to-date on pertinent happenings, as well as make it more manageable.  What strategies have you tried to help your clients deal with information overload?

Next time… why this doesn’t work for embedded librarians. 

Reevaluating the Role of the Research Librarian

Reevaluating the Role of the Research Librarian by Rya Ben-Shir & Alexander Feng

 

Great article about what librarian can do to help their clients.  What I think is crucially important is that this was not published in a library journal, but instead on a pharma/IT site.  Librarians are often guilty (myself certainly included) of telling each other how great we are, but not everyone else.  Articles like this put our value in front of the people we serve. 

Some of the parts I especially liked…

• Quoting a scientist they interview: “When our research librarians were all eliminated, as many departments as could found a way to convert an open position to hang on to at least one of them for their own group. We became the haves and the have nots… I would not work without a research library function again, if I could help it.”  How I wish the organization I worked for had made this epiphany.
• A research librarian will ask the right questions—even the ones no one has thought to ask—and knows which databases and resources will yield the most objective and complete information to advance key projects, and place that information into context.  Other people I’ve featured on the blog have written about how important the reference interview is and we see it again here. 
• Research librarians bring out the best in the skills of others. They encourage the team to freely share information among themselves, and more importantly, test their ideas and hypotheses against the world of scientific and business information.   
• Of course, anyone can surf the Web’s limitless free information. But that takes time, which for most researchers is in short supply. 
• A research librarian is able to select and expertly research the most authoritative, objective information sources. Yeah, we’re badass like that. 
• If your organization is willing to subject all of your investment of time, funding, and hard work to the vagaries of risk and failure, then surfing through oceans of un-vetted information on the Internet is fine. Ouch… but true. 

Being a “Really Useful” Embedded Library

My kids watch a lot of Thomas & Friends.  For those of you not familiar with it, it’s a children’s show that features talking steam engines trying to be good and useful people… er, anthropomorphic trains.   The trains are always trying to be “really useful engines” (i.e. taking on important jobs that make them feel good and demonstrating that to the owner of the train yard). 

A new initiative kicked off at the company I work for and pretty heavily involves the department I support.  A lot of our people have been drawn off normal assignments to participate.  I wasn’t chosen.  And while it’s an ego blow, I really don’t have the skills the project needs and that’s ok.  Still… I’m not feeling like a “really useful engine.”  As an embedded librarian, my work often doesn’t engage in the day to day work necessary to complete projects like this.  However, I’m wondering what will happen with my job since it’s not critical to this initiative. Because if you’re not a “really useful engine” in Corporate America, your job is in danger. 

So I’ve been thinking about ways to manipulate the situation participate using the skills that I’m good at.  I think there might still be a place for what I do because:

I inform what the teams completing the work are trying to do, not what they are doing. 

Let me explain. 

I don’t (and probably will never) affect the daily work of teams I support.   It’s highly technical and it’s not my role.  However, hopefully what my work does is steer their thoughts and strategy about the final shape that daily work builds up to.  The work I do guides the form of the final product.

Or at least that’s what’s I keep telling myself to make myself feel like a “really useful embedded librarian…” 

Packaging Research

Sometimes you arrive late to the party.  I had another minor epiphany this week that I should have had years ago.

I’ve been struggling with how to do more forward looking research.  Ideally, my work is supposed to be balanced between reactive requests for information and proactive prognosticating on the future of technology.  The majority of my time, however, is spent being reactive.  It’s actually kind of difficult to do the forward looking work.  By the time I clear out time to research and write a white paper, I often have another three requests which pull me mentally away from thinking about the future.  The distraction creates inefficiency because by the time I’m able to return to the white paper, I have to mentally review the nuances of the topic that I was going to write about. 

The solution, which I should have thought of long before now, is a blog.  Blogs are of lengths that are reasonably fast to produce while still infusing commentary and insight.  And in many cases, the topics I’d like to cover may not lend themselves to the length and rigor reserved for a white paper.   I’m not sure why I haven’t thought about it before now (especially since I do quite a bit of research on social media).  A new colleague in a similar position in another area of the company actually pointed out the solution to me.  Packaging up my intellectual epiphanies and information discoveries in small chunks makes perfect sense for the future oriented work I should be doing.