How LIS Professionals Can Use Alerting Services
Ina Fourie · Chandos Publishing eBooks · 2006
This book focuses on the usefulnessof alerting services for LIS professionals. It is a valuable and useful resource as it draws attention to the new and existing current awareness services which can be easily retrieved for updating ones information data banks.The availability of these services does not alwaysmean that they are exploited for advancement of knowledge either by individuals or groups. This book provides a variety of definitions of current awarenessservices by severalauthors. The book is divided into seven chapters, a detailed bibliogr~phy and an alphabetical index at the end. In the introductory chapter, the author explains about the need for alerting services and reasonswhy professionals must use these services. Shedescribes how the challengesaffect the professionals in their practice and how they can monitor such challenges through alerting services. For example, she says that there is a need for information professionals to understand their own information behaviour in order for them to make use of the alerting services to improve their knowledge generation. In Chapter Two, the author explains the concepts of alerting servicesand the early development of current awareness services (CAS), and the rationale for offering these services. Chapter Three explains the relationship between the environment and the LISprofessionals in practice, aswell as LISeducators. The variety of alerting servicesavailablefor the benefit of LISprofessionalsare dealt with in the next chapter. The web