Current Awareness Services at the Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University

Faculty, staff and students at Cornell have a number of options for keeping up-to-date with the literatrure on particular topics, written by certain authors, or published in various journals. In addition to services provided by the Library staff, you can take a do-it-yourself approach using a number of different resources noted below.

I. Library-Provided Services

Literature Search Automatic Updates

Reference staff of the Flower-Sprecher Veterinary Library can provide computer-assisted current awareness of the latest literature soon after it is published. The most recent references matching the profile are sent to you on paper or via e-mail. In addition to the citation (author, title, source), the results may include subject headings and/or abstracts whenever available. This service is available for any of the major databases currently accessed by the Library, including the most important files for veterinary medicine: MEDLINE, BIOSIS, and CAB Abstracts. There is no cost for this service for those in the Cornell Community. For others, the cost varies depending upon the number of topics (searches), the database, and the number of citations produced. Contact Susanne Whitaker, Reference Librarian, at skw2@cornell.edu or vetref@cornell.edu, or call (607) 253-3499 for more information or to set up one or more monthly searches.

After you have scanned the list of citations and want a copy of the full text of any of the articles cited, simply mark the desired references and return the search pages along with your Cornell Procurement card number or departmental account number. The copies held by the Flower-Sprecher Library will be forwarded by mail, items held in other campus libraries will be marked and returned, and interlibrary loan requests will be placed for titles not held on campus. Due to Copyright Law restrictions, we are permitted to make only one copy of one article per issue.

MyContents is a table of contents service that is part of a collection of personal services provided by the Cornell University Library. It enables you to receive the tables-of-contents (TOC) of journals of interest to you. The TOCs are automatically forwarded to your e-mailbox on a regular basis. To sign up and select journal titles, connect to the MyLibrary page and select MyContents for instructions or contact the reference staff to give you assistance.

MyUpdates provides you a bi-weekly e-mailed list of new books and other resources on topics of your choice. To sign up, connect to the MyLibrary page and select MyUpdates for instructions, or contact the reference staff to give you assistance.

II. Self-Service Options

CAB Abstracts, BIOSIS, and Agricola
You can conduct searches of these databases available on the Library Gateway for current awareness updates as well as comprehensive retrospective searching.

Focus On: Veterinary Science and Medicine
The Institute for Scientific Information issues the 3-1/4" update diskettes monthly covering the latest literature in veterinary medicine. The current and backfile of disks are available for loan from the reserve desk of the Flower-Sprecher Library. Focus On is not yet available on the network.

PubMed MEDLINE
You can search the PubMed MEDLINE biomedical literature database directly at http://resolver.library.cornell.edu/misc/apw3190 or from the Library Gateway to produce current awareness updates on a monthly or other regular schedule. Simply conduct your subject, author or journal search, then apply "limits" to select "30 days" under the Entrez date pull-down menu or choose a specific Entrez date range, such as 2003-01-20 to 2003-02-09. You can also perform monthly or other updates using PubMed's Cubby function.