Like many academic libraries, my institution uses a liaison model to provide faculty service. In short, each member of the law school's faculty is assigned to a reference librarian. That librarian becomes a faculty member's liaison to the library, and any request for library service usually goes through this liaison. Ideally, in addition to waiting for direct requests for service, a librarian/liaison will stay on top of what faculty members are working on and funnel relevant information to them as needed, say keeping track of new books and articles in an area in which the faculty member typically writes.

Maintaining these faculty-librarian relationships are an ongoing challenge of the job. Some faculty like to stay in constant contact, so knowing what they're working on is easy. But others keep a little more distance, either because they're hesitant to ask for help or because they're simply more comfortable working in isolation. Even in these more "spacious" relationships, however, author alerts can be a good way for a librarian to keep track of a faculty member's interests without nagging him or her with unwanted emails and phone calls.

Most law school librarians are probably already aware of such author alerts from Westlaw ("WestClip") and Lexis ("Alerts"). LegalTrac provides them, too ("Search Alerts"). But the limitation of these alerts is that they're limited to what's already been published. If Westlaw sends an email notifying me that Prof. Smith has a new article in the Iowa Law Review, that can be useful in a number of ways, but it doesn't necessarily tell me what Prof. Smith is working on right now. In fact, it may simply tell me what he was working on a year ago.

So, in addition to those alerts, I also subscribe to author alerts for all of my faculty from SSRN(Social Science Research Network). Because many professors post working papers and forthcoming publications to SSRN, sometimes long before a journal accepts it for publication, these alerts keep me more up to date than the aforementioned systems. I'm still limited to what's already been written, not what's being researched currently, but the delay is considerably shorter than what I get from Westlaw, Lexis and LegalTrac.

As far as I can tell, author alerts from SSRN are only available via RSS feeds, but they're easy to access. Simply search for a professor's name. When you find an article he or she authored in the search results, just click the author name. This takes you to SSRN's author profile for the professor. In addition to listing all the articles in the system written by this professor, it provides a link to the RSS feed for the author. Subscribe to the feed using your preferred RSS reader, and you'll be notified whenever the professor uploads a new or revised article to SSRN. (A quick hint: Google Reader seemed to have trouble reading some of SSRN's author feeds, so I run all of mine through Feedburner now and use Google Reader to subscribe to the Feedburner URL for the feeds. It's an annoying step, but it works.) And if you do prefer email alerts, there are plenty of options for receiving RSS feeds via email.

Technologically speaking, this isn't a mindblowing concept. I use RSS for many things, and this is hardly a novel application. However, I don't tend to visit SSRN that often, and as a result I'm not always aware of what functionality the site offers. What makes this tool so useful for me—and perhaps for you—is that I'm seeing works in progress, not long completed publications. I, for one, find this extremely beneficial in my day-to-day job duties.