My Favourite Tipples from an Assistant Librarian in a Technical Library
Jinfo Blog

By Natasha Chowdory

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Natasha S. Chowdory, who works for a specialist technical library at Microsoft. She shares some of her favourite online resources in areas from personal development to product innovations and technology trends.

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Dealing with technical resources means that I have to know what's going on across most product areas on a daily basis.

Queries have to be dealt with relatively quickly and I have to be able to field questions from clients wandering into the Learning Centre asking for books on niche technologies (often not Microsoft in origin). Add, sending regular updates via internal social sharing, and keeping clients updated on new relevant books as well providing resources for interns, graduates and running inductions for new starters, I have to be fully aware of all the resources available and the newest developments across the technology industry.

Here are My Favourite Tipples that are currently helping me through:

• Packt Publishing Blog: This blog is great for small bitesize pieces on what's currently trending in technology - at the moment it's "Cloud as a Service" and "big data". The layout is great and the information is easily accessible. If I think an article is good enough, I will often share it with the wider community at work via the internal social sharing tool. (It works out as a great way for me to sound knowledgeable even though I've not read any of the books on the topic!)

• FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver is the granddaddy of all things cool and funky about data. And this site is all of his thoughts in one place. I usually glance at this over a morning cup of tea to get me up to scratch with the more esoteric developments with technology. This is a great way to look at how technology is being applied - and has also served as a great way to engage with my clients. Something that I'm always keen to do. Silver often references books as well - that I quickly jump on to add to my library.

• Ideas.Ted: A good portion of my library collection is centred on personal development resources. These personal development books have usually been written by people who have given TedTalks, which is why it's in my best interest to know what the highest ranked videos are. This part of the TED site groups together various talks by theme each day which allows me to cherry-pick what my clients will find useful as a 10 minute video to watch on their lunch-break. It's also great for me, as I get some background knowledge to add to the books on my shelf.

• The Verge: My version of the front page of the news for work. The layout is made for people like me looking for the news in bitesize chunks to drop into conversation with senior directors who pop in. It covers Microsoft technology in a very honest way but also gives me a head start into what people may talking about that day and usually is a good way at heralding the shift in direction of different products.

 An article in FreePint which I found particularly interesting: 

• The Real Problem with Yammer. As I work for Microsoft, making the shift to Yammer has been part of my everyday job for the last few months. It's really refreshing to read an article that highlights how Yammer is an enterprise social networking tool, and how convincing people to use it is actually a bit challenging! As well as mention of SharePoint 2013, and general integration issues, this article has highlighted that the integration of Yammer is not as simple as you would think it would be.

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