My Favourite Tipples from a university lecturer in information science & management
Jinfo Blog

By Virginia Power

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Virginia Power, a lecturer and PhD student at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Virginia is CILIP'S UKeIG/K&IM specialist groups Information Manager of the Year 2018. She shares some of the specialised resources she uses for her lectures and tutorials in information science and management.

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The aim of my role as a university lecturer is to ensure that I maintain awareness of current and emerging issues in the very wide field of information science and management to support effective learning and teaching, as well as furthering my own research interests. My particular interests and research specialisms are ethics, information compliance and governance, intellectual property rights, knowledge management and open access, resources and educational practice.  

Here are some of the sources I turn to frequently:

• Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies: This site was started by Jane Hart in 2000 primarily for the development of workplace learning and enhanced practice, but I use it to keep up to date with the range of learning technologies that I can use in my learning and teaching, and to support continuing professional development. I particularly like the Top 100 Tools for Learning (updated every year via surveys), as this reflects current use of tools with supporting commentary from learning and teaching practitioners.

• Educause: Educause is a valuable source of information about research into technology and higher education. However, for me, the most useful aspect is the series of factsheets that are regularly published called 7 Things You Should Know About. Written on topics from drones to GDPR, these factsheets are simple, easily digestible and highly informative leaflets that capture the essence of new technologies and their development. Each factsheet provides a scenario and a short descriptive overview of the topic, as well as explaining who is using the featured topic and the opportunities and challenges it affords.

• Jisc: I used to work for Jisc as an elearning resources adviser and latterly as a digital collections specialist and I still return to their website on a regular basis to keep up to date with current and future technological developments and issues. The site is full of useful resources, guidelines, research and insightful commentary about the technological world we live and work in today.

• CORE: I am passionate about open access and CORE (COnnecting REpositories) is an aggregation of open access content from UK and worldwide repositories and open access journals. It provides a range of services including discovery, analytics, and text-mining access.

• KMWorld: This is an amazing cornucopia of current insights, news stories and research into the world of knowledge management (KM) and I use this site to give me an awareness of corporate KM developments. RealKM provides a similar service with many thought-provoking articles and, of particular interest, real evidence-based practice.

For fun:

• Awareness Days: I return to this site again and again for inspiration for library displays, newsletters, focused tutorials, etc. You can search by category (health, education, etc.) and each entry gives details of organisations that can supply research information, whitepapers and interactive activities. The site also provides a content-mapping toolkit. You will never be stuck for current awareness again!

A recent Jinfo article I found interesting:

• Jinfo is a source of so many excellent and intriguing articles but one Jinfo Research Focus area that has been particularly pertinent for me has been the Research Focus on the "Strategic Alignment of IS and IT". Although it dates from 2016, the topic provided excellent insights into some of the challenges of information systems working with information technology and the way in which these challenges were identified and explored. The inclusion of practical strategies that could be implemented within the work environment was extremely helpful.

Contribute your "My Favourite Tipples"

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