Curating online content : productivity tools for researchers who use social media and web materials

This week’s jobs.ac.uk hangout live video event “How to be a successful digital academic…” was full of great ideas and tips from experienced researchers and experts in digital tools for research. It was recorded, so you can watch the video, or you could read all about it in our guest blogger’s post.

As one of the panellists in my capacity as Piirus blog editor, I answered a question about my favourite piece of technology for research, and this post expands a little on my favourite tools. It also picks up from Bernie’s (our Social Science correspondent) recently blogged thoughts and experiences in the world of digital tools, which she calls the “Land of Techno“. This blog post is a fairly personal list: please do leave a comment to describe what tools you find particularly useful in your research!

As I explained in the hangout, I regularly use Evernote, which is sometimes called a productivity tool, to collect information that I read online. However, there are other tools I’ve investigated, which serve slightly different purposes. Evernote is my private collection, but what do I do when I want to share content with others at the same time as collecting?

We use Storify for collecting tweets relating to activity on Piirus, and then we publish them here on the blog too, as Planet Piirus stories. Storify is particularly good at collecting tweets about a particular theme, but you can also use it to collect websites and material from other sources, and present them all together.

ScoopIt is also a pretty good curation tool, and if you use it often to discover content, you can look more original on Twitter at the same time as creating something more visually attractive and useful than you could do with Twitter alone. The problem I’ve discovered is that your ScoopIt stories look out of date pretty quickly if it’s not a tool you use regularly, and I can’t vouch for it being the best place to discover content.

Another such tool that I’m aware of is paper.li, because someone else uses it to pick up on my tweets and then tweets at me to alert/acknowledge my contribution to his collection, which is a pretty nice, social way of working.

I must also investigate Pocket, after the hangout host, Dr Inger Mewburn (aka the Thesis Whisperer) recommended it… it sounds like another one of these productivity tools.

Which tools do you like to use? Leave us a comment below, get in touch directly or tweet with the hashtag #piirustips

(This blog post by the editor is adapted from an original post on her personal blog.)