Do you constantly feel that you are reinventing the wheel in your FUMSI practice? I hold up my hands and will admit to 'a few' deja vu moments...but I know that I am not alone.
With this in mind I am delighted that the next two issues of the Use practice area will be devoted to tips on making better use of work we have already done. Scott Brown takes us on this two-part journey. In part 1 he interviews information practitioners about how they repurpose, recycle and modularise information. He distils down and offers up tips and ideas to help in our daily and long term work efforts. The upshot - be prepared to work more efficiently and effectively to show your true value.
Joanna Ptolomey
Part 1: 'Retreading', not Reinventing, the Wheel: How info pros repurpose content for increased efficiency and visibility
Scott Brown
As information professionals, we've all breathed a sigh of relief on completing a big research project, presentation or training. But once it's over, does that major presentation sink into the oblivion of your file folders, never to be seen again? Do the materials from the training course move further back in your file cabinet, only to be purged next time you move offices? When you move on to the next big project, do you feel like you're reinventing the wheel?
I interviewed five librarians and information professionals working in corporate settings about repurposing their work - their notes, presentations, marketing and research. They shared simple yet innovative ways to reuse and extend the value of their work and all of them reminded me that, as an information professional, there are many ways I can avoid reinventing the wheel - perhaps by 'retreading' some of the work I've already done.
Repurposing your own, and your client's, research
Emily Lanka of the Mountain States Employers Council finds that she can often reuse smaller research project results for larger competitive projects. She will conduct research on individual companies or offerings, and leverage those results for more in-depth competitive projects. She says 'I sometimes think that I'll never need some of these results ever again. But the information from these small requests - even asking how many companies might be in a city - often times comes in handy in other situations'
Marcia (Marcy) Rodney of Ball Aerospace says that librarians leverage company or technical research conducted in the past five years for new requests for information in the same areas. Depending upon circumstances, the library also connects the new requester to the original requester so the new requestor can also leverage any additional research conducted by the original requester. In this way, says Marcy, the library served as 'a gateway to multiple sources of information'.
Christy Confetti Higgins of Oracle shared another way that the Digital Libraries & Research (DL&R) team at Oracle found to repurpose research. Before Sun was acquired by Oracle, they used to create JumpStarts, which were deep collections of resources on a topic of interest to the company, but they were too time intensive. Instead, on their internal-facing blog, they started posting research results, tagging them and then feeding them into the market research page of their internal wiki. This way, multiple people could take advantage of a single set of search results.
Recycling your own content to keep sites updated
By using several tools and channels, the DL&R team has become proficient at recycling and reusing content to promote their services, enhance visibility, and cut down on the work necessary to keep multiple sites up-to-date. For example, once a new set of research results is posted on the internal blog, they will post it on the company intranet and use the content for newsletters.
Twitter is also used to post notices about new information resources for the Oracle community. The Twitter feed is then included on internal sites and the DL&R wiki. 'Our own homepage, which is based on a wiki platform, always has fresh material on it because we have the Twitter and blog feeds in there,' Christy says. This cuts down on having to go in manually and refresh the page, and also allows those who don't use Twitter or follow the blog to stay informed.
The team also maintains wiki pages specific to technical and market information by repurposing blog postings based on their tags.
'Modularising' presentations
Marcy at Ball Aerospace was a regular speaker on library resources at brownbags and other events within the company. These were held by different departments, with different subject focus areas. After doing a few presentations, and finding that it took a few days to develop each one, Marcy started to develop her slides using a 'modular' mindset.
She created a base slide deck of 80-90 slides, covering all of the different sources and services available from the library. For each information source, she created a basic slide that included a description, how to access it, its uses, and other details. As long as the vendor platform didn't change, she could continue to use these slides for any audience.
Then, when putting together a presentation for a particular group, she would select only those sources relevant to the audience, and then capture a few new screenshots of searches using topic-specific keywords in those sources. This way, she could repurpose her efforts and save hours of time, while still providing up-to-date customisation for specific groups and interest areas.
Reusing frameworks for different settings
Jill Strand of Maslon Edelman Borman & Brand, LLP took the SLA CI Certificate course, 'CI Published Source Collection: Managing the Function'. For the course, Jill had to conduct an information audit for an imaginary competitive intelligence (CI) function which included looking at the background of the function, requirements and considerations, benchmarks, timelines, resources available, strengths, vulnerabilities, methodologies and evaluation tools.
As Jill learned more about her new organisation and its goals, she realised that this information audit would be a helpful framework for a new vision for the Maslon Information Resources Library by adapting the structure and methodology to those of an information centre. When she created her new audit plan, she wanted it to be challenging and achievable, but not overwhelming, particularly for the Library Committee.
In conducting the new audit, the Library found overlaps between electronic and print resources and were able to switch one area of users over to electronic access and away from print access. Jill says 'a large part of this business will always be reactive. I would like us to be more proactive by spending more time keeping up-to-date on blogs that the partners and attorneys read, or finding things that will help them keep up-to-date on their own'.
Let your clients and customers do some of the work
In November 2009, the DL&R and Global Systems Engineering teams at Sun created the READ Community, a wiki-based technical reading community, driven by the participants themselves. The DL&R team recruited an executive and some subject matter experts to participate based on the premise, 'What do you read? Reading recommendations from people you trust'. The participants could share any type of content: videos, books, websites, articles, examples of people they follow on Twitter, etc. Typically, the technical folks would contribute a reading list, and the DL&R team would make the connections to the available eBook sources. They would also create shared reading lists in the eBook services.
By doing this, the team was able to help create a self-sustaining and growing source. Coming to the main wiki community site, an engineer could link to any eBook of interest. Once in the eBook service, the engineer could then see other reading lists, subscribe to them, and get notifications of updates to the lists. The DL&R team also pulled the RSS feeds from the lists in the eBook service back into the wiki site 'creating more visibility and interaction all the way around'.
Conclusion
Repurposing, reusing and recycling have become buzzwords for how we live in the world. How can you take a deep look at your time and workflow and apply these to your own work? Some of these tips and reminders may not only free up some of your time, but also provide more value to your organisation.
Scott Brown is owner of Social Information Group (http://www.socialinformationgroup.com), an independent consulting and information practice focused on the effective use of social networking tools for sharing and finding information. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies, government and non-profit organisations, and individuals to help them understand and effectively use these tools. As Senior Information Specialist with Digital Libraries & Research, the library and information organisation at Sun Microsystems, he provided in-depth secondary research and competitive intelligence, conducted stakeholder work, and used Six Sigma tools to determine customer needs and wants. He is a frequent speaker on the use of social networking tools, including virtual worlds such as Second Life, in various types of organisations. He received his library degree from San Jose State University in California in 1999.
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Part 1: 'Retreading', not Reinventing, the Wheel: How info pros repurpose content for increased efficiency and visibility
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