Current awareness services for web-based scholarly information sources

• Main Author: Mafa, Ntsopana Carol
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Current awareness services; Selective dissemination of information; Web publishing; Scholarly electronic publishing; Scholarly web sites
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/1857

M. Inf. === It has become increasingly difficult for end-users to locate, select and organise information published via the World Wide Web. This is largely due to the scattered nature of the Web and its ever-increasing use as publishing infrastructure. More scholarly information is also being published in multimedia format through the Web. Throughout the years, current awareness services and later Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) have provided the means for scholars to keep abreast of the literature in print sources. Today such information is also published via the Web, hence scholars need to have a mechanism to keep abreast of the information published in digital format. Research was conducted to investigate guidelines scholars could use to stay abreast of new Web content. The investigation employed both a literature survey and an empirical method of collecting research data. The literature survey was conducted to establish trends in current awareness services and SDI, the use of the Web for disseminating and retrieving digital information, the impact of the Web on the scholarly communication process and current methods for keeping up to date with Web content. Empirical research in the form of structured interviews was executed to establish the needs of scholars regarding the spectrum of current awareness services that provide Web-based sources. The findings obtained from structured interviews and by means of the literature survey were used to develop a set of guidelines scholars could use to stay abreast of information published via the Web.