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Weekly News Digest
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November 12, 2007 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.
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ProQuest-Gale Agreement to Enable Cross-Searching of Databases
An agreement between ProQuest (www.il.proquest.com) and Gale (www.gale.com), a part of Cengage Learning (www.cengage.com; formerly Thomson Learning), will connect two digital research databases of early modern English books through cross-search technology. In 2008, a search in ProQuest’s Early English Books Online (EEBO) also will provide bibliographic search results from Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) for mutual subscribers, and vice versa. Libraries that have purchased both will be able to activate cross-searching at no charge. EEBO and ECCO are digital collections of nearly every printed work from the late 15th through the 18th centuries; they are considered to be among the world’s most valued research collections. The companies said the agreement is designed to streamline serious research in literature, humanities, history, and a variety of cultural studies.EEBO, the first project in ProQuest’s massive Digital Vault Initiative, includes more than 100,000 literary and historic works from 1475 to 1700. Its author list includes Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, William Congreve, and Thomas D’Urfey. The database also includes musical exercises by Henry Purcell, novels by Aphra Behn, and prayer books, pamphlets, proclamations, almanacs, calendars, and other primary resources. ECCO, published digitally by Gale in 2003, captures more than 28 million pages of books, dictionaries, directories, Bibles, sheet music and sermons—in fact, almost everything printed in England between 1700 and 1800. The more than 120,000 books in ECCO contain the seminal works of the age of Enlightenment, the provocative documents that surrounded the American and French revolutionary causes, and landmark writings of scientific, technological, and medical discoveries from the Age of Reason. Sourced from the leading libraries of the world, all the works in ECCO are fully text-searchable, and they include high resolution images and bibliographic metadata. Asked if this was the first of more cross-search agreements, Lynda James-Gilboe, senior vice president of marketing for ProQuest said: "Short answer: yes. Long answer: ProQuest’ s vision focuses heavily on uncovering content and making it more accessible, more easily discovered. It doesn’ t matter whether it’ s our content or someone else’s; if it’ s relevant, reliable, and useful, ProQuest intends to help researchers find it." Sources: ProQuest and Gale
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Brandi Scardilli
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