the dollar sign

摘要

Setting up news alerts has long been a core competency of business librarians. Curating breaking news is both a service useful to keep library clients abreast of breaking news relevant to their interests as well as a way to showcase the value of the information center. Subscription services such as Dialog (now Dialog Solutions), Dow Jones Factiva, and LexisNexis were among the first to implement this capability. More recently, other companies have found it to be a good way either to attract customers via free alerting services or to make alerting services a profit center. For Google and Bing, it's an extension of their news databases. Ozmosys has a free alerting service, but its other offerings are fee-based. Competitive intelligence firms frequently charge for their alerting services, primarily because they are not a raw feed but are heavily curated and include commentary. Over time, terminology has changed. Go back far enough, and you'll encounter "selective dissemination of information," or SDL Not only was that a mouthful, it wasn't even much of a description of what alerting services are all about. Current awareness service (CAS) remains a popular term to describe alerting services. Environmental scanning is another common term, particularly for marketing and competitive intelligence professionals. With the advent of general web search engines, the notion of setting up alerts has moved outside the library domain. Google Alerts explains that you can use it to "Monitor the web for interesting new content." Once a killer app, alerting services are now so ingrained, they are an expected feature for any news aggregator, whether free or fee-based. News has become commoditized, leading to sensationalism and a diminution in quality. Even business news is not immune.