How to "become familiar with the literature", inter alia to find appropriate method to publish independent research? This is a more basic question than, and not a duplicate of, this question. That question was answered, basically, with "become familiar with the literature in that field" and read that literature.  So that question is answered, but leaves me with this more basic one.

I'm a senior software engineer albeit with only a BS in CS.  I'm not that in touch with new ideas in such as red-black trees (not new now but newer than my undergrad degree), the latest ideas on to optimize hash tables, and the like, except as they pick up use in commonly used libraries such as Boost, or otherwise spread in the industry. My questions are:


I'd like to be more of an early adopter.  How do I even find such journals or other publications?  Note I'm with a financial firm in Japan and I doubt it has any journal subscriptions.  I'm not sure how to see if any local universities make their libraries open to non-affiliated independent researchers.
I've developed a new type of memory pool that can maximize locality of reference of allocations.  That should allow an application to substantially improve performance.  I'd like to publish it, if 1) it's not "too practical" for a research journal and 2) if a survey of the literature shows no-one's already invented it.  OTOH, I don't know how to do that survey.


Alternately, is simply trying to put something like this in Boost or GNU libraries or on github the most reasonable approach?
Maybe look for review journals on the topic. In my area there are several such journals. Researchers often do a "state of the topic" paper on something they are working on. You can scan a few 100 review topic titles. Should take you three or four hours. Then find three or four articles that you can zero in on. You should be able to "surface" read these articles in a couple days. Your university librarian should be able to help you find appropriate review journals. Once you have those papers you can also read the citations they tell you are most important.