Neenah Public Library has an email notification list, "First in Line," which notifies patrons when a book by their favorite author is placed on order in the system so that they can place a hold on it right away. I wonder if there is a way to use blogs to do this?
A library could set up blogs for various genres (fiction, mystery, nonfiction, etc.) and encourage patrons to subscribe to these feeds. On the plus side it would make the announcement public, since anyone who explored the library's website might find it. It also would give patrons the opportunity to only subscribe to genres of interest.
The one obvious negative is that you would need to teach patrons how to subscribe to the feeds.
This is not something that is feasible for my library since we don't currently add short records to the catalog when we place books on order and I've noticed that there aren't necessarily always records available for the popular items at the time I'm ordering (especially in large print).
I've also noticed that unless the book is by a blockbuster author (Patterson, Sparks, Roberts, etc.) my patrons seem to prefer to browse rather than placing a hold, so I don't think we would get as much use of this service as a bigger library might.
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Actually, Menasha is doing this with their site. With Drupal, you have an RSS feed for each category, so you can have multiple feeds for your site.
Menasha appears to be doing this for materials that have been processed and are available to be checked out. What I'm referring to is that patrons are notified when the "on-order" record is created.
Wow! This is a grand idea! I'm looking into this for our patrons!
It all depends on when you put in the entries. You could either put them in when you order the materials, or when they arrive. Personally, I prefer knowing when they are ordered so I can place my reserve.
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