Subscription Update - What's New and What's Coming
Jinfo Blog

By Catherine Dhanjal

Abstract

Find out what's new and upcoming in FreePint's Content, Community, and Consulting including articles, webinars and Community of Practice events in the "Best Practices in Information Skills Development" Topic Series. Consulting projects include working with a client to investigate how information services are likely to evolve into over the next three to five years.

Item

Content (Articles, Reports and Webinars)

The current Topic Series "Best Practices in Information Skills Development", has produced a number of practical articles and webinars recently, including:

• Supporting development through professional associations
• Leveraging vendor and partner relationships for development purposes
• Defining measurable objectives for skills development.

The last one is a recorded webinar, developed in part due to the early results from our survey on information skills development: our initial findings highlight a worrisome gap in workforce development around information skills, both for information professionals and knowledge workers as a whole.

The survey remains open until Friday, 5th June, so if you haven't yet done so, please take five minutes to complete it.

Still to come this month in this Topic Series are articles on open resources, creating measurable outcomes, using competency-based strategies, and the detailed results of our survey. Register your interest to stay informed.

Other recent content items include in-depth reviews of Solcara, Infomart and Linex Systems plus a mini review of Lexis Advance HD.

We've also published the full report of our research into the corporate market for ebooks, which documents adoption of ebooks by sector, variables influencing adoption and licensing approaches taken by the various vendors, among other topics. If you're working to understand how ebooks fit into your collection or might do so in the future, you may also be interested in the webinar we're offering on our ebooks research, scheduled for July.

Community

Current Communities of Practice fit within the Topic Series "Best Practices in Information Skills Development". They include:

• Turning Content into Curricula: a workshop on making subject-matter expertise into activity-based learning that works for on-the-job training

• Getting Information Skills Development on the Strategic Agenda: a discussion about the unexplored risks in organisations that neglect to develop a strategic view of the information-related skills required for workforce effectiveness. As we work through the research of this Topic Series, we're increasingly thinking of this as potentially the most important conversation you can take part in during 2015.

With the SLA Annual Conference coming up, we're offering a special in-person Communities of Practice session, to discuss the future of information work. If you or a colleague will be attending SLA in Boston, register to attend this strategic discussion.

In-person Communities of Practice, particularly those that bring together buyers and sellers of information products and services for meaningful discussion, are highly valued by our community. To ensure that our October plans for buyer-seller CoPs are on the mark for your priorities, we've sent a survey to eligible customers to weigh in on the format and content of these sessions. If you missed the survey, please contact our director of research, Robin Neidorf, at robin.neidorf@freepint.com.

We know that our October sessions will relate to our next Topic Series, "All About Usage: From Content Sharing to Data Mining". To make sure you're informed about our plans, register your interest in the series.

Consulting

We kicked off a new consulting project recently that also relates well to our current and upcoming Topic Series. A global pharmaceutical company is taking a proactive view of the future shape of information services as they develop over the next three to five years.

Our work with them is to research and define evolving approaches to information work, including such areas as text and data mining, and then to design a skills development plan to ensure the team is well-equipped for success in the future.

Find out more about a FreePint Subscription, which at the Content level gives access to all FreePint articles, reports and webinars, at the Community level gives access to all FreePint Communities of Practice (as well as all FreePint Content), and at the Consulting level adds a credit for up to six hours of annual consulting time.

« Blog