Keeping up to date with job postings, newly published research, and rapidly developing health topics can require extensive time and effort. The practice of monitoring aims to ease this process by automating the collection and organization of relevant news.

What is monitoring?

Monitoring is the continual and systematic collection, analysis, curation, and diffusion of information relevant to a given stakeholder. It involves a combination of push techniques, such as RSS feeds and search alerts, and pull techniques, involving manual searching, to obtain relevant and timely information. Common types of monitoring and when you might use them include:

• Environmental scanning: What characteristics of a given industry, job market, or institution will help me understand its context?
• Competitive intelligence: What information will help me innovate, attract more clients, and outperform competitors?
• Strategic intelligence: What information is essential for my director to make an informed and strategic decision for our organization?
• Current awareness: What new scientific discoveries, job opportunities, political/social changes will help me stay up-to-date?

Join us for a workshop on April 9th to learn how to structure a monitoring practice from start to finish. We will cover how to:

• Choose sources to monitor
• Find RSS feeds
• Collect and organize your feeds in Inoreader

Bring a computer and a topic you’d like to monitor. Registration is recommended but not required. We look forward to seeing you there!