Keeping up to date in your subject of study

Current awareness services enable you to keep right up to date with new literature in your subject. Electronic resources for current awareness are fast and efficient, but there is a bewildering number and variety of them ; the following is a simplified overview of the  services that are available.

Current awareness services come in two basic forms:

Active services automatically deliver current information to you, either to your mailbox or as RSS feeds. Example - email alerting service delivering tables of contents of the latest issues of selected journals to your mailbox.

Passive services contain current information but you have to visit the information source yourself and extract the information from it. Example - a web-based database containing current journal article information.

1. Books

(a) New books in AU libraries - use the "New Books" tab on the Voyager catalogue search page. You can search by keyword or by classmark for books received in the most recent 1-4 months.

(b) New books published (or forthcoming) anywhere :

(i) Global Books in Print. http://www.globalbooksinprint.com/bip/

This is the best site for books. Example (in July 2009) : Select all markets - forthcoming; enter glaciers as keyword = 26 hits; or using truncation, enter glaci* (to cover glacier, glaciers, glaciation, glacial etc.) = 79 hits, mainly covering the forthcoming 12 months.

(ii) Many publishers offer their own current awareness services on their websites, e.g. Elsevier Science : http://www.elsevierdirect.com/index.jsp . Select a subject from the list on the left and scroll down; there are sections entitled "Just Published" and "Coming Soon." Other examples are Wiley-Blackwell  http://www.wiley.com/bw/ealerts/? and Sage publications http://www.uk.sagepub.com/home.nav .

2. Journals

This is by far the most useful type of current awareness service, as most research is published as journal articles. There are two basic types of service here :

(a) Table-of-contents (TOC) services, where the tables of contents of your chosen journals are sent to you whenever a new issue is published. Many publishers offer this sort of service, as do some libraries, e.g. the British Library.

(b) Pre-defined keyword searches, as in a Web of Knowledge search, where the service sends details of any newly published article that matches your search strategy.

ZETOC    http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/  from the British Library has an alerting service which provides both of these types of search. This is called ZETOC Alert, and full instructions on setting up searches here are available at http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/alertguide.html .You can put up to 50 journal titles or pre-defined searches into an Alert list, and have as many lists as you like. The great strength of ZETOC Alert is that it is based on a huge set of current journals, i.e. the 20,000+  journals currently received by the British Library, and also that both types of search are absolutely free.

3. Other types of current awareness services include the following:

(1) Intute. A great place to find web resources in all subjects, e.g. http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/latest.html

This "latest" page give the 50 most recent websites to be added to the site.

(2) Professional Bodies/Forthcoming conferences.

Become familiar with the web pages of the main professional bodies in your subject area - these can be a great source of current information about many things, e.g. recent publications and developments, forthcoming conferences, etc. A good list of professional bodies and scholarly societies can be found at : http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/society/overview.html ,and a brilliant subject listing of these is at http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/society/subjects_soc.html .Another excellent site is SciCentral http://www.scicentral.com/ ; this has a link to conferences, which includes Hum-molgen  http://hum-molgen.org/meetings/meetings/index.html which is great for biosciences, and also a link to All Conferences  http://www.allconferences.com/  which covers all subjects but perhaps not in as great detail as more specialized sites.

(3) Mailing lists. There will be specialized mailing lists in your subject area; a good listing can be found at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/mailinglists/category/index.htm ; this defaults to Art and Design but other subjects are listed on the right of the page.

(4) There will also be specialist blogs and wikis in your subject.