How to be an effective communicator
24th May 2018

Information professionals have a range of skills at their disposal to deliver information services within their organisations, but it can be quite demoralising when those skills aren't recognised. It's essential to stand out and make your voice heard and this article looks at what it takes to be an effective communicator and get your message across. It also shows you how to successfully collaborate with others to do this and offers many useful tips to put this all into practice.

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Jinfo discovery report (part 1 - comparing top goals for content discovery)
24th May 2018

Jinfo has just completed a research project to explore goals for content discovery. The project was designed to explore and contrast how information centres managing STEM collections approach three key goals for content discovery as uncovered in a 2017 survey on the topic.

This article provides an overview of the survey carried out as part of the research. It reviews survey respondents demographics and compares responses to a set of questions about resource allocation and technology/solution vendors for each of the three goals.

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Q&A with African Journals OnLine - increasing the visibility of African research
23rd May 2018

African Journals OnLine (AJOL) aims to provide access to the world's largest online library of peer-reviewed, African-published scholarly journals. Its executive director Susan Murray told Sophie Alexander how the platform works, the problems it's helping to solve, and future plans to expand its coverage of research on the continent.

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Q&A with NERA - using Altarama RefTracker to manage information flow
22nd May 2018

Jinfo spoke to Barbara Hirsh, director of Information Resources & Knowledge Management at NERA Economic Consulting, along with two of her colleagues to find out a bit more about the group and how they use Altarama's RefTracker, a browser-based reference and enquiry management system, to manage the information flow to and from its staff. She spoke about why they started using RefTracker, how they use it along with some of the benefits it offers.

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Mini review of TIBCO Spotfire
22nd May 2018

With a growing number of companies needing data analytics tools, there are plenty of products available on the market to help them do this. One such tool is data analytics platform TIBCO Spotfire, which we last reviewed in 2015. We revisit this "enterprise-class analytics platform that helps both business and technical users quickly explore data to develop actionable insights, without requiring IT intervention".

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The importance of project management for visibility into capacity
17th May 2018

To succeed in the information profession requires many skills and a knowledge of a wide range of information resources and tools but to keep organised it's essential to have project management skills. In this article, we take a look at the importance of these skills to the information professional and highlight some of the leading software that can be used to better manage your workload along with some practical steps you can incorporate in your daily work.

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Streamline your department using the artisan or the optimised model
16th May 2018

Successful information service teams need to review, optimise and reinvent their service offerings every three years. A recent Jinfo Community session explored this topic and provided specific actions you can take to review your service and optimise your processes, using two main operational models, the artisan process and the optimised process.

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Measuring ROI for information services and professionals - an alternative point of view
14th May 2018

This article looks at how return on investment (ROI) is measured in the information profession and explores some of the changes that have taken place over the past 15 years, how to best measure ROI and what information professionals need to deliver high value.

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Community deck - does everyone on your team need great communication skills?
12th May 2018

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Community deck - Jinfo for content purchasing
11th May 2018

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