The Running Librarian

What my breakfast may have looked like

Earlier today I was fortunate enough to take part in a Sue Hill Networking Breakfast at the Roast restaurant in Borough Market. Its been a while since I've attended one of these so I jumped at the opportunity to do so and not just because Roast serves a damn fine breakfast.

The format of the breakfasts is that Sue Hill invite Senior Information Professionals from across different sectors to come and enjoy a breakfast and discuss issues that are affecting their day to day work.

There are usually some very Senior Managers present so I feel very much in awe when I'm sat at the table. The format is Chatham House Rules, which means that anything said isn't attribute to anybody, essentially everybody can speak freely about their issues. So having ordered our breakfasts we went round the table introducing ourselves and our role. We then put forward two issues which were affecting our work.

These ranged widely from, restructuring, alternative service models, content management, SharePoint vs other tools and many more. However there were definitely some issues which appeared to affect information professionals irrespective of the sector they were working in.

We were then asked for more information on some of the issues we had mentioned and this is where things got really interesting, with discussions around the following topics:

• Records Management and Twitter
• Open Access
• Digital Shadows
• The accuracy of information
• Information vs Knowledge
• Salt mines in Chester

The last was especially interesting as two of the attendees had visited the Salt Mines in Chester where it would seem most of the UK's archives are stored and spoke about how wonderful the experience was. Although I'm not sure I would like to have the lingering taste of salt!

Of most interest to me were the discussions around Records Management and Twitter and Information vs Knowledge. Records Management and Twitter isn't something I'd thought about before, fortunately for me other people have thought about Records Management and Twitter and I've included some links to these resources below:

• Managing tweets as records - how to capture
• Twitter and implications for Records Management - Forum posting

These links are a few years old, so I wonder whether this means everyone has considered Twitter and the implications for Records Management or whether we're all choosing to ignore it?  The other discussion I was interested in was the old chestnut of "Information vs Knowledge" I believe both Information and Knowledge can exist harmoniously alongside each other. But they do mean different things to different people.  If you're looking for a good description of both of these terms and data then I would recommend having a look at the "Differences between data, information and knowledge" on the Infogineering blog.

This was another excellent Sue Hill networking breakfast, although next time I wont be ordering the Full Borough as it's some commitment.

[Photo credit - Full English Breakfast from Flickr]