Weekly News Digest

Elsevier Engineering Information announced the launch of Referex Engineering, a specialized electronic reference product hosted on the Engineering Village 2 platform. Referex Engineering draws upon more than 300 of Elsevier's book titles to provide engineering professionals with a fully-searchable reference database. According to the company, by combining the reference resources of Elsevier's book programs with the search and discovery tools offered by Engineering Village 2, engineering professionals can now locate and retrieve reference information with pinpoint accuracy.

Referex Engineering is designed upon a concept of layering content to create the breadth and focus which researchers, professional engineers, and academics each require. By layering broad based handbooks, professional reference works and how-to guides, with specialized monographs and scholarly texts, Referex Engineering has created a foundation of information allowing searchers to quickly find solutions to their reference needs.

Elsevier Engineering Information publishes six bibliographic databases including Compendex, and provides the online discovery platforms Engineering Village 2 (http://www.engineeringvillage2.org) and ChemVillage (http://www.chemvillage.org).

Source: Elsevier Engineering Information

ARTstor, a nonprofit initiative founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, announced the availability of its Digital Library to nonprofit educational and cultural institutions in the U.S. starting this summer. The ARTstor Digital Library comprises digital images and related data, and the tools to make active use of those images (http://www.artstor.org).

ARTstor's "Charter Collection" will contain approximately 300,000 digital images of visual material from different cultures and disciplines, and seeks to offer sufficient breadth and depth to support a wide range of non-commercial educational and scholarly activities. The Charter Collection is anticipated to grow to half a million images by the summer of 2006. ARTstor has developed software tools that will allow users at participating institutions to use its Charter Collection without the need for any other software.

The Charter Collection is meant to serve as a campuswide resource that is focused on, but not limited to, the arts. It has been derived from several source collections that are themselves the product of collaborations with libraries, museums, photographic archives, publishers, slide libraries, and individual scholars. Source collections include: the MoMA Architecture and Design Collection, the Illustrated Bartsch, the Huntington Archive of Asian Art, and others.

Source: ARTstor

Wiley InterScience, the online content service of global publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc., announced the launch of Organic Reactions, a comprehensive new database devoted exclusively to important synthetic reactions. Organic Reactions will be available through Wiley InterScience at http://www.interscience.wiley.com/db/or.

The database includes detailed procedures that illustrate the significant modifications of the chemical reaction, and tables that include all the pertinent examples of the reaction. Each reaction is presented with information about the reaction conditions, products, and yields where available, and is fully referenced to the primary literature.

Key features include structure and substructure search, reaction search, and real-time, full-text searches as well as by CAS RN, chemical name, and sorting by publication year, yield of reaction, and other such properties. The initial database will consist of the content from the Organic Reactions series, volumes 25 to the present. New data will be added on a continuous basis.

CrossRef will enable linking to primary literature references regardless of the publisher's identity, and internal links to Wiley's other databases, such as Organic Syntheses (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/db/os), will be added in future enhancements, so the paths between databases will be seamless.

Source: Wiley InterScience