Librarian-Inspired New Year's Resolutions

This time of year many of us are thinking about eating healthy, exercising more, or maybe working on trimming down your debt. If you're like me, you're thinking, "How could I be more organized?" Because, let's face it, being organized can only help us meet our other goals.

If organizing is part of your plans for 2010, don't forget to spend time thinking about managing all of your social networking information. This is the perfect time to review your social tools like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. Close accounts that you no longer use and don't have time to update. Look at your friends / follow lists and hide or delete the ones that no longer interest you. (But be aware of the social implications of unfriending... Sometimes it's just better to hide them from your feeds).

If you use RSS Feeds, look through the blogs you follow. Review them and organize them into categories or delete the ones that are no longer relevant. I have found that I'll be more likely to review my feeds if I have whittled them down to the most essential feeds. If you have used RSS feeds to track information for your academic research, go through and delete the feeds that are no longer relevant to make room for Spring semester topics.

If you use social bookmarking tools like Delicious, review your bookmarks, deleting and tagging as you go.

Keeping your online information organized will only save time and make your online searching more efficient, so perhaps you can throw in that extra work out this week!

If you don't use any of these social tools, maybe you can add this to your list of resolutions: Attend the library's free workshop: "Internet Tools for Academic Research." We will teach you how to save time while searching online and we also teach how to make the most of social networking tools like blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, and RSS feeds.

Whatever you resolve to do this year, the library staff would like to wish you all the best that 2010 has to offer. As always, let us know what we can do to help you be successful with your research papers, speeches, and personal research.

Happy New Year!

Maureen :-)