If you’re a user of eBooks or digital audiobooks, you may have searched Libby for a certain book, only to find it’s not available. While it’s true that some titles just aren’t available for libraries to buy, it may just be that your title was overlooked by purchasing librarians for one reason or another. Today, I’ll show you how to find out whether the title you want is available for the library to purchase, and how to recommend they add a copy to the collection using the “Notify Me” tag. When you use a notify me tag, Libby will let you know when the title has been ordered, so you can borrow it.
The Notify Me Tag
After executing a search that does not come up with the title you are looking for, you may are may not be prompted to use the “deep search” filter to continue searching. Most of the time, the title will show up in the results, but instead of showing “borrow” or “place a hold,” you will see a “notify me” option.
To express interest in a title and receive a notification if/when it is purchased, tap the notify me button, and then tap the notify me “smart tag” on the next screen. The next screen allows you to choose whether you want that notification in the form of an email or a push notification (popup through the app on your smartphone/tablet)
You can review items you have tagged by clicking the tag icon at the bottom of the screen:
What If the Title Isn’t In Search Results?
Sometimes the title you’re looking for won’t appear in results, but don’t worry – you can do a “deep search” to see if you can force it to show in results. In the image above “deep search” shows up as a suggested filter, but that is not always the case. Sometimes, all you see is the filter icon (three lines). Tap that for more options.
Scroll down to the “deep search” section. In this case, we have 13 results, and none of them are what we are looking for. After I tapped the deep search button, it turned purple. Now you can see there are 387 titles. Tap the “Show [#] Titles” to see an expanded results list that likely contains the title you were looking for. Tap “notify me” as described in the previous section to express your interest in the title and set a notification.
Don’t You Have a Video Showing How to Do This?
Yes! OverDrive created a video to walk you through the process of performing a deep search to use notify me tags.
