Web Current Awareness

The links on this page are useful for librarians or anyone who has a professional interest in keeping up with the most useful sites on the Web. Many of these sites will let you subscribe to their updates by e-mail or RSS. Some of my personal favorite haunts for each day of the week are listed on my Good Reading for Today page.

This page:
Current Awareness Web Sites | Custom Alert Services

Current Awareness Web Sites

• Digital Librarian's New Sites
• Free Pint - Reviews Web sites in many areas (focus on business); newsletter comes out twice a month; archives available
• Internet Resources Newsletter - Monthly with an emphasis on academic resources (Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland)
• Internet Scout Project
• The Scout Report - A weekly update of the best of the Internet. Started in 1994. See also:
• Internet Scout Weblog
• Scout Report archives
• Librarians' Internet Index: New This Week
• Neat New Stuff on the Net - By "librarian without walls" Marylaine Block
• Netsurfer Digest
• Research Buzz
• ResourceShelf - Weblog where librarian Gary Price lists his latest discoveries.
• Real-Time Information - Sites that tell you about stuff going on right Now
• See also Price's Direct Search site.
• This Week's Useful URLs - Bergen County (N.J.) Cooperative Library System
• The Virtual Chase - Emphasis on legal searching, but this site has more general news and links, too
• What's Hot on the Internet This Week - El Dorado County (Calif.) Library
• Yahoo Picks

Web Directories:

Sites that link to many other current awareness Web pages.

• Web Savvy (Cyberlibrarians' Rest Stop)
• See also Library Networking

Custom Alert Services (Web Site Tracking)

These sites offer services that track changes to Web pages. Most of these are Web-based services; WebSite Watcher, however, is client-based (i.e., you download software to your computer).

• Change Detection - Monitor pages for changes, or notify visitors of changes to your site
• Change Notes (formerly Watchit.us)
• Infominder
• Tracerlock - Even works with news sites
• TrackEngine
• Trackle
• Watch That Page
• WebSite Watcher - $40 download (free trial)

Directory:

• Web Page Change Detection Resources (Steven Bell)

Other Ways to Keep Up with Your Field Online:

Many of these ideas come from ResourceShelf, April 21, 2006.

• Use one of the above Web site tracking services to monitor the Web site of a researcher or university department you're interested in.

• Monitor the Web site for a conference at which relevant papers are likely.

• Do a keyword search on OAIster or other Open Archive Repositories, then track the search results page using one of the Web site tracking services above.

• Do a search using a Journal Index, then see if you can get e-mail or RSS updates. This may work on journal indexes available from your library, which are often of higher quality than the free indexes on the open Web.

• Get tables of contents of the current issue of a relevant journal. They are often available from journal publishers or services like Ingenta and Infotrieve.

• Get updates on new books from ISBN.nu, Amazon, or your library, which may offer RSS feeds of its new book lists.