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Weekly News Digest

October 29, 2009 — 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. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

Remote API Searching of Nature.com Through OpenSearch

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) now offers remote searching of the nature.com platform via nature.com OpenSearch (www.nature.com/opensearch). The new service allows application software to query nature.com and return results in a machine-readable format that can be reused and redisplayed. Nature.com OpenSearch is the latest example of NPG's drive to improve availability of article metadata on the nature.com platform, maximizing usability for the research and information communities.

As a demonstration of the new OpenSearch service, NPG has developed nature.com search desktop widgets (www.nature.com/widgets). Available for both Mac and PC, the widgets allow users to search nature.com without visiting the website. Searches are put together and sent by the widget, and results can be browsed with links back to the relevant article on nature.com. The widgets are available for download at Apple Downloads and Yahoo! Widgets gallery. See the screencast on YouTube for an introduction (www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqf_ew4o3U8).

Nature.com OpenSearch takes advantage of public protocols, using the emergent Search and Retrieve via URL (SRU) protocol and supporting the industry-standard OpenSearch conventions for accessing search engines. Federated searching, which enables the search of numerous resources via a single search interface, is now fully supported. Queries can be sent as a simple keyword list or as more complex descriptions, and the results are returned in a machine-readable, list-based format for easy integration.

Source: Nature Publishing Group