A current awareness system for Namakwa Teachers Resource Center

Abstract

The study was carried out at Namakwa Teachers’ Resource Center. The aim of the study was to design a Current Awareness Service System in order to improve on the current methods used by the resource center and to help users get easy access to alerts about new publications brought to the resource center at their convenience. The objectives that guided the project were to establish the status of Current Awareness Services at Namakwa Teachers’ Resource Center, to find out how Current Awareness Services are offered at Namakwa Teachers’ Resource Center, to identify challenges faced when carrying out Current Awareness Services at Namakwa Teachers’ Resource Center, toidentify user requirements for Current Awareness Services at Namakwa Teachers’ Resource center and to design a Current Awareness Service System for Namakwa Teachers’ Resource Center. The researcher used a descriptive research design to conduct the study.The total population was 775 from which a sample of 52 respondents was drawn and it included teachers, tutors and librarians .The methods used to collect data included interviews, issuing of self administered questionnaires and it also involved data analysis and ethical considerations Major findings of the study were identified according to the respondents’ views over Current Awareness Services provided by the resource centre for example use of noticeboards, citation alert services among others, challenges faced with offering Current Awareness Services for example some Current Awareness Services are not readily available, most of the CAS programs are not convenient, inappropriate display of new arrivals and delay in delivering current awareness information. The proposed Current Awareness Service System for Namakwa Teachers’ Resource Centre was designed with the employment of ICT knowledge that is hyper text pre processor, XAMMP software and MSQL as the database server. It is able to send notifications to users’ mobile phones, face book timelines, twitter as well as Gmail accounts and this will be convenient in alerting users about the new acquisitions. The researcher’s recommendations for the study were; use of social media networks, provision of comprehensive orientation on CAS to resource center users, publicizing Current Awareness Services and conducting user education programs regularly to train users on how to use different types of CAS.