Page 129 - DLIS006_INFORMATION SOURCES AND SERVICES

Information Sources and Services

Notes 6.6.3 Current Awareness Services

As studied earlier (Unit 5), CAS according to Luhn is an essential function of management to
make the members of its organization aware promptly of such new information which will
most likely contributes to performing their individual task with the highest possible degree of
competence. Modern procedures and techniques of CAS have included individual notification
of published information directed to individual professional scientist’s engineers and others.
The long-term purpose of the CAS is to provide a substitution for the circulation of new journal
to the users various electronic current products have been investigated that could partly provide
what the circulation of journal has provided over the years. They also had to be available via the
Web in order to allow the ultimate extension of the service to research students located at the
distance from the campus. Silverplatter, NISC, Ovid, Dialog and Faxon allow the user to save
profiles.
A library can provide this service through e-mail, which is easiest and common procedure.
Otherwise a library can refer or link directly to some location to their WebPages.

6.6.4 Electronic Selective Dissemination of Information

Most of the R&D and academic institute because of the tight teaching and research schedule, it
was found that scientists and faculty members of the institute were hard-pressed to personally
visit the library. Here an electronic SDI service was formulated to deliver current information of
interest to faculty members on their desktop. Through this service the Research Interest Profiles
(RIPs) of users are searched in a batch mode on the latest updates of EDB’s on a monthly basis and
the result are e-mailed to respective faculty members. Thus this service not only function as a
Current Awareness Tool, but also influenced the acquisition of information sources as well as
usage of other library services like document delivery, resource sharing and acquiring reprints.
For promoting E-SDI services on the web, library should create a link from the existing library
environment (i.e. E-SDI page is accessed by clicking the SDI siblink from the information service
link of library main page) and the different task followed provide the services can be traced by
hyper-navigating the active link. A general definition about E-SDI can be given on the basis of
H. P. Luhn’s original definition of SDI developed in 1958 which involves the matching of user
profile with the new materials, the notification to the users’ feedback from the users and the
modification of users’ profile. Further link outline the different step followed in delivering the
output, how the RIPs are constructed, answering the frequently asked question, feedback received
from the users, statistical details about the service, and a figurative representation of the whole
activity.

6.6.5 E-mail

First let me clear that e-mail is not at all web based library service. It is a web based excellent
media and most probably most popular media. And the library professionals can use this web
medium for various purposes specially for delivering some web based services.
The most easy and convenient method to access the web sources is e-mail. When a researcher
who registers his name and chose the content pages of some journals of publishers like
Elsevierscience, Pergamon Press and some other society publication, request for sending the
content page of the selected journal the publishers take care of sending the content in advance,
against the registered individual’s e-mail address. This helps as excellent current awareness
service to the scientists.

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