As I discussed in Information Trapping (Part 1), you can keep up with news and blogs by subscribing to pages using RSS and a reader like iGoogle.
Not to be left behind, the EBSCO Research Databases also allow you to subscribe to content through Search Alerts & Journal Alerts. ProQuest has similar alerts (search and publication/journal) through emails.
How does this help me?
If you are doing an extended research project, say for your Senior Project, you will be working on the topic for several months (not weeks, days or hours like typical papers). If you performed a killer search that retrieved really good results, you might want to save that search and run it again later to see if more information was added to the database. Similarly, a journal alert lets you know when new articles for a particular title have been updated in the database.
Setting up a Search Alert.Once you have performed a search, on the result screen, click on "Create alert for this search" A popup window gives you the syndication feed link which you can then cut and paste into your RSS reader (according to that aggregator's instructions).
Journal Alerts.
For a journal alert (new content added), you need search for the journal title under Publications or click on the title in a citation. In Publications details screen, click on Journal Alert (upper right). You'll need to log in to your EBSCOhost account, then you can select your preferred method of delivery: email or RSS.
