Creating Alerts to Follow to Your Favorite Topics

Victor Willis of the Village People has just successful exercised his termination rights on 33 on the songs he wrote for the group, as reported by Billboard. This makes him the first artist to reclaim copyright ownership of his recordings under a provision of copyright law that took effect January 1 of this year. Artists such as Bob Dylan and Tom Petty are pursuing doing the same.

Termination rights, which allows composers to reclaim the rights from the record companies to their recordings after 35 years shows the potential to have major effects on the recording industry, particularly for legacy stars whose recordings have continued to sell over the years. Following this issue is a great example of why you would want to set up an alert in one of our databases.

Let's start with the basics of alert services. If you do a search in a database, it will retrieve matching items, usually articles from magazines, newspapers or other periodicals, that already exist in that database. By creating an alert, you'll be notified when anything new is added to the database that matches your search.

The basic steps from within a database:

• Sign in, or create an account if you don't have one yet.
• Do a search.
• Set up an alert.

Not every database offers this feature, and procedures vary from one database to another, although they are usually consistent within the databases from a single vendor such as EBSCO or Gale.

Here is an example for termination rights in Business Source Premier, a database with articles on business topics.

Once are in the database, sign in to your account. Click sign in to create a new account if you don't have one yet:

Perform a search using any criteria your like. For this example, it's a basic search for "termination rights." You can use the features in the database to further refine your results if you want. If the results look on target for your interests and you want to see what is added in the future that meets those criteria, click "Share" near the top left:

 

One option in the pop-up window is Create an alert. Following the directions, you can create an email alert or an RSS feed so that you will find out when new content is added matching your criteria.

Using alerts, you can keep up-to-date on any topic you're interested in.