Current Awareness Service - What It Is ?

Although Current Awareness Service (CAS) is a term of recent origin in the vocabulary of special librarians and information specialists a search for its definition or what it stands for leaves one confused. This can be not iced from Guha [1) when he says "it is difficult to draw a sharp line of demarcation between a current awareness service and any other type of indexing and abstracting service. " Bottle [2) has coined altogether a new name "General alerting service" as he finds CAS "means so many different things to differ-ent people". An examination of the CAS in the country leaves a hazy picture. An attempt is made in this paper to understand what a CAS is and how far the existing dissemination services in the country really fall under this category.