Tales from the CDG Tardis

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:

1. College noticeboards (formal notices from tutors etc)
2. College pigeonholes (internal and external mail)
3. Message sheet on door to my room (literally a blutacked piece of A4 where people would scribble a note if I was out)
4. Face to face conversation (Talking 1.0)

As a professional librarian in Dundee in 2008, here are the information sources I have to monitor:

1. Abertay email: own inbox, FOI inbox, Infodesk inbox, Marketing inbox…
2. Instant messaging (for internal IS communication)
3. Telephones: own and colleagues’ in a large open-plan office
4. Notes and postits stuck to my desk, monitor etc
5. Internal and external mail
6. Blogs
7. RSS feeds
8. Wikis
9. Forums
10. Sponsored desktop panel messaging
11. Professional email lists including 4 CDG related
12. Professional journals (from CILIP, CILIPS, 4 x SIGs, SCONUL)
13. Meetings
14. Videoconferences
15. Home email
16. Home post
17. Home telephone and answerphone
18. Mobile for calls and texts
19. Facebook
20. 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!