Weekly News Digest

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) announced that it is phasing out its 13 remaining brick-and-mortar bookstore operations outside Washington, D.C., an action that will significantly reduce costs. On Aug. 1, GPO bookstores in Los Angeles; Denver; Pueblo, Colo.; Detroit; and Milwaukee closed their doors to the public, the latest in a series of changes marking the GPO's transformation into a primarily electronic information disseminating agency.

The GPO Access site offers more than 250,000 titles free of charge, with public retrievals exceeding 32 million every month. According to the GPO, the service has become one of the principal tools for providing public access to official U.S. government information.

In addition, the GPO is actively transitioning its Federal Depository Library Program, which serves 1,200 libraries nationwide, to a predominately electronic basis. GPO also offers an online bookstore (http://bookstore.gpo.gov). Its catalog includes all titles available for sale and can be searched by publication title, subject, or keywords.

Source: U.S. Government Printing Office

West announced that it has entered into an agreement with Thomson Delphion that will enable patent researchers to seamlessly access the Delphion patent research service from within their Westlaw session. Both West and Thomson Delphion are Thomson businesses.

Researchers who access Delphion through Westlaw can use the following features:

• Text searching and images from U.S., European, and Patent Cooperation Treaty collections; Patent Abstracts of Japan; and bibliographic information and images from INPADOC
  
• Dynamic sorting and display of citation lists, including image thumbnails
  
• Analytical tools that create graphical maps and bar charts online as well as offline analysis of results with 3-D graphs and charts
  
• Work files to save, organize, annotate, and share personalized lists of patents
  
• Bulk downloads of patents and fast export of key bibliographic fields
  
• Saved searches and alerts
  
• Name-normalized searching capabilities

Westlaw's patent content includes major primary and analytical patent resources as well as the KeyCite Patent Citator, a tool that delivers access to key information and relevant documents pertaining to U.S. patents. Westlaw also offers patent research information such as cases, statutes, and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office decisions and administrative content; analytical materials; litigation information; prior art sources; and news and information.

Source: West

Snapshots International, Ltd., a publisher of market-research overviews, and EduServ, a U.K.-registered charity established with the support of U.K. higher education funding bodies, have announced that the Snapshots Series is now available through Athens. The Athens service, which is adopted by all U.K. higher and further education institutions, offers an authentication process that streamlines access to a range of services via a single-password sign-on.

Snapshots Reports cover a broad range of industries in 23 countries. Each report provides an instant overview of a market, with data supplied in both graphical and tabular format. All Snapshots data is compiled in-house by the Snapdata Research Department, a team of multilingual researchers who check original sources and interview industry experts all over the world.

Source: Snapshots International, Ltd.