[Web4lib] Current Cites Turns 15 This Month

[Roy Tennant]

The popular current awareness service "Current Cites" turns 15 years  
old this month. The monthly electronic newsletter features citations  
and evaluative abstracts of articles in information technology and  
librarianship considered by the Current Cites team as the most  
significant for that month.  Sources of citations include  
professional magazines, journals, web sites and occasionally books.   
The newsletter goes out to a subscription base of over 3,000  
individual subscribers and is either forwarded or featured in  
additional mailing lists, online forums, paper publications, and  
blogs. Each issue typically contains about a dozen one-paragraph  
citations, distributed toward the end of each month. Currency is the  
publication's strength, with some sources appearing only days (or  
hours!) before it is cited and published in Current Cites.

Distribution was far different with Issue Number One.  That came out  
as a paper insert to the library newsletter at UC Berkeley.  The  
original intent was to provide an in-house guide to the rapidly  
expanding literature in information science.  Soon however, the first  
electronic version became available through the University of  
California MELVYL system.  Next came distribution through the PACS-L  
mailing list, and subsequently through a myriad of systems and  
protocols that reads like a glossary to technology in the 1990's:  
FTP, Gopher, WAIS, and finally the Web.  Most recently, Current Cites  
completed a move to WebJunction.org, a library support site managed  
by OCLC and supported in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates  
Foundation. Current Cites has always been a volunteer operation, with  
no budget to its name but simply a team of committed individuals.

The Current Cites team consists of 7 tech-savvy librarians.  Their  
contrasting interests and styles serves to give each annotation a  
distinctive personal touch.  This monthly dive into the literature in  
order to fish out the pearls is easily as rewarding to the team as  
the final product hopefully is to the public.  Otherwise it would be  
hard to explain the service's longevity.  Nevertheless, as founder  
and editor Roy Tennant admitted to American Libraries in 2001, "It  
still amazes me that we have continuously published this resource  
month after month for almost 11 years."  Make that 15 years!

Current Cites is available for online browsing at <http:// 
lists.webjunction.org/currentcites/> or email subscription at <http:// 
lists.webjunction.org/mailman/listinfo/currentcites>.

-- The Current Cites Team