Push Technology for leveraging Current Awareness Services on World Wide Web: Opportunities for Cyber Librarian

Abstract

With growing interest in the Internet, more specifically, the World Wide Web, over the past few years and rapid growth in the number of users, the volume of information carried by the Internet has increased dramatically both in sheer size and diversity. In addition, vast amount of information on the Web is publicly available to users with uncontrolled, unstructured, and drastically changing nature. Internet search engines, meta-search engines and subject directories have contributed, to a certain extent, in finding information required by the user. However, it is a time consuming task because the user has to actively search relevant information. In the context of Internet and World Wide Web, keeping completely current with all latest information available is an impossible task. But, majority of services such as the Current Awareness Services, alert service table of contents of journals, new books, standards, patents, Web page monitors, E-Newsletter and daily news digests, etc. are based on the concept called push technology for delivering latest literature right to the end-user’s desktop through e-mail as soon as published. When full-fledged features of the push technology are utilized for providing current awareness service using Web resources, it will not only open new opportunities to the librarians but also to the end-users to keep up-to-date with latest literature. The article describes the opportunities open for the Cyber Librarian, advantages and down sides of push technology, push models, types of notifications and user interfaces, and active current awareness services on World Wide Web that are relevant to the library profession.