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Alert Services: A How-To Guide

Covers basic techniques for setting up alerts (a.k.a. current awareness services) - including table of contents and saved searches via email, RSS feed, blogs, twitter, and Facebook.

Table of Contents Services (such as those listed below) vary in the journals they include. All of them provide ToC alerts for journals from a large number of publishers. As a result, it may take a smidge longer for them to send out alerts but they are quicker to set up and easier to maintain.

In comparison, publisher alerts (see the separate tab on the left) are usually faster than other alert services because publisher websites are the first place information is made available. This information is then sent to other vendors. The drawback to publisher alerts is that they usually cover a fairly small number of journals while Table of Contents Services cover several thousand journals.

Your Librarian

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Lorrie Pellack
Contact:
Head, Research & Instruction Services Dept.
150c Parks Library
Ames, IA 50011-2140
Phone: 515-294-5569