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Thursday, August 19, 2010
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Digital Lending Goes into OverDrive
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by Paula J. Hane
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I'd been hearing some buzz this summer about various improvements made by OverDrive to its services for libraries—more content, mobile apps, simplified procedures, etc. OverDrive is a full-service digital distributor of ebooks, audiobooks, music, and video that first launched its online digital warehouse in 2000. So, I caught up with the company's vice president of marketing, David Burleigh, for an extended conversation on what's new and what's coming. While OverDrive offers publishers a secure, web-based, wholesale distribution service for the sale and delivery of digital media, I didn't get into the details of that side of the business. Our discussion focused on what OverDrive offers libraries and their patrons.
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LexisNexis to Enrich Content with SRA’s NetOwl
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LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.com) announced that it has signed an agreement with SRA International, Inc. (www.sra.com) to implement SRA's text analytics product NetOwl as its enterprise tool to deliver enhanced search and discovery capabilities for legal and business professionals. By integrating NetOwl's entity, link, and event extraction capabilities into its solutions, LexisNexis will create a richer set of metadata for each piece of text-based content it offers. This enrichment will deliver a more sophisticated semantic search capability, answer filtering, and analytics to LexisNexis customers—enhancing their ability to quickly find and analyze the information they need from across large enterprise databases.
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EOS International Enters Digital Library Market
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Library automation vendor EOS International (www.eosintl.com) has announced EOS.Web Digital, designed for libraries whose collections are stored in digital, electronic formats. The application and digital content may be stored on a local network server or accessed remotely from one of the company's global data centers.
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Google Announces Additions to Biking Information in Google Maps
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Google began adding added U.S. biking directions to Google Maps in March 2010 (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/biking-directions-added-to-google-maps.html) and said it was eager to see the response from the cycling community. (Select "Bicycling" from the "more" dropdown menu on the map or click on the bicycle icon when asking for directions.) Through its partnership with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, it had detailed bike lane and trail information for 150 cities; and for the rest of the country, it recommended routes based on other data such as the size of the road, speed of traffic, and hill steepness. Through its "Report a problem" tool, any user can send corrections or recommend improvements, and receive notifications from Google when their report has been resolved.
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New Search Engine Promises Relevance, Now
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by Avi Rappoport
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The new search engine, NowRelevant.com, says that it will find, "everything about your subject for the past two weeks." The name promises relevance, but what does that even mean? Information science researchers have been trying to understand it for over fifty years, and it's become clear that relevance is in the eye of the beholder. Some beholders may love NowRelevant.com—others may not.
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