Acknowledgements
The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions). This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 LicenceGrateful...
View Article1.6.6 Professional bodies and societies
Consider joining a learned society or professional organisation. They can be very useful for conference bulletins as well as in-house publications, often included in the subscription. Don't forget to...
View Article1.6.5 RSS
RSS (‘Really Simple Syndication’ or ‘Rich Site Summary’) newsfeeds supply headlines, links, and article summaries from various websites. By using RSS ‘feedreader’ software you can gather together a...
View Article1.6.4 Blogs
The founder of Technorati claims that the number of ‘blogs’ doubles every five months and that the creation rate is approaching two per second. One estimate I read in July 2010 put the number at 400...
View Article1.6.3 Mailing lists and newsgroups
Mailing or discussion lists are email-based discussion groups. When you send an email to a mailing list address, it is sent automatically to all the other members of the list.The majority of...
View Article1.6.2 Alerts
Online bookshops and some of the major search engines offer ‘Alerts’ services. These work by allowing you to set up a profile once you have registered on their site, and when there are items meeting...
View Article1.6.1 Introduction
The process of keeping up-to-date in your chosen subject area is useful for your studies and afterwards, for your own personal satisfaction, or perhaps in your career as part of your continuing...
View Article1.5.9 Plagiarism
Referencing is not only useful as a way of sharing information, but also as a means of ensuring that due credit is given to other people’s work. In the electronic information age, it is easy to copy...
View Article1.5.8 Bibliographic software
If you are considering taking your studies further you might like to consider using bibliographic software. Bibliographic software can be used to sort references, annotate them, manage quotations or...
View Article1.5.7 Referencing
We mentioned above that we need to reference sources to ensure we abide by copyright legislation. But there is another reason we need to give accurate references to items we use – so we can share...
View Article1.5.6 Copyright – what you need to know
An original piece of work, whether it is text, music, pictures, sound recordings, web pages, etc., is protected by copyright law and may often have an accompanying symbol (©) and/or legal statement. In...
View Article1.5.5 Social bookmarks
If you find you have a long unmanageable list of favourites/bookmarks you might like to try social bookmarks as an alternative.Activity – what you need to know about social bookmarksRead 7 things you...
View Article1.5.4 The 5 Ds
If you don’t use a system at all, then you could suffer from the effects of information overload:losing important informationwasting time on trying to find thingsending up with piles of physical and...
View Article1.5.3 Desktop search tools
Finding your paperwork or electronic files can be a problem. You may find that even if you do have some sort of filing system, your structure soon gets quite large with files in multiple locations,...
View Article1.5.2 Ways of organising yourself
How do you organise yourself?ActivityMake a note of how you organise your:emailsinternet bookmarks or favoritescomputer filesyour household paperwork, for example bills, insurance documents,...
View Article1.5.1 Why is it important to be organised?
87% of items that are filed into a filing cabinet are never looked at again. STANFORD UNIVERSITYTIn 2010, the world’s digital information output was estimated to pass 1.2 zettabytes– A zettabyte is a...
View Article1.4.8 Summary
In this section we have introduced you to the PROMPT checklist as a useful tool for assessing the quality of any piece of information. If you use it regularly you will find that you develop the ability...
View Article1.4.7 T is for Timeliness
The date when information was produced or published can be an important aspect of quality. This is not quite as simple as saying that 'good' information has to be up to date.ActivityHere is an example...
View Article1.4.6 P is for Provenance
The provenance of a piece of information (i.e. who produced it? where did it come from?) may provide another useful clue to its reliability. It represents the 'credentials' of a piece of information...
View Article1.4.5 M is for Method
Method is about the way in which a piece of information is produced. This is quite a complex area as different types of information are produced in different ways. These are a few suggestions to look...
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