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June 14, 2010 — In addition to this week's NewsBreak(s), the editors have compiled the Weekly News Digest, featuring stories from the week just past that you should know about. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. CLICK HERE to view all of this week's Weekly News Digest items.

WorldWideScience.org Launches New Multilingual Tool

WorldWideScience Alliance, which offers a federated search service across multiple databases, has unveiled the beta version of a new multilingual tool. The tool is projected to enable scientists to simultaneously search and translate over 400 million pages of scientific research published in 65 countries from around the world in multiple languages. Multilingual WorldWideScience.org^BETA was officially launched at the recent International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) annual conference held in Helsinki, Finland.

WorldWideScience.org ^BETA will be able to offer researchers real-time searching and translation of articles written in Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and English simultaneously. This new capability is the result of an international public-private partnership between the WorldWideScience Alliance and Microsoft Research, whose translation technology has been paired with the federated searching technology of Deep Web Technologies.

Set up in 2007 to create a single portal from which to conduct federated searching of multiple open access scientific databases, the WorldWideScience Alliance initially brought together 12 databases from 10 countries but has since grown to cover the research output of 65 countries worldwide. Bringing together the best in private sector information technology with leading public sector science and technology institutions, including national libraries such as the British Library, this next phase of the WorldWideScience.org project will help to make this a truly global resource and reduce the widespread unnecessary duplication of research.

WorldWideScience.org is maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information as the Operating Agent for the WorldWideScience Alliance.

Source: WorldWideScience.org