Librarians and computing officials at Virginia Commonwealth say the notifications are just the latest example of personalized services that libraries can offer students and faculty and staff members. We now have the tool set and the Web environment that makes it easy to do. But given the competition among online information services, many of which are commercial, he predicts that more and more campus libraries will begin to offer such services. For its You've Got Books service, Virginia Commonwealth uses a popular scripting language called ColdFusion, which finds records about new books in a library database and displays them on the user's computer screen.
Librarians describe the service as the virtual equivalent of a library's new-book shelves.
New library materials are listed on the screen in the same order as they are arranged on the library shelves, so that users can browse as they would in the library stacks. Every item in the list has a hypertext link to the library catalog, where a user can read a full bibliographic description of the item and see whether it is checked out. Virginia Commonwealth maintains two libraries that together acquire as many as 40,000 new items a year. Otherwise you'll be overwhelmed with material. That's only a fraction of the campus population at Virginia Commonwealth.