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The Challenging Landscape of Ebooks in Libraries
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by Paula J. Hane
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The overall growth in digital content of all kinds, and in particular, the growing importance and acceptance of ebooks, has clearly presented great opportunities for libraries, as well as plenty of challenges. Many libraries are coping with decreasing budgets while at the same time experiencing increased demand for content and services. Challenges include limited availability of ebooks from publishers, increasing demands for tech support with ebook readers and mobile devices, cumbersome borrowing processes, and minimal discoverability of ebook content. Two recent reports shed some light on the current situation, providing interesting statistics and perspectives.
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Inmagic Announces Presto for DB/Text
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Inmagic introduced a new product that will bring advanced web publishing capabilities to DB/TextWorks customers. The new product, Presto for DB/Text, is a limited version of Inmagic Presto that will enable many new web publishing capabilities for DB/Text, while allowing textbases to continue to be created and maintained in DB/TextWorks. Presto for DB/Text will work with both SQL and non-SQL versions of DB/TextWorks.
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NoveList Select Gains New Features and Options
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NoveList, a division of EBSCO Publishing, is introducing new features to NoveList Select, its catalog enrichment resource. These new features improve the user experience, as well as offer new upgrade options, including book jackets, professional book reviews, sample excerpts, tables of contents, and more, from Content Café—a database offered by Baker & Taylor.
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Columbia University and Thomson Reuters Launch Advanced Data Visualization Project
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Columbia University and Thomson Reuters announced the launch of the Advanced Data Visualization Project (ADVP) based at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). The initiative, sponsored by Thomson Reuters, will facilitate research into data visualization and its implications for academia and industry in a world increasingly awash with data.
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New European Library Portal Launched
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by Katherine Allen
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The European Library is a new discovery service that provides access to the collections of the national libraries of 46 European countries, plus a growing number of research libraries. Content accessible from the new service includes rare books, manuscripts, images, and video. The service allows users to cross-search 200 million records, covering more than 24 million pages of full-text information and more than 7 million digital objects. Users can export records to reference management services such as Mendeley, and from the end of 2012, registered users will be able to download and re-use metadata free of charge. To facilitate further research, links are provided to other websites in the Europeana group.
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Plum Analytics Maps Success in Open Access Scholarship
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by Barbara Quint
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Another trendy term has arrived—altmetrics, a contraction of the phrase "alternative metrics." The term refers to a group of different techniques and technologies all meant to wrestle with the issues of scholarship moving to digital venues. The issues include filtering good/better/best from bad/worse/worst, relieving the "firehose as drinking fountain" challenge of keeping up with digitally borne scholarship, and effectively replacing or reinforcing traditional measures of success in scholarship (e.g., prestigious journals, positive peer review, cite counts, etc.). A new small startup, Plum Analytics, has moved into the altmetrics field. It offers universities and other research institutions a way to track how researchers on staff have fared in the open access (OA) milieu.
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