Current Awareness Afternoon organised by JIBS User Group

21st September
2-5pm
Lecture Room A, Oxford University Computing Services, Oxford

JIBS (the JIsc assisted Bibliographic Services User Group) is helping to
organise an afternoon on Current Awareness Issues. Attendance at this will
be free, but you will need to register beforehand. More details are given
below, but if you do wish to attend this please send your name and e-mail
address to Dr Stuart Lee (c/o [log in to unmask]). 

DETAILS
------
The cessation of the BIDS ISI service at the end of July 2000 also brought
an end to the popular AutoJournals alerting service, which enabled
students, researchers and academics alike to set up personalised current
awareness services based on cluster profiles of core journal in their
subject area. This has initiated a debate on the provision of current
awareness services in the academic sector, at a time when the desktop
delivery of timely and relevant information is increasingly important.

A Table of Contents Service to replace Autojournals was announced by MIMAS
(Manchester Information & Associated Services) and the British Library over
summer. MIMAS has been awarded a contract to make the British Library's
Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC) database, on which the BL 'inside'
service is based, freely available via the Web for the UK HE community from
September 2000. This will provide access to a comprehensive
multidisciplinary database of over 15 million articles and conference
papers. Science, medicine, engineering, business, industry, law, finance,
humanities and the arts are covered extensively.

One planned feature of the new resource is that it will provide a current
awareness e-mail service both for Tables of Contents (TOCs) and for subject
specific searches. Users will be able to identify a list of key journals
for a given discipline and set up a regular personal alerting service.
Every time a new issue is added to the database they will be emailed
directly with the current contents. Articles and papers are added to the
database within 72 hours of the receipt of a new journal or conference, and
10,000 new records are added every day.

The BL 'inside' service has retrospective bibliographic coverage going back
to 1993, and provides access to over 20,000 current journals that can be
searched at article level and over 70,000 conference proceedings that can
be searched at paper level.

However, a date for the provision of a fully ATHENS-compliant ETOCs service
has yet to be set, and there are a number of alternative services and
internet resources that are also available.

The JIBS User Group is pleased to announce an afternoon meeting which allow
librarians and information professionals to assess the latest current
awareness services on offer and to investigate local initiatives and
practices.

There will be presentations from BL/MIMAS, Ingenta - Uncover and ISI -
Current Contents Connect.

Date:	Thursday 21st September.

Time: 	2 - 5 pm

Venue: Lecture Room A, Oxford University Computing Services,
Oxford, OX2 6NN.

Email Dr Stuart D Lee c/o:

[log in to unmask]

for more information.







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