Reading Time: 7 minutes
I was talking with a group recently and someone asked what media I read to get information. I always find that question hard to answer because “everything” is not helpful but I tend not to read too many publications regularly. I thought I’d try to capture why.
There has been a huge shift in my professional career in how I gather information. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I relied on a lot of print subscriptions. I read a lot of trade and professional publications. I was also on a lot of the common discussion lists at the time.
It can be hard for me to recommend the current equivalents, as I know some of these discussions have been moved into sites like the AALL Communities or onto social media platforms like Facebook, but I haven’t followed them as my information uses have changed. I do not receive very much information, voluntarily, by email, despite the resurgence of newsletters and the like, and so resources that require a login or that do not offer RSS feeds tend to be demoted in my information gathering. Also, a lot of these print publications—Law Technology News, Law Office Computing, and so on—have disappeared. Many of the trade publications I used to follow became websites and then became more difficult to as advertising and “opinion” by interested parties obscured more useful information.
I have posted about paywalled content elsewhere. In my work, anyway, I have not found paywalled content to be necessary to staying current. This is true even when it’s legal-specific. I find that most topics worth knowing about are discussed widely and it is usually easy to find an open version of that discussion.
If you are early in your career or early in a new job, I still think curated sources can be the best place to start. Law librarians should be reading AALL Spectrum and Law Library Journal (not a disinterested plug, as I’m on the Spectrum advisory board at the moment). I used to also follow Library Journal when it was LJ Digital. Like AALL’s KnowItAALL which is also a good read (and I’m grateful that they include this blog sometimes), it helps to have people looking for content that they think you’ll be interested in. A couple of curated sources are plenty because good ones will do a lot of legwork for you.
Then what?
Newsfeeds
What is a Whelan blog post without mentioning RSS (here and here and here and …)? Seriously, though, RSS has become my primary resource for information. I have posted before about my general philosophy which is this: you need to browse curated content and you need to have serendipity. If anything, as you get more experienced, you need the latter more than the former.
Curated content is time-efficient. Serendipity introduces you to ideas you won’t have known to look for and it’s what the people curating your content are doing. You are just moving yourself up the food chain. As you develop your own interests and expertise, you will know deeper resources that will be more relevant as you create your own curated feeds.
RSS is useful to me because it is not email. It also will support a variety of inputs, so I can follow a curated RSS feed and I can follow alert RSS feeds. It’s that mixture that helps me see a lot of information.
The alerts are pretty straightforward. I use Google Alerts and I use really simple searches. The two most relevant to law librarians are:
“law library” OR “law librarian” OR “law libraries”
and
“legal publishing”
Both are set to “all results” and RSS, and are delivered “as it happens”. I don’t read them as they happen, but it means that, when I pop open my news reader (I use my own hosted version of FreshRSS), they’re there.
That’s it. Cat’s out of the bag. But, as you all know, acquiring information is the lowest form of value-added information delivery. It still needs analysis.
It’s a real potpourri of stuff. LinkedIn. Reddit. Foreign websites. Spam sites. Lots of opportunity for serendipity. I think this is perhaps important to note: I don’t read all of the items.
A note on foreign web sites. If you know a foreign language, great. I know a couple enough to be able to read headlines. But most browsers have either built-in or extension-enabled translation support. If you have a web-based RSS feed reader, you may be able to get it to translate the headlines as they appear.
Most, perhaps 95% if I were to guess, are not interesting. So I scroll through a couple of hundred headlines a day, dipping in when I have a moment. It’s how I found out a law librarian had been indicted on a theft charge (and not the first law librarian who committed a crime or been sued that I’ve found). Or that Oklahoma’s legislature was fiddling with its courthouse law library fees, which is often a good news/bad news option.
You might also look at EBSCO or Gale Cengage news sources and their alerts through public libraries. The downside is that once you set up an email alert, you can’t really customize it because the alert feature requires a user account and those are generally not available with a public library card. Their RSS is also not well-formed and so may not work with an RSS reader, as I found recently with Cengage.
I would also note that I think Google is a strong alternative to paid services from legal publishers and other commercial options. I block news aggregators like LexisNexis’ Moreover and Mojeek and OMGili, for a variety of reasons, increasingly due to content harvesting for AI. So you may find that a Google alert, while perhaps not as fancy, is likely to uncover content that a commercial service doesn’t, if only because people tend to allow Google to index content.
Curated Content
This is hyper personal and I rarely read something just because someone else reads it. For instance, I no longer follow any of the major news organizations in the US—New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox—and I don’t ingest news via video or audio, so I’m not following podcasts or watching TV or YouTube channels for information.
Some people like video and audio, and I completely understand that hearing or seeing can add to information. It’s just not for me. I find the experience too linear without the ability to move to the information I seek. Some podcasts or radio programs like NPR will supplement with transcripts after the audio is published. Governments with accessible sites often will be required to publish transcripts too. You can also use alerts on databases like the news ones from Gale Cengage, through your public library, to surface TV news transcripts.
Anyone who wants it is welcome to my RSS OPML file, although I don’t think it’s any real value to anyone unless you have the exact same interests and reading habits that I do.
None of these stories that surface tend to be individually important. And I’m not sure that my method will work for other people. But once I see these stories, I will remember them. Sometimes I will bookmark them but mostly I just remember. And, over time, I will see enough that I realize I’m seeing a pattern or I accrete enough knowledge that I care a bit more and shift to more curated content on the topic, if there is any.
I tend to like technology and information overlaps. If you wanted to start with a handful of sites that I find useful, I’d look at Ars Technica, CMS Wire, Poynter, and Fast Company’s Work-Life content (there is a lot of noise on other parts of Fast Company that isn’t useful to me). The legal areas I follow are on the Legal Skills Prof and Law School Academic Support blogs. I don’t follow any #legaltech content because (a) I know I can find it if I need it and (b) it tends to be laggard to mainstream tech or overly inward looking.
Other than that, I’d just keyword search for topics that pique your curiosity and the sites that repeatedly have content you’re interested in, follow them. Then follow the folks they link to. As I am reading something, I will often highlight a term or a person’s name or a concept, right click, and run a quick search in a new tab. Then I can flip over to that and see if there is anything interesting being discussed or learn more about the topic or person.
And weed your resources, definitely weed. I add and remove content based on quality and how often I access it at least on a monthly basis. Sites close, authors stop writing, and your own expertise may out grow the site. And, as you can tell from my OPML file, I don’t follow pundits. If they’re not citing to research or other information, I don’t find a lot of value.
This is, in part, because I’m not looking for opinions (“you oughta”). I’m looking for ideas (“try this”). I’m looking for things that I can replicate: be a better manager, deliver information better, raise money for our organization, work better with our governance board, play better with others.
Take Action
Sometimes I post about these stories on this blog, as much to remember them as to timestamp a collection of items that go together. But information gathering can have a purpose other than just knowing more. In most cases, it will then lead me to do more directed research, which might lead me to audio or video that I know has what I am seeking. And it can be actionable.
Here’s a real world example. In my RSS feed, the headline said: “This new guide explains how to represent yourself in a St. Louis-area court“. Our excellent colleagues at the Law Library Association of St. Louis had received a grant and created a guide for self-represented litigants. That’s good news all on its own.
I had not seen the original posting about receiving the grant. But the news item popped up in my feed and, I think, made more of an impact because of my own operational issues. Our law library has a “friends”-like foundation that has a goal of supporting us financially. They have been looking for ways to expand their footprint but it is difficult to raise awareness outside of the legal community, even though we’re a public resource and the bar is not among our greatest users.
I suggested to them that we consider reverse engineering LLAST’s success. Not the money, so much, but the attention. Our law library already creates guides so perhaps they could fund the creation of a new one. But, as important as the new guide, it would give the foundation something to talk to potential donors about: look what we funded! And it might achieve media coverage in the same way, which would benefit both the foundation and the law library.
As I pulled this post together, it made me realize how inverted this use of information is. Normally, when we are trying to help someone with legal information, we already know where the endpoint we’re trying to reach: file a complaint, send a letter to a tenant, and so on. We’re looking for information that gets us there.
But my use of news and current awareness information, curated and otherwise, is the opposite. It’s like trying to find paths forward but the endpoints remain in fog. Until they don’t.
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