It's a good question. If you have access to Current Contents Connect,
http://scientific.thomson.com/products/ccc/ it offers multidisciplinary
coverage of journal contents, and you can sign up for e-mail alerts on
topics, authors, keywords. ScieFinder Scholar also is useful for current
awareness. Many academic journals offer table of content alert services
by e-mail.
For your patron, and for open access patrons generally, the Public
Library of Science, PLOS may help; the link below describes their
e-alert services.
http://www.plos.org/connect.html
Popular science and technology magazines online, science sections of
major newspapers, (The New York Times, Science, Nature) and
subject-specific scholarly and popular science communities, including
scholarly societies and larger professional associations, with their
related e-newsletters and e-portals, provide much of the electronic
version of scanning the browsing section of a good periodicals library.
For research news, try Science Watch http://sciencewatch.com/
You can sign up for e-alerts at Google News, but must be specific in
defining terms. In advanced Google Scholar, you can date restrict, or,
once you have executed a search, you can click on the hyper-linked words
RECENT NEWS, at the top.
I haven't used SciTopia, but it is supposed to offer open access table
of contents alerts:
Scitopia.org
currently accesses the electronic libraries of these thirteen
participating sci-tech societies:
* American Geophysical Union (AGU; www.agu.org)
* American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA;
www.aiaa.org)
* American Institute of Physics (AIP; www.aip.org)
* American Physical Society (APS; www.aps.org)
* American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE; www.asce.org)
* American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME; www.asme.org)
* The Electrochemical Society (ECS; www.electrochem.org)
* IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.;
www.ieee.org)
* Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP; www.iop.org)
* Optical Society of America (OSA; www.osa.org)
* SPIE (International Society for Optical Engineering;
http://www.spie.org)
* SAE International (Society of Automotive Engineers; www.sae.org)
* Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM; www.siam.org)
Patricia Pettijohn
Head, Collection Development & Technical Services
Nelson Poynter Memorial Library
University of South Florida Saint Petersburg
140 Seventh Avenue South, POY 118
Saint Petersburg, Florida 33701
ppettijohn@nelson.usf.edu
727-873-4407
" I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day,
the dark sacred night
And I think to myself: what a wonderful world. "
~ Louis Armstrong
-----Original Message-----
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum
[mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Thompson, Allison
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 9:33 AM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] Cross-discipline journal discovery
In the McMaster libraries, we have done away with current issue displays
(as of last week); all issues are shelved in the stacks once they
arrive.
I had a patron come in with a very interesting question: Now that the
current journal issues are not displayed, what means of serendipitous
discovery of journal content across disciplines is there?
Though his specialty is Biochemistry, he used to go to our science
library to look at the new issues of ALL journals on display
(mathematics, computer science, etc.) He now believes that because the
current issues are 'hidden' and you have to know what you are looking
for to find them, that his research will suffer from lack of a wider
viewpoint.
I pointed him to databases, RSS alerts and publisher's webpages, but in
these instances you still have to know a little something about what you
are looking for before you find it.
Does anyone have any other suggestions for cross-discipline journal
discovery?
Are there websites you know of that meet this need? Or do your libraries
have 'homemade' solutions?
Your input is appreciated!
Sincerely, Allison
__________________________________
Allison Thompson
eResources Librarian
Health Sciences Library
McMaster University
Hamilton, ON
905-525-9140 ext. 22609
http://hsl.mcmaster.ca
