LISNews: Librarian News

If you have an email notification system in place through your calendar and/or library automation system, you may not know it but you also have a basic text message notification system. What it takes to make this work is some basic knowledge of email to SMS gateways, how it works, and a little finagling with the wording of your email notices. This may not work for every system (and there is certainly a question or two I can’t answer towards the conclusion of this post), but it could offer libraries another notification method to customers with only a little extra staff work.

In case you didn’t know it, every cell phone number has a corresponding email address set up by the mobile carrier. This allows a person to send an email to a specific address which is then converted into a text message for the destined recipient. This is what is known as an email to SMS (or text) gateway. The rubric for discovering this email address is devilishly simple. -- Read More