RSS for National Information Literacy and Instruction List (ILI-L)

I just learned that the Information Literacy and Instruction List (ILI-L) is now available as an RSS Feed! I moderated this list, formerly BI-L, for several years, and it’s a great source of news, expertise, and job postings. Many people stop subscribing because there tend to be some long, mailbox-clogging debates, and an RSS feed seems like a perfect solution to this problem.

Rewire Your Life

From the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog, Rewire Your Life:

“That’s right, this is ‘Rewire Your Life Day,’ says Ellen Ernst Kossek, a professor of human-resource management and organizational behavior at Michigan State University. She’s not checking e-mail today. Her cellphone is switched off. And she went out to lunch with a colleague from another department who, until today, she’d known only via electronic correspondence.”

Well, it’s too late for me. I’ve emailed, talked on my cell phone, blogged, instant messaged, and facebooked. I went to three meetings to talk with my colleagues face-to-face, then spent the other hour of my day frantically following up with reminders and to-dos. I can’t really say whether I could have been more productive without all the electronic communication, because I can’t really remember how I got things done before.  Maybe  I’ll try it next year.

Experimenting with New Ways of Sharing Information

Since I started my new job as Library and Information Literacy Instruction Coordinator at UW Madison, I’ve been noticing some problems with communication. For one thing, I go to a lot of interesting meetings on and off campus that other people might like to know about. I also have the opportunity to share things that might be of interest to the broader group.  It seems like the current system of listservs, web pages and shared file system isn’t doing the trick for this type of information sharing, probably because it’s not a good match for the way I work. I don’t keep much paper, am away from my office a lot, take notes on a laptop, work on multiple computers, and am generally not much on traditional organization. To me, the ideal communication system would allow sharing of information with members of the LILI community, but also a handy archive of what was shared. Maybe a wiki would be better…. but it also seems important to try something out and see what issues come up.

This blog is not intended to replace all the great information-sharing that’s already in place.   I will still share anything everyone needs to know on the infolit listserv, and I will still post all documents in LILI space.  The ideas here are also my own, and don’t necessarily reflect the direction of our program or the library as a whole.