Insight 2 from Research Focus - should you opt out of current awareness provision?
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

In the second of the insights from Jinfo's Research Focus, "Content and technology for current awareness", Robin Neidorf raises the provocative question of whether you still need to provide a formal current awareness service.

Item

It might be time to stop delivering current awareness altogether. Don't assume this service remains a "must have", just because it was a decade ago.

In times of tightened budgets and increased pressure on information staff, more and more information centres are opting to eliminate or significantly reduce traditional current awareness services. If you're constantly fighting pressure to justify the expense of delivering this service, perhaps it's time to stop fighting.

You may feel an almost visceral resistance to ending or curtailing current awareness. These services may be one of your best forms of outreach to users on a regular basis. You probably feel strongly about the need to provide valid and up-to-date alerting to your user base. And current awareness has been delivered in a particular way for a long time.

But none of those reasons may be good enough to maintain a service that our customers tell us can take up to 15 hours a week or more to deliver... not to mention the cost of content and technology to support it.

Jinfo suggests: examine your biases, and face the new reality

It's time to set biases aside and take a hard look at the ongoing need for current awareness service as you are delivering it today. Consider the following:

• It's getting easier all the time for users to manage their own alerting on a "good enough" basis

• If visibility of the information centre to user groups is a key objective of delivering current awareness, this too can be better achieved in ways that are more measurable and eat up fewer resources.

Conduct a thought exercise, starting from nothing. Describe the needs that are met through current awareness today, and then consider how you would address these needs if you were starting from scratch today. How well do the results of this thought exercise match up with current awareness as you are delivering it?

Support from Jinfo: leverage our research and experience

The content in the recent Research Focus, "Content and technology for current awareness", provides research-based analysis, tips and examples of different approaches to evaluating if it's time to opt out of providing current awareness services. 

Jinfo Consulting can also help you evaluate your provision of current awareness to make sure this service still aligns with your priorities.

These items from the Research Focus support your assessment: 

• What does artificial intelligence mean for current awareness?
• The developing landscape for content platforms
• Keeping up with the changing face of news
• What's the best format to deliver current awareness?
• Staying on top of your current awareness service
• What does declining usage reveal about my current awareness service?
• Mini review of Factiva - recent enhancements
• Mini review of Nexis - recent enhancements

The main lessons learned from this three-month Research Focus, plus a thematic index to all content published, are listed in the report Insights and actions from the Research Focus "Content and technology for current awareness". Visit the Research Focus page to get your copy.

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