Alerting services provide a way to automate searches in your fields of interest. This involves setting up a personal account with a database, publisher, or other organization; saving a search that is executed on some regular basis; and requesting that alerts be sent.

Notices of new publications matching your saved search are sent by email or RSS feed (What is RSS [1]). The frequency of alerts varies. In some cases, an alert is sent whenever a search match occurs; in other cases, it's on some scheduled basis such as weekly or monthly. Below are examples of alerts by type of resource.

Books
Rod Library UNISTAR [2] - Within your My Library account, searches can be saved, with notification sent when something on the topic is added to the collection.
Books in Print [3] - can create a BIP My Account, then save searches
Amazon - some commercial services provide email notifications of new books similar to those purchased in past

Articles
Many journal databases and publishers provide alert services. Below are examples of Rod Library databases providing alert services for new issues of specified journals or new articles by a certain author on on a certain subject; this page [4] provides basic instructions.

ABI/INFORM Complete (ProQuest)
American Accounting Association Digital Library
Business Source Elite
EconLIT
Ingenta
PsycINFO

Rod Library News [5]
Rod Library news items can be accessed every day on the Library home page and they also can be received via RSS feed.

Rod Library BizBlog [6]
Rod Library BizBlog news items can be received via RSS feed.

Google Alerts [7]
This can used to get notifications of new web pages on specific topics. While Google Alerts cover some social networking sites, services such as Addictomatic [8] and TweetDeck can be used to search various social media sites.

Web Page Monitors
Free and fee-based programs can be used to monitor specific web sites and be notified of changes. One example is Watch That Page [9].