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

This page:
Current Awareness Web Sites | Custom Alert Services

Current Awareness Web Sites

• Best Free Reference Websites - Annual list (American Library Association, Reference and Users Services Association)
• Free Pint - Reviews Web sites in many areas (focus on business); newsletter comes out twice a month; archives available
• INFOdocket - Where librarian Gary Price reports his latest discoveries (Library Journal)
• Internet Resources Newsletter - Monthly (last issue Dec. 2009) 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
• Archives
• Internet Scout Weblog
• Research Buzz
• ResourceShelf

Web Directory of Current Awareness Sites:

Sites that link to many other current awareness Web pages

• Web Savvy (Cyberlibrarians' Rest Stop)

Custom Alert Services

Keyword Monitoring:

These sites will watch the web — or parts of it, such as social media sites — for keywords or terms. For example, you might want to be alerted when your name or company is mentioned on the web.

• Giga Alert
• Google Alerts
• Mention
• Yahoo Alerts

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 Notes (formerly Watchit.us)
• Distill Web Monitor - Firefox extension (formerly AlertBox)
• Follow That Page
• Infominder
• Tracerlock - Even works with news sites
• TrackEngine
• Trackle
• Versionista - Get notified of changes and see side-by-side differences
• VisualPing - Absorbed ChangeDetection (also available as a Chrome extension)
• Watch That Page
• WebSite Watcher - $40 download (free trial)

Directories of Monitoring Sources:

• Free Keyword Monitoring Services
• Web Page Change Detection Resources (Steven Bell)

Other Ways to Keep Up with Your Field Online:

Many of these ideas come from ResourceShelf

• 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

Books

• Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web by Tara Calishain (New Riders, 2007)
  (Find it in a library)
• Keeping Current: Advanced Internet Strategies to Meet Librarian and Patron Needs by Steven M. Cohen (ALA Editions, 2003)
  (Find it in a library)