7.9 Current awareness services
A current awareness service is a way of letting users know
about materials that have been newly received in the resource
centre. Current awareness services include:
- current awareness bulletins
- selective dissemination of information
- circulating documents
- displaying newly acquired materials and using noticeboards.
Current awareness bulletins contain details
of new materials, book reviews, announcements about meetings and
conferences, and news of resource centre activities. Current awareness
bulletins are particularly useful for larger resource centres,
or for resource centres whose users are widely dispersed. They
help users to keep up with a range of new developments. They also
help to generate specific enquiries, which resource centre staff
can deal with more efficiently than general enquiries. The practicalities
of producing a current awareness bulletin are similar to those
of producing a newsletter (
see Section
7.13: Newsletters).
Selective dissemination of information (SDI) means
notifying individual users, or groups of users, about materials
that will interest them. It is possible to keep up-to-date with
what different individuals or groups are interested in through
ongoing needs assessment work, advisory services and reference
interviews.
Circulating materials means passing materials
to individuals to pass in turn to others on a circulation list.
There is a disadvantage to this service, in that materials can
take a long time to reach the last person on the list. It is
often more useful to circulate a contents page than the actual
item.
Displaying newly arrived materials helps users
to notice new materials, and makes the resource centre look
lively and attractive. Noticeboards can be very useful for displaying
the contents pages of newly received periodical issues, or copies
of the covers of new books, reports and audiovisual materials.
Displays are useful for attracting the attention of non-regular
resource centre users, and visitors to the organisation.
next: 7.10 Abstracts
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