To that end, I wonder if you have a suggestion for "processing" (in whatever form that may take) summary or "answer" messages from listservs such at BUSLIB-L?
This morning, I got an interesting email from a new librarian. In essence, her questionj was how to save for future reference the most useful postings from email discussion lists. My response:
My philosophy has been to do Just-in-time information collecting, rather than Just-in-case collecting. If you see something in an email discussion list that's useful immediately, use it. If not, you know where you'll be able to find the information again - in the list's public searchable archives. So I think your main task is to identify the lists and other resources that are consistent sources of good information, and become familiar with the archive search functions of each. That way, you can always find the information later.
Trying to retain and store these bits of information is, IMO, pointless. The problem is that you don't know what you'll use the information for later, so almost by definition you can't design a storage system that would work for you, unless you re-create the archives of all the useful sources.
Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes in discussion lists, really good information comes out in threads on completely separate topics. From past experience, it's really hard to find these posts in the archives because of the poor search. In some cases, blogging might help, or using del.icio.us to bookmark the web archived version of the post. Actually, I find that desktop search of my e-mail archive is more effective than searching the web archives individually. YMMV.
Posted by: Christina Pikas | July 29, 2007 at 01:33 PM