My Favourite Tipples from a technology enthusiast
Jinfo Blog

By Andrew Tattersall

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Andy Tattersall, an information specialist at The School of Health and Related Research at The University of Sheffield. He highlights some tools which help disseminate information using images, visualisation and sound.

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Increasingly my job requires a degree of inspiration and creativity to help academics and students disseminate knowledge and research. Some of the platforms I'm interested in help create complementary discoverable and shareable content to support the discovery of traditional research outputs such as journal papers.

• Canva: This is a really useful tool for those who wish to generate attractive, visible content to help support the dissemination of content, whether that be events, ideas, resources, outputs. It has a rather easy learning curve and allows you to create content in a matter of minutes. You will be spoilt for choice with a myriad of templates, fonts and images.

• Infogram: This is a really useful tool for when you want to move onto the next level of creating infographics. I like how it has geographical and regional templates which allows you to embed data to create your own heat maps. It has various premium versions and the free account is a nice place to start.

• Mixcloud: Even though this site is primarily for DJ mixes, it is an attractive platform for hosting your own podcasts. The free version does not limit you to file size or how many podcasts you host, so there is a lot of flexibility. I like the attractive interface which has been since copied by the likes of the BBC for their BBC Sounds.

• Snagit: My job requires me to capture an awful lot of screen images as part of my teaching and writing. TechSmith's Snagit tool gives me a lot of flexibility to do this. I like how I can easily adapt, edit and annotate images and that it provides the ability to export in a variety of file formats.

For fun:

• Discogs: I'm an avid record collector and the ultimate database for discovering music and buying it has long been Discogs. I love how I can catalogue my collection on there as well as buy and sell records internationally. It's a very simple and effective user-generated resource.

An article in Jinfo I found particularly interesting:

• I enjoyed Jinfo's research into "Rethinking the role of information teams". I think this is an important report that touches on the perennial and thorny issue of the identity of the modern information team within larger organisations. The issues of what makes an effective professional information team and how it can develop to meet ever-changing demands are covered in detail. Based on interviews, this is a useful insight into the collective intelligence of information managers. The focus on how to maintain success and the barriers to that happening are discussed. I'm especially interested in the impact of technology which is explored, an aspect often overlooked at organisational level.

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