About SDI and alerts

OLIB has a fully automated SDI facility which uses the alerting feature to inform Users when new items are added to the catalogue. Information about relevant new items is sent to Users via email. This can be an email that contains a link to the items in the OPAC, or it can contain a list of the items themselves.

An SDI profile has to be created for an individual, or for a group of Users. This contains the search terms that the User(s) are interested in and the start date and frequency of the emails. Search terms can be expressed as either a list of subject headings (with AND OR NOT) and/or a Keyword search string.  

Users can belong to any number of profiles. Profiles are created in the Alerting> Notices domain and they can also be created in the OPAC where existing profiles can be edited by an individual User.

Each SDI profile can be Location specific - to include only items added to the catalogue for specific Locations. This requires use of the fields Notice Locations, Include Accessioned Titles and Include Accessioned Copies. If this feature is required, the System Manager needs to add these fields in Layout Manager.

A process runs every night in daystart to send SDI alerts at the correct time. This process creates a folder for each SDI profile that is due to be sent. The folder contains the titles which match the SDI profile and that have been catalogued in OLIB since the profile was last run.