Alerting Services

Many of our electronic service providers offer free alerting services or pages, designed mainly for research/ academic staff, where you can
sign up to be informed of either new content in a specific subject area that you are interested in, or recent addition of journals to a database. Some of these are accessible from within the database, as a saved search function ; others you can use direct from the link below.

ABI Inform (Proquest)	Includes all ABI titles - abstracts as well as full text. Separate feeds on Marketing, Management, Finance, International Business, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Economics, Leadership & Organizational Behavior.
ASSIA Save Search / Alert	Within the service, save searches and set up email alerts. More details on CSA's alert help page.
BHI Save Search / Alert	Within the service, save searches and set up email alerts. More details on CSA's alert help page.
Childlink	RSS news feed on AllRegions News. Set up weekly email alerts by region.
*ERIC, BEI* and AUEI Alerting	Within Advanced Search, set up email alerts by clicking on button. See Dialog's instructions.
FAME Alert	After you have retrieved a company record, FAME will send you an alert when that report is updated. Click on the Alert button on the bottom of the screen.
Index to Theses Alerts	Register and you will be notified by email whenever the Index to Theses site is updated.
Ingenta Connect	RSS feeds are on individual journal homepages. (Remember we do not have access to everything in full-text.)
Ovid (CINAHL, Journals@Ovid)	Create an Ovid Personal Account using your ATHENS username and password, then save your search to keep for reference and/or be alerted by email of new additions to the database.
*Proquest Content*	Sign up for publication name changes; changes in format availability, cessations; new publications etc for ABI / Inform Global. New button on Proquest - for details click here.
*TicTocs*	JISC sponsored project developing a freely available journal tables of contents (TOCs) service working with publishers such as ProQuest CSA, Emerald, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers and Inderscience Publishers. You can use ticTOCs to select journal TOCs and save them on your MyTOCs folder (with a "tick"). From there you can read future TOCs at your convenience, or export them as an OPML file into your favourite feed reader.
*whatsnew@westlaw.co.uk*	If you email WESTLAW your name, email address and connection to Birmingham City University (eg student,staff etc) you will receive an update on new features of WESTLAW UK.
*ZETOC*	and email alerts from British Library Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC) database.

1.0 What are RSS Feeds

RSS stands for "really simple syndication" or "rich site summary". RSS allows you to have content, such as headlines and updates, delivered
to one piece of software from lots of different websites. So, rather than checking all the sites separately you can just open up the appropriate software package to see the latest items from a number of sites. The RSS feeds will also provide links through to the original sites for more information on a particular story or topic.

The software that is used to receive and read RSS feeds is a news reader or news aggregator. These can either be pieces of software you download to your computer or a service you subscribe to via the internet.

2.0 What you need to do before you will be able to receive RSS Feeds

Just follow these three steps:

2.1 Register at an RSS reader web site. But probably you will require to download and install RSS reader software.
Here is a list of free RSS Readers available:

FEEDREADER	Feedreader is a lightweight open-source aggregator that supports RSS and ATOM formats. It works under Windows 95 and later versions.
ACTIVE WEB READER	Active Web Reader is a FREE web feed reader that supports RSS 0.9x, 1.x and 2.x feed formats. It is a lightning fast RSS reader
BLOGLINES	Bloglines is a free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and news feeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. It also allows you to maintain your RSS feeds online without the need of a particular bit of software on your PC.
Other Free RSS Readers	Contains a list of various RSS Readers for different operating systems (MAC, WINDOWS etc.)

2.2 Subscribe to your chosen RSS feeds. Although only a few e-journal sites provide them at the moment, the number is increasingly rapidly. Look out for one of these icons: or

on e-journal sites. Right-click on the icon (or RSS link), copy the Shortcut (or Link Location) and paste it into your RSS reader.

2.3 When you run your RSS Reader from your PC it will automatically read any new RSS Feeds from your chosen site.

RSS / News / General Content Disclaimer

In an effort to make content easier for our visitors to find, we occasionally display information or link to external pages which provides RSS or News Feeds. We are not liable nor responsible for the content of such items. Please bear this in mind when using these sites. You may not be able to install these players on student machines on the Birmingham City University network.

*Linex Legal*	Over 40,000 legal updates and reviews are now available via Linex Legal from over 60 jurisdictions. You need to register as an individual user by clicking on ‘Register’ at the top-right tab. Make sure you use your University email-address, otherwise this service will ask for payment.
*PubMed*	Allows you to create a PubMed search as an RSS feed. Can deliver search results straight to your desktop.