Call me the pusher

OK, here's a little cherry bomb for a Tuesday morning...

In that ideal world which may or may not be just around the corner, we identify the information we need and, instead of going looking for it, it comes to us, all neatly packaged, and just what we want!

...But can that ever happen? Despite the possibilities of tagging et al, can we ever in most cases get exactly what we want? That means no more [difficult, as ole Twitter is proving] and NO LESS. Medical researchers like PubMed because it delivers precisely what they want, but that is because largely they work in narrow fields and can use precise terms to define their requirements, with a helping hand from MESH if necessary. Great.

So we get our fix of feeds. We might want to know Jordan has or hasn't throw Alex out, or if Victoria is contemplating another child, but it doesn't matter if we don't get told the second it leaves the PR's Blackberry. But a busy researcher might say they haven't time to log-in to WoK or mess about ticking boxes on Scopus, they want feeds! OK, fine, but then we get into the dodgy realm of the Unknown Unknown. If they rely on those feeds, and quite soon they might, because they decide they haven't time for anything else, how do they know they have everything they should have?

Are we doing ourselves and the information hungry community a disservice by making it seem easy? [Actually people use Google because it seems easy, don't they?] Who will bother to do a search if they THINK they are getting what they should have via feeds? Students constantly ask for detailed lecture notes and access to lecture Ppts, and are as a general rule these days reluctant to read recommended book chapters. Part of the thinking and processing has thus been cut off. They want to be given the precisely necessary, and no more. And that seems to be what we are aiming for. Currently, that's how we refine searches etc, and we have to think about it. Not necessarily a bad thing! The recent RIN survey on the use of e-journals identified some seemingly-odd smash-and-grab behaviour at Cambridge compared to other universities. Here, as a whole we dive straight into an e-journal, grab the paper we want, and exit. We don't run a subject search, we seem to know what we want. Does that really mean Cambridge people are extra-intuitive, or that they think they are? [Oh shut up, Miss Crail, who are you to say?]

Some would say you get more with feeds anyway, the serendipitous, the information you didn't know was out there, the helpful tip, but how do you accurately pinpoint the source if you don't know the information exists?

Miss Crail sits, arms folded, glasses down nose, nostrils flared, and demands ... Aren't we making ourselves dumber? Is it really easier to sift through and filter a lot of STUFF being fed to us, than to actually go out and look for the information we need? And no, Miss Crail is not saying that because she could be out of a job.