The Bart’s Current Awareness Initiative

Abstract

Librarians in general, and medical librarians in particular, have swiftly adapted to the changes brought about by the widespread availability of PCs, CD-ROMs and networks. Now more than ever before, however, questions are raised about the librarian’s role in a world of bibliographic systems designed primarily for end-users, not for librarians. As far as current awareness services are concerned, can libraries cope with the delivery of information from an ever-increasing diversity of sources, some on diskette, others on CD-ROM, all with different output formats? And even if they can cope, why should librarians continue to take the trouble to supply current awareness services, now that end-users are provided with the means to search the literature for themselves? The current awareness programmes reported in the literature and the current awareness initiative at the Medical College of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, show that instead of giving a single answer to these questions, libraries have devised a rich variety of individual current awareness services, some of them very imaginative.