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Unit 8: Current Awareness Services

Self Assessment Notes

Fill in the blanks:
1. The full form of RSS is Really simple ...... .
2. The full form of OPML is ...... .
3. The full form of CAS is ...... .

8.2 Need and Characteristics of Current Awareness Services

Information is the life-blood of research work. Research today depends on
retrospective as well as current information. An important source of current
information is journals or periodicals. A researcher has to keep himself updated
by regularly scanning journals related to his/her area of work. However, increasing
volume, specialization and interdisciplinary nature of research work have led to
the problem of information explosion, seepage and scattering. Added to this is
the escalating cost of journal publications.

These problems have been posing major challenge to information professionals for quite some time.
Indexing and abstracting periodicals, both in print form and CD-ROM databases have tried to
overcome this problem to some extent. They act as useful tools for identification of information.
Rapid developments in information and communications technologies and the reduced costs of
hardware, make possible new and better means of providing access to information, by affording
just in time information rather than just in case information.

Publishers of journals are shifting to electronic and on-line publishing to reduce time lag. They also
provide services like e-mail-based Table of Contents services like Link Alert from Springer Verlag
and Contents Direct from Elsevier, where by they push the Table of Contents of journals to the
desktop of researchers. This helps the researchers to locate articles that might be of interest to them.
But with a great number of journals being published, it is still difficult to identify articles of relevance.
To overcome these problem electronic versions of secondary services like Current Contents from
ISI and Uncover Reveal have come up. They are similar to indexing and abstracting periodicals.
They provide the Electronic Table of Contents of major publications, especially journals (often along
with the abstracts) according to the requirements of the users.
But once the user has identified articles of interest, locating the full text is still a problem. The
journal may be within the reach of the researcher, but he may not be aware of it. This information,
of the availability or non-availability of a journal of interest to a researcher in the local library will
greatly assist in the location of the full text of articles.

National Center for Science Information

National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), established in 1983,
is a premier information centre providing computer-based information services to the research and
academic community in Science and Technology all over the country. It provides different types of
information services using bibliographic databases and other resources. One such is the ‘Electronic
Table of Contents’ or ETOC service.

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