Alert service
As Alert service (of English. Alert service for reporting service or message service ), Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) or current awareness services are information services refer to operations where after the publish-subscribe can be registered model questions whose answers then sent as regular messages. The reports can be, for example, hits from a search engine , articles in a weblog or tables of contents from specialist journals. The messages can be sent via RSS orEmail are received.
In contrast to search engines, which search all documents that have already been collected, alert services continuously determine whether a newly added document meets previously defined query criteria and, if necessary, send a corresponding message to the user. The message contains either the full hits, a summary or a reference.
In general, with current awareness services, the notification takes place at regular intervals - for example monthly - while with an alert service, newly added data records trigger the notification. However, the terminology is not consistent and different names are used for the same types of services. In a much broader sense, the term alert is also used for services that are simply subscriptions to periodic publications. For example, some journal publishers also call subscriptions to digital tables of contents "alerts".
History, technology and dissemination
Unit bodies that review new publications are a preliminary form of alerting services . Computer-based alert services have been known since the early 1970s.
From around 1999 weblogs gained importance as a new form of publication on the Internet. Blogs typically have a RSS - web feed , which makes all posts immediately available, with the publication in machine-readable form. Blogpings ensure that interested weblogs, but also z. B. Alert services, automatically find out about the publication of every new article. In 2002 the weblog alert service Technorati was created . Technorati reported on new posts in weblogs that meet custom query criteria. Just one year later, numerous similar services were launched and, since 2004, the large, established Internet search engines Google , Yahoo and MSN have been integrating alert services into their offerings. In the meantime, for example, the major search engines also offer alert services specifically for traditional news sources, i.e. for agency tickers, online editions of newspapers and similar sources; and with IngentaConnect 2004 an alert service for tables of contents of scientific journals was created.
Application examples
search engines
In addition to alert services for searching in weblogs, search engines also offer prospective research. Prospective search with search engines reports position changes in the top results of a given search query. This covers a very specific need for information: for example, a company can observe whether its own website is among the top results when searching for the generic name of the product being marketed. Another case would be a search query that is so sharply defined that initially fewer than ten or twenty results are achieved - in this case the prospective search query would also report entirely new locations. The Yahoo Web search as well as the news and Web search by Google offer - to alert services, they deliver the results as both - in both their international and German versions RSS - web feed as well as e-mail notification message.
Continuous research
Commercial database providers offer the possibility of long-term research with their own topic-related queries in databases to be selected. The contents of the databases are mostly specialist publications, patents, etc. The queries must be created in the search language provided by the database provider. The long-term research is chargeable, many parameters such as the content of the output (database fields), duration, number of publications, etc. can be specified for the query.
Web pages
In addition to alert services that report changes to a user-defined query criterion, there are also services that fulfill a simpler function: They simply report every change to a website selected by the user, regardless of the type and content. Since the messages for these services are also event-driven, they can certainly also be referred to as alerts.
See also
literature
- Annika Hinze, Daniel Faensen: A Unified Model of Internet Scale Alerting Services . Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 1999, ISBN 978-3-540-66903-6 , doi : 10.1007 / b76490 ( (archive with ps file) (160 kB) [accessed on March 26, 2009]).
- A. Raizada: On current awareness services . In: Annals of Library Science & Documentation . tape 14 , no. 3 , 1967, p. 152-160 .
- Patrick Sullivan: Information Overload: Keeping Current Without Being Overwhelmed . In: Science & Technology Libraries . tape 25 , no. 1/2 , 2004, p. 109-125 .
Web links
- Alerting services , article "Electronic subscription services" in LOTSE: Library Online Tour & Self-Paced Education (Ed .: Director of the University and State Library of Münster)