CPD23 Thing 4

How Do I Keep Up?

Keeping up to date and on top of things always seems so hard to do, particularly since the advent of the Internet, Google and instant knowledge. I have used Twitter for a while and partly use it as news source. I follow various Twitter accounts of things that interest me from professional to personal, although few of my friends or colleagues use Twitter. I follow some mainstream media, some Library news sources and some fun news sources. I have often found Twitter to be a good way to keep very current and check it once a day at work. I rarely check it at home.

RSS Feeds have been more problematic. I have learned about them a few years ago and have used RSS Feeds on and off. My problem is the having to check in part. I do like the Google Reader better than other I have used. One because it is not yet another username/password to forget; and two because it only keeps things as unread for a short while so when you do check in months later you are not overwhelmed by the quantity of what you haven't read.

I did set up a Pushnote account but have yet to see a lot of utility here. The main stumbling blocks seems to be that there aren't that many people using it. And you can only search for people by username or email address. I tried searching for CPD23 and got nothing. I'll experiment and try rating some sites and see how it goes but so far I am not seeing how useful it is.

A service I find useful for keeping up is Tabbloid which allows you to have a RSS Feeds in a PDF document deliver to email once a week. I have in that RSS Feed a bunch of library (okay, cataloging) related blogs. I can scan through them quickly, click on those that I want to read more about and I am done. I find this easier to do than remembering to check into Google Reader. You can even print out the PDF if you need to take it off line to read.

As I am US based I also find useful the email enewsletters from Library Journal and the Wednesday afternoon email from American Libraries Direct -- both are good ways to keep up on what is going in US libraries at least, and often offer a bit of humor. Which is always a good thing!

And I do still use Listserv -- AUTOCAT is very active and can be draining to use at times but also a good source of information (I do a digest so I get only one message a day and can scan through it and then delete or follow up as need be). A few others a a bit less active and easier to keep up with.

Lastly, conversing with others is always a good way to learn new things and has the added advantage of the personal touch.