Are you interested in receiving automatic weekly updates for new library acquisitions? The easiest way to do this is to set up a preferred search in MIDCAT and select the option to Mark for Email. This generates a weekly email listing any new materials matching your search criteria. Note that if no new materials match your search terms for a given week you won’t receive an email. You may set up multiple search alerts, as needed.

For example, to receive notice of all new Jazz CDs I would:

Log into My MIDCAT
Click on MIDCAT to search the catalog
Choose a format, like Music Recordings (in Advanced Search I may choose other parameters – like language, publication years, etc.)
Enter search term in a keyword box, e.g. Jazz
Submit search – it will bring up every Jazz item we have currently in that format
Click “Save As Preferred Search”
Go back to my “Patron Record” and click on “Preferred Searches”
Check the “Mark for Email” box

I will now receive an email notice for any new materials that match those search parameters. Check out the LIS Wiki page for more information about setting up or adjusting MIDCAT search alerts.

Tip:  Want to get notifications about ALL of a particular material type (not just things matching a certain genre or keyword)? Use an asterisk (*) as your search term!  E.g. to find all DVDs (in order to set up a search alert for all new DVDs) perform an Advanced Search for Any field = * and limit to Material type = DVDs.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me here in the comments, or to contact a Librarian at x5496 or via email at Ask-A-Librarian.