I woke up this morning having had a very vivid dream about Oxford. (I’m famous for my dreams - just ask anyone who’s shared an office with me. Sometimes I have CDG dreams, which nearly always involve long and impossible journeys). Anyway, I waxed nostalgic. (This is different to waxing nostalgically, which would be more ‘Oh, remember when I was young and had silky smooth legs’). Too many brackets and asides. Blame Pratchett.
SO to get to the point, I was thinking about personal information management. As an undergraduate in Oxford 16 years ago, these were the information sources I regularly had to monitor:
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College noticeboards (formal notices from tutors etc)
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College pigeonholes (internal and external mail)
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Message sheet on door to my room (literally a blutacked piece of A4 where people would scribble a note if I was out)
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Face to face conversation (Talking 1.0)
As a professional librarian in Dundee in 2008, here are the information sources I have to monitor:
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Abertay email: own inbox, FOI inbox, Infodesk inbox, Marketing inbox…
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Instant messaging (for internal IS communication)
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Telephones: own and colleagues’ in a large open-plan office
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Notes and postits stuck to my desk, monitor etc
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Internal and external mail
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Blogs
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RSS feeds
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Wikis
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Forums
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Sponsored desktop panel messaging
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Professional email lists including 4 CDG related
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Professional journals (from CILIP, CILIPS, 4 x SIGs, SCONUL)
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Meetings
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Videoconferences
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Home email
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Home post
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Home telephone and answerphone
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Mobile for calls and texts
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Facebook
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Face to face conversation
You get the point. I need a Personal Information Manager! I was chatting to someone recently who is writing a dissertation about personal information management. A very interesting topic. Another friend sent me a weblink about zen habits, including an article on How not to multitask. And I finally got round to reading the CIBER report on the Information behaviour of the researcher of the future, which talks incessantly about ‘power browsing’ - flicking, scanning and hopping between information sources and chunks, looking for a quick win. This behaviour seems an inevitable and necessary strategy in the 21st century, but I can’t help lamenting the loss of quality input. What happened to reading, reflecting, inwardly marking, pondering, savouring…?
Martyn remembers starting out as a research student in Oxford in the days of printed abstracts and indexes and the early CD ROMs, which took ages and were unwieldy by modern standards. I remember navigating guard books and card catalogues in the Bodleian. So some of today’s technologies would have made my studies easier back then. But oh - I do sometimes long for a simpler life!
