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SENDI: Current Awareness

A Library Services Subject Guide

Document Summary Service

The Document Summary Service is a really useful current awareness tool published by the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol, who each month release a series of documents summarising key changes to UK educational policy.

BGU students and staff are permitted to use the summaries for educational purposes but are not permitted to share them with third parties. To view the current month's summaries click here. An access code is required and is available from the Library's Blackboard site under Password Protected Resources. Previous summaries can be viewed via the Archive button.

News Syndication

RSS stands for rich site summary or really simple syndication.  It's a format for funnelling constantly updated information, like news, from different web sources into a single point of access, meaning you only have to visit one site instead of several. You may have noticed the RSS icon on webpages before but not realised what it was; it's a small orange box containing what looks like a wi-fi symbol (put 'rss icon' into a Google image search to see what one looks like).

To use RSS you will need to sign up to a feed reader or news aggregator like for example Digg or Feedly and, when you're ready, go to the sites you are interested in and subscribe to the RSS feeds.  You can then view the aggregated feeds via your chosen reader.

Apps like News360 and Flipboard do a similar job but in a slightly different way.

Gallery

A neon news sign
A newspaper
People being interviewed near Big Ben

Issues Series

Issues Online is one of our library databases but is also a great current awareness tool and covers over 60 topics including things like families and relationships, mental health, addiction and body image.  The series is also published in print and we receive twelve new titles a year, each one focusing on a different issue; if you perform a WorldCat search using the phrase pb:"independence" you will see a list of all the printed titles available to borrow.

Image attribution

News: all the news by Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr under a CC BY 2.0 Creative Commons Licence.
Website: Breaking News by Doug on Flickr under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Creative Commons Licence.
Outside broadcast: talking heads by Live4Soccer on Flickr under a CC BY-ND 2.0 Creative Commons Licence
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