A personalised current awareness service for library and information services staff: an overview of the NewsAgent for Libraries project

NewsAgent for Libraries is one of the projects funded by the Electronic Libraries Programme in the UK. Following a brief historical account of the original ideas behind the project, the main stages in developing the project - which aims to create a userconfigurable electronic news and current-awareness service for library and information professionals with a mixture of content streams, including metadata - are described. Users' interests are specified by profiles which are then matched with incoming records so that users are alerted by e-mail of items of potential interest. Examples of creating profiles and of some of the "input feeds" in the project are given as well as an example of the use of the Dublin Core metadata format for describing resources covered in NewsAgent.