Starting with release 6.1, VuFind® supports “selective dissemination of information” (SDI) – users can subscribe to searches and receive notifications in the form of regular email alerts when new records appear in those result sets.
To set this up, follow these steps:
1. Make sure that you are Tracking Record Changes during your indexing process, or else VuFind® will not know which results are new for the purposes of sending alerts.
2. Turn on the “schedule_searches” setting in the [Account] section of config.ini. There are also some related settings in this configuration file which you may wish to consider adjusting (for example, the user-selectable notification frequency options).
3. Set up a cron job or other process/workflow for running the command line utility (“php $VUFIND_HOME/public/index.php scheduledsearch notify”) to send notifications based on user subscriptions. It is generally preferable to run this during a low-volume time since it will potentially perform a large number of searches, imposing a load on Solr.
The XML Change Tracking and Email Alerts video discusses this feature and demonstrates how to configure and use it.