Keeping alert: the productive use of web-based current awareness Alison McNab JISC Collections...

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

Transcript of Keeping alert: the productive use of web-based current awareness Alison McNab JISC Collections...

Keeping alert: the productive use of web-based current awareness

Alison McNabJISC 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 email– 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– Email– 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

Growth in journal titles 1932-1997

0

20000

40000

60000

80000

100000

120000

140000

160000

180000

1932 1951 1959 1970 1980 1987 1991 1997

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 e-mail 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 NotessSearchEngineShowdown

Current awareness …….

hitting the target