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by Clare Brown on March 17, 2022
Your colleagues are overwhelmed by information. It is your job to employ your library management skills to ensure that they can identify that key article that will impress their client, and help them win work. Are you unsure of how to do this? Don't worry, you are in the right place to find out how it can be done. It’s time to stop wasting your time and your end-user's time and increase the effectiveness of your current awareness.
At one of the ALLA conference’s opening addresses, The Hon. PA Keane, Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia, stated that librarians must drive new technology despite the “lukewarm” feelings of law practitioners. "Lawyers will not initiate new services” he said, "…they expect librarians to guide them." This certainly rings true with current awareness and news monitoring.
If you want to quickly bore a lawyer, start talking about “aggregation”, “RSS feeds” and “third party alerts”. Alternatively, show them the end product – a single email update combining their favourite resources – and be rewarded with relieved enthusiasm and perhaps even a little excitement. Automating processes have many benefits, saving time is the first one that comes to mind, although there are many additional perks.
Create consistently high quality news alerts
There’s no denying the truth: machines will be a lot faster than you are. Some people still don’t like to rely on technology as it doesn’t allow cherry picking the perfect article for each person in your organisation. Manual intervention is important, however it should only be used to fine tune the most important details to focus on.
Automating processes helps to improve the quality and consistency of your established system. Having your processes automated ensures that all activities are performed uniformly across the board, avoiding any manual errors. It provides a constant reliable quality to your audience.
Gain insight into how people use your content
Automated digital aggregation solutions will also provide you with tracking tools and insight on how people use content within your organisation. This information helps you better understand the needs of your audience and adapt your entire sourcing strategy to their specific interest.
It's not just to see how your clients or end-users are using the content. Every business is made up of a bunch of moving parts, with different teams working on different tasks. Automation tools streamline collaboration and keep everyone on the same page. Tracking progress and getting a better feel for where resources can be best allocated becomes a whole lot easier with automation.
The Pareto Principle
The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, applies perfectly to this situation. In many cases, 20% of someone’s activities produces 80% of their output. What if you actually spend the majority of your time on the activities that produce 80% of the outputs instead of only a fifth of your time? If you manage to automate most of the activities that do not produce a great deal of output, your productivity will skyrocket.
Overall, automation increases your performance with fewer resources. Impress your management committee with visible ROI, improved quality, consistency and time savings. Enhance your current awareness and see the benefits!
