Page 259 - DLIS007_LIBRARY AUTOMATION

Library Automation

Notes needs of an individual or group, and recording them so that notifications may be sent to those
individuals or groups to whose needs they are related”.
According to S.R. Ranganathan “Service listing the document appearing during a period covered
and without being selected to suit the requirement of a reader or a specific topic under
investigation”.

Alerts of items in a library user’s areas of interest; a publication, or a system designed by
librarians, to alert readers and researchers to recently published literature in a field, or on a
specific topic.

Example: The table of contents for new issues of selected journals or new search results
for a specified query is e-mailed to a user.
Current awareness services assist you with keeping up-to-date with new publications in your
subject area. For example, most journal indexes and databases allow you to set up a profile
where your search can be automatically run periodically and the results emailed to you. Most
databases also allow you to set up alerts to email you the table of contents of a journal each time
that a new issue is published and added to the database.

A number of different services are available:
Journal alerts – It receive the table of contents each time an issue is published, or save a
search for a topic and have it run automatically every day, week or month.

Book alerts – It find out about new books purchased by the Library or set up alerts to find
out about new books published around the world.

Web alerts – To be notified of new or changed web pages, the same as you can for Journal
articles and books.
Citation Alerts – It find out when someone has cited an article of interest.

Discussion Lists – Discussion list use email to communicate with a group of people with
similar interests.
Conferences – To be notified of upcoming conferences and calls for papers.

RSS feeds – It use software that allows you to gather the RSS feeds from various sites and
then displays them for you to read.
FYI – This page provides some hints and tips on how to manage current awareness services.

!
Caution Not all current awareness services used to be run this way; technology has
improved the library staff workload of providing a current awareness service.
Information seekers use the following conventional channels to know the current developments
in their areas of interest:
Communication, oral or written, received from colleague working in similar area of
research.

Regular scanning of current awareness lists such as list of additions, forthcoming or current
contents, etc. brought out by various agencies and primary sources of information received
in libraries/information centres.

Preprints received from authors.
Reviews of publications appeared in primary sources.

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