Current Awareness

What is Current Awareness?

Current Awareness is any tool that helps you stay on top of your specialty, profession or any topic in which you have interest.  Table of content services, automatically emailed alerts from databases and RSS feeds are all Current Awareness tools.

How can this Current Awareness Service help me?

Whether you are starting from scratch or you want to give your current tools a tune up, Ebling librarians can help build and tailor an effective system.  Having an organized and easy to use way to browse through the literature will surely save you time and frustration.  And you can do so from your work or home computer using a variety of familiar options such as email or your web browser.

Can I access the online full text of articles through a Current Awareness Service?

In most cases, yes.  When we speak with you, we’ll determine what we might need to tailor so that you get the most online full text possible.

Can I still have traditional table of contents sent to my email?

Although the age of routing paper table of contents is gone, many publishers offer to send table of contents from current issues to your email. We can help you determine whether email is the best method for you to receive table of contents.  Alternatively, we may be able to introduce you to new methods that would work even better for you.

Where can I read more about RSS as a Current Awareness tool and look at the journals I can access?

Take a look at our Current Awareness & RSS guide for more information..  Read about what RSS technology is and how you can use it. If you just want to see which journals have RSS feeds go straight to our electronic journal pages which have an RSS feed link for each journal as well as subject-based bundles of feeds.

Who can use this service?

This Current Awareness Service is intended for the UW-Madison community whether working and living in Madison or not. However, we are happy to speak to anyone about options available to you and connect you to others that can help.