Where is that !*#@ book??

Abstract

This paper describes initiatives taken by the Curtin University Library to reduce the time books sit idly on shelves while clients seeking them are unaware they are available. These initiatives use technologies such as SMS, RSS and email to inform clients when books they have recommended or recalled are available, and to allow clients to receive weekly updates of new titles in their subject area. Feedback indicates that these initiatives are very popular with clients.The Curtin University Library has been sending email notices to the Official Communications Channel of the Curtin student portal for more than 4 years. These notices are deemed by the University to be official communications. As items which are being recalled are by definition in high demand, we decided to trial an optional SMS service to replicate the information in the official emails in a more convenient manner for many clients.Academics used to complain that by the time they were aware that a title they had recommended was in the library collection it had often been borrowed by another client. To improve notification to recommenders we implemented an automated email service to notify them of the availability of their recommendations.We have also created a subset of the catalogue containing titles received in the previous 7 days, and have set up RSS feeds, updated weekly, for a series of predefined searches on this subset. Clients can receive alerts of new tiles in their areas of interest.