The months of December and January always mark for me the time when I start to see “top 10” lists appearing on discussion forums, blogs, websites, and via direct mass email services. For some reason they catch my attention and peak my curiosity. Depending on the theme of the list, I often wonder if I can predict what the list might reveal!
Some of the lists I review are for sheer entertainment, for example:
- The 10 Best Books of 2017 (as selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review)
- The Top 10 Gadgets of 2017
Other lists provide useful insights and prompt me to reflect on how the MSK Library is supporting our knowledge workers, and to consider whether there are any additional approaches that we should be using to engage our library user community.
- The Top 10 Library Stories of 2017 (Publishers Weekly looks back at stories that captivated the publishing world)
- Top 10 Trends at the 2017 Charleston Library Conference (as shared by Morgan Kubelka, Library Services, Wiley)
- OCLC Top Stories of 2017
- NLM IN FOCUS – a look inside the U.S. National Library of Medicine (not really a top 10 list but still very interesting to review!)
And still other lists provide me with a chance to see what the top science research stories were last year — how scientists impacted the world of scholarly communication by sharing their research findings and how interested readers reacted.
- 2017 Breakthrough of the Year from Science (AAAS)
- The 2017 in news: The science events that shaped the year from Nature
- The Altmetric Top 100 – what academic research caught the public imagination in 2017?
- Highly Cited Researchers in 2017 from Clarivate Analytics – see who’s made the list from MSK
I hope you take a moment to view my “top 10” list from 2017 and if you have one that you think worth sharing, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services and Avid List Reader