The Gordian Knot

Hennepin County Library recently began offering a service we’re calling “Author Alerts“: users can create a list of authors/performers and we send an email alert when a new title by that author is added to the catalog.

Some GK readers may be interested in what’s going on behind the scenes with this service, as we have been able to completely automate the backend processes.

On the opening page, users have the option to browse for authors, select from a list of “popular” authors or select from a list of the last ten authors previous users signed up for. The browse function works similar to an author authority search in HIP. Users type in an author’s name and we query HIP in the background and display the results for the user. (We remove uniform title entries from the results list.) As in HIP, users can browse up and down the alphabet.

After the user selects an author of interest, we request their email address and barcode number. We confirm their barcode in Horizon and store their borrower# and email address in an MSSQL database, along with the auth# from the Horizon auth table. If the user comes to AA from a link in HIP (and they are logged into HIP) we look up their borrower# and email in Horizon and enter it in for them.

Once the process is completed, the user has the option to add additional authors to her alert list.

Guest access is also available for users without accounts in our system - they are prompted for their email address and a password.

In the background, a script on our webserver queries the bib table for the author’s existing titles and stores the bib#s in the MSSQL database.

Each night a script runs to check for new titles in Horizon for each author in the AA database. The list of bib#s is compared to the existing list in the AA database. If one or more new bib#s has been added, the script generates an email to each user who has requested an alert for that author.

Patron response has been positive so far. A little over 300 users signed up during the first week , tracking about 850 authors. A couple comments from users:

“I absolutely LOVE the new Author Alerts service. I’ve been waiting years for this.”

“The author alerts are absolutely frickin’ genius…I love this service and expect my list to be dynamic and long. Thanks for the great service to us voracious readers!”

Those interested in more details should not hesitate to contact me at gpeterson at hclib.org.