Guide to current awareness services

/ RCM library

Guide to current awareness services A new page on the RCM website lists a variety of tools for navigating the internet. Catherine Ebenezer explains how midwives can use them to gain information more efficiently.

Catherine

Ebenezer

is theRCM information systems manager

Appropriate current awareness is essential for midwives and other health professionals not only to keep up to date with clinical literature, but to respond effectively to changes in the working environment, notably within the NHS. Good current awareness services (CAS) should keep the user up to date, aid in the creation of new ideas, and save project time. From a library point of view, they should also facilitate exploitation of the printed and electronic journal stock. Typically nowadays a library does not act itself as a provider of CAS, but mediates a range of commercial or freely-available services to its readers (Rowley,1997). CAS essentially divide into two categories: those that support browsing, such as electronic bulletins, and those that support specific searching. This second sort is known as electronic selective dissemination of information (SDI). Below is a list of free services of both kinds accessible via the internet.

Monitoring changes in web pages •

Google Alerts: www.google.com/webalerts is more like a SDI service, in that an email is sent when there is new information on the internet matching the

•

ProFusion: www.profusion.com/default.asp is a service where page or search alerts can be set up

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WatchThatPage: www.watchthatpage.com/is a customisable free service that sets up page alerts.

search that was specified

Health news services •

•

on happenings within the HS, provided by the King's Fund library on behalf of the NeLH Management

Electronic tables of contents •

Holders of ATHENS accounts can use the ZeTOC (http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk) electronic tables of contents (eTOC) service. This provides alerts for tables of contents of journals in the British Library

•

A similar service, with unrestricted access, is available from Infotrieve (www4.infotrieve.com/ journals/toc_main.asp).

eTOCs of over 20000 jour-

nals are available, browsable by category or by title •

HighWire (http://highwire.stanford.edul) provides a facility for setting up email TOC alerts for a selection of journals. Registration is required, which is free

•

Many publishers and electronic journal aggregators are now providing free electronic alerting or eTOC services. Among these are Blackwell Synergy, see: www.blackwell-synergy.com and Cambridge Journals Online, see: http://journals.cambridge.org/ public/door

Subject-based •

•

alerting services

The free AMEDEO service: www.amedeo.com/ provides updates on articles, organised by clinical specialty with abstracts or citations available to download. There is also an eTOC service that lists journals by specialty - a single submission will select the relevant journals in a subject area for eTOC notification The NurseLinx Perinatal Newsletter: www.mdlinx.com/NurseLinx/index.cfm

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Specialist Library, and available via JISCmail E-health insider: www.e-health-insider.com/ index.cfm is a weekly newsletter providing an independent source of health informatics news. The website hosts an archive of news articles, a document library and discussion forums.

Saved searches on bibliographic

data bases

Within the NHS Dialog data bases available to NHS users as part of the NeLH, SDI alerts can be set up to automatically run searches against new content. Visit: http://nhs.dialog.com/Forms/HelpPages.htm and click on the link 'creating alerts' under 'user worksheets'

A note on RSS Most of the services listed use email as their delivery vehicle. Recently a technology called rich site summary, or alternatively, really simple syndication (RSS) has emerged as a tool for monitoring weblogs and CAS while avoiding email overload. RSS newsfeeds can be read within an application called a newsreader, simply by adding the URL of the feed to it (which ends in .xml). This may be a separate application or included with a browser or em ail client. A good free newsreader Feedreader is available to down load at: wwwJeedreader.com/. Any service that is set up with RSS feed capabilities and as such can be placed in an aggregator for viewing and updating displays this symbol: Em!

is sent out

most days. It provides useful coverage of midwifery, ,obstetric and specialist nursing literature, including updates to Cochrane Reviews. Inevitably much of the material covered is subscription-based.

Vol 7 Nog September 2004

SocietyGuardian health briefing: http://society.guardian.co.uk/healthbriefing is a weekly round-up of news for health professionals from the Society section of The Guardian newspaper ational electronic Library for Health News Alert: www.jiscmail.ac.uk!lists/schema.htmlis a weekly update

Reference Rowley J. (1997) The changing face of current awareness services. journal of Librarianship and Information Science 30(3): \77-83.

The official journal of the Royal College of Midwives

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