Weekly News Digest

Ovid announced Ovid LinkSolver, its new universal link resolver (based on the OpenURL standard) that provides end users with linking capabilities with which to access their library's entire collection of Web-based content, as well as Internet resources, regardless of where they reside. Ovid LinkSolver can be purchased independently of Ovid's current product line or integrated into the OvidWeb Gateway platform. Ovid LinkSolver will be available in June 2003.

Ovid LinkSolver provides information professionals with complete flexibility in defining, organizing, and displaying links based not only on their institutions' existing electronic content collections, but also on a range of linking options available to researchers through the Internet. When used with Ovid's search engine, Ovid LinkSolver enables end-users to conduct a search in Ovid's bibliographic resources and limit the results to citations in which full text is available--either located within Journals@Ovid or hosted externally.

Ovid also announced that it is offering new outbound full-text linking functionality, delivered as a service within the OvidWeb Gateway solution. This Links@Ovid functionality will now be available to its customers at no additional charge, and provides linking from Ovid's more than 100 bibliographic databases to electronic full text hosted internally or externally, as well as locally held print resources through institutional OPACs and document delivery services.

Source: Ovid

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has appointed Swets Blackwell and Extenza, divisions of Royal Swets & Zeitlinger, as its business partners for consortia and multi-site sales. ALPSP is the international trade association for not-for-profit publishers. It has 240 members in 21 countries.

Swets Blackwell will be the global sales and marketing channel for the ALPSP Learned Journals Collection, as well as providing access for subscribing organizations through SwetsWise. Swets will also provide back-office customer service and administrative support both to libraries and to participating publishers. Extenza will offer a complete journal hosting service for those participating publishers that require it. This is not an exclusive deal; customers are free to use other agents.

Sally Morris, secretary-general of ALPSP, said: "It is very difficult for smaller publishers with just a few journals, however high quality these are, to break into the consortia market. We believe that by working together through the ALPSP Learned Journals Collection, our members can overcome this problem and reach additional customers. We are extremely pleased to be working with Swets Blackwell on this major initiative."

Source: ALPSP

ebrary announced that it is developing a new product that enables libraries to cost-effectively create online institutional repositories of documents, such as theses and dissertations, technical reports, articles, curricula guidelines, and special collections. In preparation, the company is extending a free pilot program to its existing customers and libraries that subscribe to ebrary's database collections by June 30, 2003.The system allows organizations to securely distribute their content over the Internet in an environment that integrates with existing infrastructures.

Participants that enroll in the pilot program prior to June 30, 2003 will receive the following:

• 500 megabytes worth of free storage (approximately 30,000 pages)
• A co-branded portal of the library's own content openly and freely accessible via the library's Web site
• Inclusion in an aggregated institutional repository openly and freely available via ebrary's Web site

• Simultaneous, multiuser access. Any number of researchers may access the information at any time, from anywhere
• Ability to integrate the institutional repository with existing ILS systems, ebrary databases, and other digital resources
• ebrary InfoTools, which allow researchers to highlight words and instantly link to corresponding information, such as definitions, biographical information, maps, translations, and more
• Advanced searching capabilities within and across documents
• PDF technology, which provides a mirror digital image of the documents in print