As the number of newsletters available via email grows I hope that we will start to see more tools for managing them. Subscribers have to be added and removed, usage needs to be monitored (is there anybody subscribing to this anymore?) and the issues need to be sent out to everyone on the list as soon as they are received. For whatever reason the serials software used by libraries to check in and route materials seems to be lacking in any tools for email list management.
In addition to the standard newsletter-type current awareness materials, customized email alerts are also are proliferating. Think Westclips and Lexis Eclipses, for example. In this morning's program (Internet Librarian 2004), A Web-Based Current Awareness Management System, Michael Rogers and Mary Talmadge-Breebenar (Bristol-Myers Squibb) showed the in-house system they developed to manage all of the various email alerts that are set up for their users.
Their system centralizes the email distribution and archiving of custom alerts so that duplication is reduced and money saved. Users are notified of new alerts and can opt to subscribe. Their users can easily subscribe and unsubscribe to the emails via a web page, and are notified of new alerts that may be of interest. The software can monitor the usage of the alerts to help the librarians determine which ones should be cancelled and can even automatically unsubscribe a user if they haven't accessed at least one of the past 20 alerts they've received. Anyone can see who is on the routing list for a particular alert.
They assign both categories and topics to each alert, with categories being more general (17 total) and topics more specific (170 total). The user can view the archive for a particular alert before subscribing, and can fill out a web form to request that a new alert be created.
Now, here's a business opportunity if I ever saw one. Rather than all of us trying to coerce our tech departments to build this kind of thing from scratch, how about some enterprising individual developing such a tool to sell to those of us who need it!
Forgive a vendor-contribution, but this is exactly what Ozmosys, now in its 3rd generation, has been doing for several years, providing tools to aggregate, classify, distribute and track content both public (Federal Register, SEC, etc.) and private (Lexis trackers, CourtLink, Factiva folders, etc).
In this case the software resided on their own servers, however Ozmosys as an ASP will also do this for you. See a previous entry on Ozmosys.