Britain needs lerts

Keeping up to date - being alert to new things coming up - can be quite straightforward using the alert service on Search 2.0 at the National Library for Health. The nice people at Shrewsbury and Telford Health Libraries have put together a short guide, but a guide is barely needed. There is (once you have logged in and run your first search) a pair of buttons "save selected rows" and "save all". Select rows, or click "save all" and the next screen has a "save and create alert" button. Then all you need to do it give it your email address and tell it how often you want to be emailed. The system will then run that search for you once a week, month or fortnight, and email you the results. The search can be as basic or as complex as you like, focus on a topic, or an author, or even a particular journal.

If you are asking the system to email alerts to you at work then you must give it your full email address. So if you are at Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust, and your name is Rafael Nadal then your email address is rafael.nadal@colchesterhospital.nhs.uk. If you'd rather give it your Hotmail, Gmail, BT or other address, then feel free.

For other ways to keep up to date (our own current awareness service aside) think about using RSS feeds. This is a ways of making headlines or new items from news sites or journals or even blogs pop up on a single page. It saves you having to look at lots of other pages. You can gather together as many - or as few - feeds as you like through a "news reader" or "feed reader" service. NLH has a tutorial using the example of Bloglines as a feed reader.

A second option is to personalise your home page (the page you see when you first go in to the internet) to include news feeds. If you use the personalised version of Google (just sign up for a free account) you can "add stuff" using the link at the right hand side of your page and then "add a feed" using the link on the left of the page.

If you have Internet Explorer 7 on your PC then you can add feeds as you would favourites, and you can look at those no matter which page on the internet you are on. However, this only works on a PC where you have Explorer 7 and have set up the feeds. A news reader or personalised Google can be reached whichever PC you are using, at work or home.

Keeping up to date is a "little and often" activity. If you leave it for months you've got more to look at and it becomes a huge chore. If you make a date in your diary every Thursday morning, or every other Tuesday afternoon, or whatever suits you, you'll keep on top of it much more easily.

As we used to say at school - "be alert - Britain needs lerts."

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Cover to cover

I don't know about you, but I like to get my money's worth out of things. That might mean staying to the bitter end of a film I hate, just because I paid to get into the cinema. More usually it means that when I buy magazines I like to read from cover to cover and back again. If there are a couple of bits I can cut out and keep - a review of a book I want to order from the library, a recipe I want to try, a web address I might visit - so much the better. The thought of paying out for an annual subscription to a magazine where I might - if I get round to it - flick through some of the copies, and perhaps read bits of one or two articles, makes my toes curl.

How is this relevant to you? Well, as departments find their budgets being nibbled away I find more of them phoning me up to ask if I will take on their journal subscriptions for them. My standard response is that I wont.

That's partly because the library budget has had its fair share of cuts, the same as everywhere else. But it's also because I don't believe that having two, three or four journals in a department is useful any more. Most people in the department wont know they are there. Those who do wont always remember to look at every issue, and when they do they will probably just flick through it. The number of papers that are read from end to end is probably very small. And when you want an older copy...well, somehow it isn't on the shelf and no one has seen it.

The better way to go about keeping up to date is to have the table of contents of journals sent to you on a regular basis. You can do this using eTOCs, where the journal itself emails the contents to you, or you can try RSS feeds using a feed reader. Either way you can normally see abstracts. Then, when you find a paper you actually want to read you ask us to send you a copy. We will get it from one of our partner libraries or the British Library. Yes, it costs us, although we don't charge you. But I guarantee that your department will not request enough papers from any given journal for the total cost to match or exceed the cost of subscribing.

Better still, in addition to the eTOCs or feeds - as many as you like - do a regular search on Medline or Cinahl. The point is that you will find papers of interest published in your favourite journals, some in more general journals, and others in journals you hadn't even heard of. Yes, there are standard journals that like to think they cover everything, but why miss out on papers just because they haven't appeared in the two titles you hoard in your department? There's a whole world of evidence out there - why restrict your reading?

Now, if you'll excuse me, there are still some snippets in the latest IWR I haven't read yet...

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