Roy Tennant distributed a post today from “The Current Cites Team” noting that Current Cites is 15 years old this month.
For those of you who don’t know Current Cites [this link gets you the subscription page; the earlier one is for online browsing of the archives], I’ll quote a bit of the post:
The monthly electronic newsletter features citations and evaluative abstracts of articles in information technology and librarianship considered by the Current Cites team as the most significant for that month. Sources of citations include professional magazines, journals, web sites, and occasionally books. The newsletter goes out to a subscription base of over 3,000 individual subscribers and is either forwarded or featured in additional mailing lists, online forums, paper publications, and blogs. Each issue typically contains about a dozen one-paragraph citations, distributed toward the end of each month. Currency is the publication’s strength, with some sources appearing only days (or hours!) before it is cited and published in Current Cites.
Fifteen years–as a “volunteer operation, with no budget to its name but simply a teamof committed individuals.” The team currently includes even “tech-savvy librarians.”
I won’t quite go so far as to say Cites & Insights (which was noted in Current Cites when it first appeared) would never have happened without Current Cites as a shining example of nontraditional publishing in the library field–there’s a cause:effect relationship I’m not sure of.
I will say that Current Cites has indeed been such a shining example (and is one of several reasons that lists won’t die any time soon).
Congratulations, Roy and the team. I wouldn’t miss Current Cites–or, rather, I would miss it if it was gone.
