Keeping alert: the productive use of web-based current awareness Alison McNab JISC Collections Manager, Journals & Discovery Tools

Outline Productive use of your time Tips and tricks New possibilities for current awareness Current awareness for: –Yourself –Colleagues –Clients

Are you an informed professional? or suffering from information overload?

The Internet: cause or cure of information overload? Using the Internet for: –Communication –Content delivery What works well for current awareness? –Discussion lists, newsgroups and web logs –Monitoring changes to websites –New Internet resources –Internet technologies

What type of current information is required? Professional or general news items Conference and events information Journal articles and books Specialist information –New Internet resources –Official publications –Subject-specific sources

Managing the information flow (1) Managing –Good practice –Filtering –Sharing the load Managing references –Bibliographic software –Creating in-house databases –Sharing Bookmarks/Favorites Managing paper

Managing the information flow (2) Your sources –Do you catalogue them? –Can you re-use the data? Information gathering –Can you share the workload? –Are you duplicating effort? Obtaining feedback on your sources

Information delivery WWW –search facility –archive facility RSS weblogs WAP / PDAs Don’t forget: –Print – –Newsgroup / bulletin board –Bibliographic software

News items Breaking news Commentary Background information

Conference information Tracing conference papers and reports Identifying forthcoming conferences Planning a conference

Growth in journal titles

New journal articles by Title –Table of Contents Services (TOCs) by Subject –Via an aggregator –Article preprints –Saved searches on databases

Table of Contents services Collections of ToC services Publishers with ToC services ToC services on publishers websites

New possibilities RSS Weblogs PDAs/Wireless

RSS Rich/RDF Site Summary Used to create news channels for web sites –lightweight XML application for sharing metadata –widely used by news content providers to deliver news 'headlines' on the Internet –can syndicate content to third party web sites

Weblogs Trendy Vanity publishing? Potential for updating library users Potential for learning & teaching

PDAs

Monitoring webpages

Managing a current awareness service What is a current awareness service? –Column in print publications –Table of contents services –What’s New feature on websites –News monitoring services –SDIs from online hosts –Subject-specific CAS bulletins

Types of current awareness services Commercial Mediated Self-service and permutations of the above….

Issues Current current awareness –Breaking news –Monitoring websites –Pre-publication sources Integration with other services Confidential data Copyright!

Greg Notess SearchEngineShowdown

Current awareness ……. hitting the target