eLucidate (Journal)
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Virtual Teams: Benefits & Challenges
Get PDFAlthough the current language of business speaks of ‘collaboration’ it does not speak of ‘virtual collaboration’ but of virtual teams. This is useful because not all teams work in a collaborative way with a common cause.
A team can be defined as a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks, who share responsibility for outcomes, who see themselves and who are seen by others as an intact social entity embedded in one or more larger social systems, and who manage their relationship across organisational boundaries. A team therefore has a unity of purpose, a social structure, and its members share a common responsibility for outcomes which is not necessarily a common cause.
Probably the most comprehensive survey of virtual team adoption currently available was undertaken by the Economist Intelligence Unit in late 2009.
The main reasons quoted in the report for establishing virtual teams were:
Improve collaboration with other business units;Tap into a larger pool of expertise;Improve competitiveness through a faster response to opportunities;Cost reduction, especially travel costs and the need for internal meeting spaces;Improve collaboration with customers, suppliers and partners.
The challenges of working in virtual teams were seen as:
Misunderstandings due to differences in culture, language and an inability to read people’s expressions;Difficulty in leading teams remotely;Difficulty in building camaraderie and trust;Difficulty in managing the productivity of virtual teams;Managing information overload
Digital Content Curation
Get PDFInformation overload has become a typical phenomenon and it is becoming increasingly difficult to sift through all the information available to find which is the most relevant. Content curation is therefore a vital skill that involves aggregating, organising and presenting information in a useful manner by adding value to it.
 
Web & Social Media Analytics
Get PDFIf you are responsible for your organisation\u27s or department\u27s website then you should be using some form of analytics tracking software to measure who is visiting the site and what they are looking at. If you or your organisation have a public-facing website then its purpose is to promote something or, at the very least, engage with a target audience at some level. There are some basic things you need to know if you wish to evaluate the effectiveness of your site:
How many unique individuals are looking at your web pages for any given time period?Geographically, where do these individuals come from?Which pages of your website are the most popular?How long are people spending on your site?What are the most popular landing pages and exit pages on your site?Which other sites are referring visitors to your site?How much traffic to your site is coming from search engines
SCONUL Summer Conference
Get PDFOn the 26th of June, thanks to a generous UKeiG grant, I was able to attend one day of the SCONUL Summer Conference taking place in Glasgow. The theme of the conference was The Open Library: Collections, Collaborations and Challenges, a very topical and sometimes controversial topic in library and publishing circles at the moment.
As an early career professional, attending this conference has been a great opportunity for me to learn more about the background and future directions of open access publishing from a library perspective. It was also very interesting to think about the rising demand for published open data in research as well as published outcomes and the ensuing challenges this will bring in the humanities field where I currently work
Information Governance and Assurance: reducing risk, promoting policy
Get PDFThis book’s blurb describes it as a “comprehensive textbook”. Textbook it clearly is, appearing as it does to be primarily aimed at students of the subject and to busy information managers who need to get a quick overview of the topic. But it does not go into enough detail to justify the word “comprehensive”. This 196 page paperback has chapters entitled: Introduction; The Laws and Regulations; Data Quality Management; Dealing with threats; Security, Risk management and business continuity; and Frameworks, policies, ethics and how it all fits together. This is complemented by a list of acronyms and definitions of some technical terms, answers to some exercises and discussion points, and a reasonably good index. The book provides an introduction to the subject from a UK point of view, though most of the principles enunciated would apply in other countries
Web Metrics for Library and Information Professionals
Get PDFDavid Stuart’s “Web Metrics for Library and Information Professionals” is an authoritative overview of the origins of and evolution of web metrics with a focus on their relevance to the information profession. The author’s background as an academic researcher at King’s College London means he approaches the subject more from a research perspective than from a practitioner’s one. This results in a book particularly relevant to an academic audience although practitioners wishing to know more about the technicalities of web metrics will find much of value here.
As a lecturer in digital marketing who teaches across a range of computing and LIS courses, I found the book’s first several chapters especially useful. Stuart describes the connections between bibliometrics and web analytics and shows that librarians have had measurement as a key part of their job for many years. In Chapter 2 he outlines the evolution of metrics as used by the library profession and the origins of web metrics. He makes the point that web analytics have their origins in marketing, making it more applied than bibliometrics, which often have a more abstract heritage. However, he shows that some marketing tools such as Google Trends are also useful for academic researchers because of the breadth of the data they provide access to. The discussion on relational and evaluative metrics may appear a little academic to some readers but it provides a useful foundation for understanding web metrics and how they differ in what they are measuring and how their outputs might be used