change in alerting system

One of our successful services is our 'email alerting service'. Everyone can subscribe to this service by simply choosing a subject of interest and providing an email address to which the alerts should be sent. There are some 55 different subjects, ranging from “The State as Subject of International Law” to the “Grotius collection”.

When this service started in January 2003, we thought that just about 300 to 400 people would subscribe, each for 2 to 3 subjects of their choice. However, our total number of subscribers make up 850 people, and this number is slowly growing: we expect the number of subscribers to reach 900 somewhere in the first half of 2010. Each subscriber receives, on average, 2.5 emails a week.

All this leads to a rather heavy workload for our servers every Friday morning. Not only do thousands of emails have to be sent, each email also features all relevant bibliographic descriptions. So, depending on the subject, quite a few lengthy emails are sent out. All in all we are talking about a lot of emails, of which 10% are lengthy ones, and we figured we should improve on this emailing system.

We decided to rewrite the code which creates the email alerts. The script now takes all known subscriber data (subject(s) and email address) to create one simple email for all a subscriber's subscriptions. At this moment we are down to only 850 emails, a huge downfall in number, but an improvement in service. One simple email provides links to your subjects, with the number of new titles for every subject. Clicking the links to a subject in your email creates a PDF file , which will popup on your screen.

The PDF file will automatically start your PDF reader (like Acrobat Reader), so you can read all about the new titles, and click our link resolver to get more information. Creating these PDF files is also rather straining to our servers. However, at the moment we send out these email alerts, our American subscribers are still sleeping while the Japanese and Australian subscribers are going to bed. This means that the whole process of alerting (from creating emails to making PDF files) is much more balanced out.

The other advantage to you is that these PDF files with new titles on a particular subject can be stored on your computer, creating a list of files, which all contain relevant information about a certain subject. All with clickable links!

In the near future we will try to create still more advanced files - meaning more clickable links will be put in the PDF. This way, our subscribers will need only one extra mouseclick to take them to the fulltext (when available), a Google search, or relevant (secondary) databases on our servers. Check our website regularly to see where our services are taking you!