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Bowker Enhances Its Suite of Library Resources

Bibliographic information provider Bowker, a business unit of ProQuest, has announced enhancements to its suite of library resources. These include Books In Print, Syndetic Solutions, and Library Thing For Libraries products. The efforts are designed to enhance the bibliographic content found in library online catalogues.

Books In Print features nearly 20 million in-print, out-of-print, and forthcoming book, ebook, and audio titles, representing nearly 500,000 publishers worldwide. The all-new Books In Print combines this content with powerful new Web 2.0 user features and tools for facilitating research. The new Books In Print now features the following:

• New visual search interface
• Intuitive relevancy-ranked results
• 50+ interactive faceted refine options
• Edition grouping and FRBR
• Rating, tagging, and user reviews

Syndetic Solutions provides specialized, high-quality enriched data designed to enhance library online catalogs. A library's catalog is the primary entry point for most library users. Syndetics gives libraries more than 11 million unique, descriptive data elements relating to books, audio books, videos, CDs, and DVDs, which deliver richer, more informative results and create a significantly better experience with the catalog.

The new Syndetics Plus combines Syndetics content enrichment elements with advanced widget technology to seamlessly integrate this data within a library's OPAC. As a result, using and accessing Syndetics' data is now easier for libraries and their customers. The widget allows for customized implementation that makes the Syndetics content neatly match the look and feel of the OPAC, so your catalog pages not only look better, but work better.

Library Thing for Libraries enriches a library's online catalog with the power and fun of Library 2.0. It now offers several enhancement packages, including reviews, catalog enhancements (recommendations, tag browsing, and other editions and translations), and shelf browsing (with the context and serendipity of browsing a physical shelf). Library Anywhere offers a mobile web version of a library catalog, with apps for iPhones, Blackberries, and Android.

Source: Bowker