Keeping Up-To-Date : Current Awareness

While often neglected, follow-up is an important step in the awareness cycle.

Follow-ups are relevant to make sure you still have everything covered.

The questions you should ask yourself regularly are:

• Is my informational need still valid?

• Are there new sources to add or sources that should be removed for lack of relevance?

• Are there sources that do not generate any information? If so, is the problem with the collection tool or rather with the source’s contents?

• Are there any search strategies to adjust (which either generate too many results that have little relevance or only a few results that are really relevant)?

In order to evaluate your current awareness activities, keep statistics about the number of articles read, collected, and used with your awareness plan.