Current Awareness Streams

Are plentiful. And in such a situation it is often the obvious that gets overlooked. There are many places you can turn to for keeping up to date, and each has something different to offer, be it in content, presentation or opinion. Below are some of the main resources available electronically for current awareness.

Email Alerts - of course. Subscription and non, although many are paid email alerts. Often publishers will offer particular collections of articles via email, not accessible on a website or RSS feed, for example, to enhance the value of that email alert.

RSS Feeds - mainly free. Most websites now offer RSS feeds in various forms. Large news sites will tend to have feeds for each section. On a smaller site, a blog or specific journal for example, often you will have just one feed for all the site updates.

Blogs - tend to offer feeds or email updates, but I point out blogs separately because the value is not only in the posts, but often the comments as well. Many blogs now offer feeds for comment streams too.

Social Media - in its various forms. For the sake of brevity I group in this category the many social websites and tools, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Slideshare, YouTube. They are all of course vastly different and deserve individual discussions, but let us put them together here under the banner of “sharing”. We are well into opinion territory here, but when used well there is a huge amount of value to be gained form each of these.

Journals - for more in-depth, subject specific information. Most journals are now available in electronic form as well.

Websites - good old fashioned websites. Perhaps an RSS feed is too broad, or too specific. Perhaps they have no email option. Website scraping is another way to get the information you need.

Crowdsourcing options - which is linked to sharing, of course. Listservs, recommendations, “have you read this article” functionality. As the quantity of information never ceases growing, this option increases in value. If I may interject - we are working on tools to fit this in to the Linex platform, watch this space.

What have I left out of this list?

This started out as a list for my own benefit, to focus on what I needed. But I can’t end it without mentioning Linex: once you have all these streams you need to bring them together and then filter down to the content you need. I hope you are aware: this is what Linex does for you.