Libraries Australia alerts used effectively at State Library of Tasmania

Alerts are one of the features available to users of Libraries Australia, launched by the National Library late last year as a replacement for Kinetica Web Search. When a searcher saves a search query and sets it up as an alert, the search will be run again automatically either weekly, monthly or every three months. The alert search looks for newly added bibliographic records to match the search query and sends the search results by email. The State Library of Tasmania saw alerts as an additional means of identifying recently published items for possible addition to the Tasmaniana Library’s heritage collections.
For internal convenience, separate alerts were set up to look for:
- potential legal deposit items (i.e. published in Tasmania) about Tasmania
- potential legal deposit items whose subject matter is not Tasmanian
- items published elsewhere about Tasmania.
These three alerts are further divided into separate monograph and serial reports as the acquisition processes are handled by different sections.
The search for each alert was set up using the command screen. As we are looking for items likely to be still in print, date published is set to be greater than 2003. For the potential legal deposit items, place of publication is set to Tasmania; and for Tasmanian subject matter, subject is set to ‘ Tasmania or Tas’. In order to exclude items for which we already have holdings on Libraries Australia, the NUC symbol is set to be ‘not TSL’. Below are the exact monograph search queries which were set up as alerts; the serials alerts are the same with BIB = s inserted instead of BIB = m.
* BIB = m and DAT > 2003 and CTY = tma not (SW = tas or SW = tasmania)
not ILL = TSL
* (SW = Tasmania or SW = Tas) and DAT > 2003 and CTY =
tma and BIB = m not ILL = TSL
* (SW = tas or SW = tasmania) and BIB = m
and DAT > 2003 not ILL =
tsl not CTY = tma
Alerts are available at no extra charge as part of the library’s subscription to Kinetica. They add another level to the many varied ways the State Library of Tasmania already has to identify this material. Some of the titles that appear in the alert reports have already been noticed and acted upon, but others have not been previously spotted and can be fed into the selection processes. The reports are run monthly and each month we find new titles to pursue. It has the added benefit of identifying any titles we have in our collection for which we are yet to add a holding to Libraries Australia. Setting up these alerts has been a worthwhile exercise and has expanded our collection of heritage material.
Michael Baker
Senior Cataloguer,
Resources and Access
State Library of Tasmania



