3.1. How do I store the information obtained?
Each information search process involves acquiring skills that the user adopts in order to design search strategies that are ever more efficient, and provides new information on the instruments and techniques to search for contents and to validate them. This is a skill-building, progressive process that may be supported by using information storage and organization tools so that this information may be found afterwards.
With these search processes, a variable amount of interesting information sources are located, and they should be arranged and classified for immediate or future use.
When having to store these electronic information sources, we may choose between several options of variable effectiveness, which are not mutually exclusive. For this reason, the most efficient thing to do may be to combine them so that they better suit the needs of each user in every moment.
In the resource “Guidelines to optimise the organisation of digital information”, the strategies listed below are defined, among others, along with tools and recommendations of use to store the information chosen over the different search processes in a simple, orderly manner:
- Browser tags.
- On-line bookmarks (social).
- Personal notes.
- Content syndication (RSS).
Making storage processes automatic makes management easier when it comes to using a combination of different tools. Several actions may be scheduled, such as storing browser tags in a place in the cloud without having to do it manually.
This point is explained in detail in the section “Automation in information management” in the resource “Guidelines to optimise the organisation of digital information”.