How can current awareness services (CAS) be used in the world of library acquisitions?

Acquisitions librarians operate in a dynamic environment requiring constant alertness to new developments. Current awareness services (CAS), especially those available for free through the World Wide Web (WWW), can help them to keep up with trends, publisher and vendor‐related information, developments in a particular field of acquisitions, events important to professional career development, new titles and conference announcements. A number of WWW types of CAS are discussed and examples are provided. These include table of content services, automatic notification from tables of contents, book alerting services, SDI or alerting services available through aggregate services, e‐newsletters, newspaper filtering services, monitoring through intelligent agents, Web site update notification services, Web pages with newsworthy content, discussion groups and electronic mailing lists, and personalised Web pages.