Open access repositories of library and information science research are good (free) sources to monitor to keep up with professional reading. Alia eprints and dlist are examples of  subject-based repositories in the library and information science area.

Repositories are a fairly hot topic in the academic sector at present as more Universities, usually with the leadership of their libraries, are establishing institutional repositories to showcase and archive the research that is being carried out. But maybe our colleagues in other sectors are not as aware of these valuable resources.

They are usually indexed by Google and other search engines so you are quite likely to stumble across research papers via this kind of search. But if you want to focus your search on scholarly works that don’t require subscription or pay-per-view access then you have some options.

OAISTER - harvests metadata from over 650 institutions and contains records of 9+ million articles. It provides both browse and search access.

DigitalCommons@ProQuest - provides search and browse access to repositories using bepress repository technology via the Digital Commons licence offered by ProQuest. It also provides an RSS feed of recently uploaded papers.

ResearchNow - includes the repositories in the DC@Proquest set, but also other sites using bepress separately from Proquest and bepress journals. Not all content is open access. It also provides an RSS feed.
Arrow Discovery Service - harvests metadata from a number of Australian repositories including the Australasian Digital Theses program

If you want to take a narrower approach think of a couple of institutions doing research in your areas of interest and get to know their repositories. Subscribe to RSS feeds if they are available to keep up-to-date on your own interests and if you are a liaison librarian, your customers’ interests. You can easily email them useful papers in their field.
Queensland University of Technology has a well-populated repository with subject browsing and has a number of papers in the LIS area.

Institutional repositories will not always have exact copies of the published versions of  papers, but where permission is granted you will find peer-reviewed papers among the pre-prints.

This dlist paper arrived in my Bloglines account this week. The author takes Ranganathan’s five laws for a walk on the web side. Food for thought next time you look at your library’s website and when you are helping your customers finding information on the web.

Noruzi, Alireza (2004) Application of Ranganathan’s Laws to the Web. Webology 1(2). — in dlist.