Dr Ina Fourie 

Biography

Dr Ina Fourie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.  She teaches aspects of information organisation and retrieval at undergraduate and postgraduate level.  Her research interests include information seeking behaviour, current awareness services, instructional design, and distance and telematic teaching.  She is a member of CILIP, ASIS&T, and a number of local associations.

Abstract

Current awareness services (CAS) for health professionals

Current awareness services (CAS) have for many years been offered by libraries and information services to keep people abreast of their fields. Many CAS are now available for free via the World-wide web (WWW). Such services include table of content services, electronic newsletters, book alerting services, conference announcements, WWW discussion groups, weblogs, RSS feeds, information monitoring services, web pages with newsworthy content and article alerting or Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) services. This can put any healthcare professional with access to the Internet and the know-how to use such services in a position to track new developments in his/her field.

The purpose of the presentation is to show how the use of CAS can be planned and exploited to the benefit of health care professionals.

The presentation will offer guidelines on how librarians can help health care professionals to use CAS, especially those available for free via the WWW. The following aspects will be covered: background to CAS; meaning of CAS, alerting services and SDI; value of CAS; steps in planning CAS; types of CAS available via the WWW; problems that may be expected, and assessing the value of CAS for health professionals. Under planning we will consider a situation analysis, skills assessment, assessment of knowledge and experience, assessment of attitude, selection of CAS, mapping selected CAS against the needs, and the need for ongoing monitoring and adaptation.

A variety of types of CAS will be discussed. Although the focus will be on services available for free, commercial and subscription services will also be covered. Examples will focus on oncology nursing to show the spectrum of services available. It will also be shown how similar examples can be identified for other health care professionals such as hospital administrators, health care trainers, et cetera.

This page was last updated on: 17 May, 2006