Legal Research

Media Monitoring and Current Awareness

By Shaunna Mireau

I attended an excellent conference session this week at the CALL/ACBD/MichALL Conference in Windsor. The session, titled Media Monitoring and Current Awareness: Tools in the Information Explosion. There was a panel of speakers including Casian Moscovici from NATIONAL Public Relations, Jillian Taylor a Librarian from Fasken Martineau, and Connie Crosby of Crosby Group Consulting (and Slaw too of course). Some presentation materials are already posted.

Media monitoring and current awareness take up a lot of time in the daily routine for the library staff at my firm. The pressures of knowing immediately when something critical is taking place have been growing. Instant communication techniques like twitter and other social media means that the 10 minute delay for Google Reader news feeds might be too long. Risk increases when news breaks first online.

I thought that we Field library folk were doing pretty good at current awareness gathering with aggregating and pushing out requested information daily. The great information passed along in this session causes me to wonder if that is true. Would you want crucial watch information more than once per day? Twice a day? Is hourly checking too much or not enough?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 13, 2010 (boomark / email).