Google alerts

I decided to be creative and to do a fairly narrow search on Google: sheep diseases, and set this up as an alert. I had also chosen this topic for the Proquest exercise, but didn't get any new feeds coming through at all - at first I thought I had done something wrong, even though I'd followed the work-around to make sure I would get feeds, so reloaded the alert, but no, obviously there's not much academic stuff being written about sheep diseases at the moment - maybe I should fill the gap? However I did get alerts through from Google, not many, but better than nothing. So I decided to re-run the exercise searching for something wider - prostate cancer (being Movember and all) and this time got lots of alerts, plus some good RSS feeds from Proquest. My own preference is still to use RSS feeds and alerts for Reading Experience-type things - new books, author talks, events, but patrons wanting information on evolving technologies, eg. xenotransplantation (Y12/13 biology); human rights; current affairs; new IT developments, etc. etc. can have the information delivered right to their desktop through these alerts - perfect for the time-poor Generation Y and Z.