June has been a busy month and we have covered quite a number of subject areas in both introductory level and advanced strategic level courses. Below is some food for thought from a selection of the courses.
Internet Tools for the Advanced Searcher - A number of new search engines have been released recently and Phil Bradley's course incorporated both Microsoft Bing and Wolfram Alpha into the course looking at the pro's and con's for each as a tool for information researchers. New technology and an analysis of its benefits was the key point of discussion here.
Building the Brand: Marketing and Customer Collaboration - What’s the difference between Branding and Marketing – and does it really matter? Following on from Ruth's very interesting post giving us an insight into how marketing is used by each and everyone of us every day, her course gave attendees a more practical insight into how an information service can be marketed internally within an organisation. Key topics of discussion covered amongst others was the way to impact on users and key stakeholders how important an information service is.
Digital Copyright - Key discussion points were numerous as the law changes and develops all of the time. Most notable ones were the Digital Britan report and its impact on copyright related issues and the problem posed by "orphan works" and the CIBER report whose study notes that over 6 million UK citizens are infringing on copyright through downloading material via peer to peer and other file sharing sites which is having a massive effect on intellectual property.
SharePoint for Records Management - From our trainer Marc Stephenson - The attendees were (as expected) rather surprised to hear that records management in SharePoint is not quite the mature product that they have been lead to believe. There was even some anger towards Microsoft that they could even use the term “records management”. Some practical ways of ameliorating the records management functionality however was thankfully explained. It was also a very useful course in giving the trainees a good foundation as to what SharePoint is good and not so good at, so that IT could be challenged (the delegates were records managers or other information professionals). I was struck yet again by the number of concepts that must be understood in order to address any training within SharePoint, in particular the often misused and misunderstood SharePoint content type.
Comments