A method for using a CATLINE SDI (selected dissemination of information) as a current awareness and collection development tool for the health sciences reference department is described. This paper reports three years of experience with this service in an academic health sciences library. It emphasizes the exploitation of four data elements in the CATLINE file: the Abstracting and Indexing Tag (AI) Data Element; the Shelving Location (SL) Data Element; the MeSH Heading (MH) Data Element; the Subheading Qualifier (SH) Data Element.