The changing face of current awareness reporting in law libraries

In response to budgetary concerns and feedback from users, the New York Law School's Mendik Library needed to streamline the way it reported current law journal table of contents (TOC) information to its users. As part of this streamlining process, the librarians discovered that most of the journals they provided in paper had web pages that provided full access to all articles in their current issues. The librarians responded to this opportunity by building web pages that provided links to these journals and noted when a new issue had just appeared. The purpose of this paper is to assess the status of current awareness information in the field of legal journals and uncover the options for best using them.

The library worked from a list of journals that they purchased through paper subscriptions. They determined the web page location of each and then checked whether the journal provided TOC data only, full text through internet protocol recognition or open full text for at least the current issue.

More than 60 percent of the law journals that Mendik purchased had online TOC available with full, free access to the content.

Librarians can begin to explore replacing TOC reporting with virtual journal shelves that contain full content to the articles.