Current awareness services at Tilburg University

Library automation in the past twenty years has concentrated on the use of computers in traditional library services. First of all administrative processes were automated; next, the card catalogue was transformed into an Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC). These traditional processes were very much book‐oriented, while in the same period the importance of journals in the scientific process has grown dramatically. To cope with the growing demand for disclosure of articles, mainly outside the library world, abstracting and indexing services (AIS) emerged. However, some characteristics of AISs mean that library users use them less than OPAC. This was one reason why Tilburg University started the Online Contents project in 1989. The aim of this project was to give users information about articles in the journals collection similar to that given for books. This is a service comparable to ISI's well‐known Current Contents, but mapped on the journals collection at Tilburg University.