Issues in usability studies for alerting in digital libraries

Abstract

Alerting Services inform users of Digital Libraries about new or changed content of their favorite Digital Library collection, or about new documents discussing a topic they are interested in. The users define their interest in form of subscriptions; the alerting service filters new or changed documents against all user subscriptions and notifies the users about matches found. To define their subscriptions, users may, e.g., select a journal from a list, or a topic from a classification. Few services support the definition of IR type queries, or advanced combinations of queries and metadata selections.