Penny has mentioned that she would like to keep up with professional reading as a way of keeping up her learning mojo.

Unless my professional reading is shoved under my nose as part of my workflow, I tend to neglect it.

I have three major sources of leads for what to read next.

1. Twitter.

I strategically follow people who are good at flicking out links that I will want to read … or even links that I will not read, but know that they exist in case I want to go looking for them later.

Generally I use the “2 minute rule” for productivity and during time in my day set aside for Twitter I will read useful links then and there. Those too long to read in two minutes are either:

• Nodded at politely, thanked for existing, then ferreted away in my brain under “may be useful if you could only recall it exists and where it is”
• If I know it has use for my writing/research – saved to my citation manager in a specific collection for later academic use
• Those with general interest (e.g. articles from the Conversation about academic mental health) – saved to Pocket for leisure reading
• Those useful for teaching – emailed to myself, to be processed when I next do my email, generally transferred to my “Teaching to Read” folder.

I hit “peak curation” last month when I realised that I was co-curating with Jane Cowell in a very, very odd way.

When I specifically taught Twitter to my tech students, I set up a “paper.li” paper called The Infoventurer Weekly. Paper.li is a great little tool that collates the most popular/followed links that the people you follow push out, and sorts them into a magazine-format webpage. My Twitter account automatically tweets out a link to the paper.li paper every week.

Now, I don’t always see the most popular links from the people I follow on the day they send them out, and while I would like to say I generally read the paper.li each week, I simply wasn’t.

But – Jane was. She would then tweet out a very interesting link, hat-tip to my account by including @infoventurer in the tweet. I would see it, and discover a delightful, relevant interesting link that I would not have seen otherwise.

2. Email alerts

Email is another “in your face” way to make sure I will read. I want the link to come to my inbox, and then to be filtered into its own file called “To Read”, sitting on my sidebar with the number of entries obviously growing each day…nudging me to set aside time to read, or at least browse.

Each source has its own folder that it is automatically filtered into.

The sources that I use are:

1. Those pesky emails I email to myself when I find articles but do not have time to read
2. Automated alerts of new items added to the discovery layer for my university library, about my research interest
3. Automated alerts from some of the large journal databases provided by my university library, about new items that meet my research interest
4. The UK-based JournalTOCs (Tables of Contents) site. You can set up a profile and then select alerts of newly published items in journals that you specify. There are over 300 Library and Information Science titles listed.
5. Roy Tennant’s monthly Current Cites items
6. ALIA’s Professional Development Postings, ALIA Weekly , and the Australian Public Library Alliance News

3. Exploiting my poor students dreadfully

I set an assessment in my technology unit where postgraduate students are required to locate an authoritative journal article published in the last two years that is specifically relevant to whichever Topic we have studied that week, and provide an analytic summary.

(Not all students, the task is evenly divided over the weeks. Those who do not summarise an article have opportunity to answer questions posed by the students who summarise the articles)

This is a really good way to ensure they do actually understand what the topic was about, as they have to articulate how the article is relevant. It also makes sure they understand what the disciplinary literature looks and smells like, and the quirks of the “how we done it good” papers, and the not-so-authoritative journal articles that still manage to be not-so-helpfully indexed by sources like Proquest.

The summaries are shared, so it builds up for all students a far wider survey of current reading than I could ever provide in my Topic notes.

BUT – It also is a way I can check that I am on top of the latest literature in the area I teach. Sometimes I will incorporate a reading a student found the previous semester into the Topic readings. Even if I do not, by following the citations in the articles I am forced to get a pretty good handle on some of the current disciplinary thinking in the areas I teach.