As far as electronic journals and other electronic materials are concerned you can often "subscribe" to news. Here are some ideas about how to keep yourself updated.

Tables of contents from new numbers of journals

Maybe you have a favourite journal? Go to the journal's website and look for:

• Alerts, news, for example tables of contents
• e-tocs, contents (toc is an acronym for "table of contents")
• RSS , news/contents (RSS can be read as Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary)
• Atom feeds, news/contents, a variant of RSS

Get information about new books and journals from publishers and libraries

News comes straight to your e-mail address or your RSS reader. Most publishers and suppliers ask you to register. Usually you have to give details about your name, title, department and e-mail address.

You can often choose to receive news as an e-mail or an RSS newsfeed. If you choose RSS you must have access to a reader. You may have one inbuilt into your web browser, for example in the most recent versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox. Otherwise you can register yourself with an online RSS reader, for example Google Reader or Bloglines.
Tips about RSS readers

Keep track of new articles on your subject

When you've done a search in a bibliographic database or in a catalogue, you can save your search. Then you can request that your saved search is repeated at certain intervals and that the results are sent to you.

Examples from LIBRIS

Here is an example of a search on the word globalisation OR globalization in the Swedish academic library catalogue LIBRIS. Click on the Feed button below to see the RSS feed (unfortunately it's in Swedish). Then you can choose to subscribe to the feed.

This is how to set up your own "feed"

1. Go to LIBRIS
2. Do a search. You can narrow down your search until you are happy with the results
3. Click on the Feed button at the bottom of the hitlist
4. Follow the instructions to create a feed