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Weekly News Digest
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February 17, 2015 — 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.
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ProQuest Announces Digitization of Early European Books
ProQuest released the first 2 million pages—about 5,800 books—from its digitization project of rare, historical works at the National Library of France (BnF). The fields covered include history, theology, law, physics, and medicine. When it is finished, the project will provide more than 28,000 European books from 1400 to 1700 as fully searchable images.Works from the BnF “have been among the most requested by scholars,” says Susan Bokern, ProQuest’s VP of product management. It is the fifth major library to participate a digitization project for ProQuest’s Early European Books collection. For more information, read the press release.
EBSCO Commits to Making Koha Improvements
EBSCO Information Services agreed to support the web-based, open source Koha ILS by getting involved in several of its projects, including a strategic upgrade of Koha’s core full-text search engine technology to Elasticsearch; the development of a browse function by author, title, subject, and call number; and greater flexibility in ingesting metadata schemes beyond MARC 21.These enhancements, expected to be completed by the end of 2015, will be open source. EBSCO and Koha also plan to ensure complete Koha OPAC functionality within EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) for mutual customers, with no additional charge. For more information, read the press release.
Springer Packages German Psychology Ebooks; Debuts New Journal
Springer Science+Business Media added a dedicated package of German-language psychology titles into its ebooks collection. By the end of 2015, the package will have more than 100 individual works, which will all become part of SpringerLink.“The choice to bundle all German-language titles into an eBook package for psychology reflects the field’s growing importance for science and in practice,” says Reinald Klockenbusch, editorial director of psychology and reference works at Springer. “As part of a strategic decision on the part of Springer’s management and in response to repeated requests from the market, we decided to group all of these titles thematically as of the 2015 publishing year.” In other news, Springer launched SCIENCE CHINA Materials, a new journal that is part of the Science China Press Co. Ltd. (SCP) series. It covers all aspects of materials science and is published monthly in print and digital formats. For more information, read the press releases.
Thomson Reuters Boosts Boards of Directors' Productivity
Thomson Reuters introduced a new iPhone app for its BoardLink service, which gives boards of directors a secure workflow solution and access to company and business intelligence information. Directors can respond to items such as board resolutions, draft documents, and messages from other board members. Other tools in the app include a calendar and surveys.The app is compatible with iOS 7 and 8, as well as with the iPhone, complimenting the existing iPad app and web version of BoardLink. For more information, read the press release.
TV Content Joins Zignal Labs' Analytics Platform
Zignal Labs partnered with iQ media to expand its offerings into television content. Its customers now have access to coverage from television, print, online, and social media sources, as well as from LexisNexis. This robust platform for analytics offers a view of how stories move among disparate media.Video segments from 900 channels in the U.S. and Canada are available directly within the Zignal platform and use the same intuitive filtering and search parameters as the other media. European channels will be available sometime in 2015. For more information, read the press release.
Wiley Online Library Implements ReadCube Connect
Wiley integrated ReadCube Connect across its Wiley Online Library to provide a new reading experience and enhancements to the majority of its PDF articles, such as hyperlinked in-line citations, annotation tools, clickable author names, and direct access to supplemental content. Readers can also save articles and annotations to ReadCube’s cloud library.“One of Wiley’s goals is to ensure that our high impact content is connected in ways that add to the productivity of researchers. Our partnership with ReadCube helps us transform the flat PDF into an innovative, next generation content experience on Wiley Online Library,” says Todd Toler, Wiley’s VP of digital product management. For more information, read the press release.
New Report Shows Importance of Monitoring the Dark Web
The Global Commission on Internet Governance issued a working paper, “The Impact of the Dark Web on Internet Governance and Cyber Security,” which reports that insights on the deep web—and its subset, the dark web—must be considered when formulating comprehensive strategies and policies for governing the internet.The paper recommends the following efforts to monitor the dark web: - mapping the hidden services directory by deploying nodes in the DHT [distributed hash table];
- customer data monitoring by looking for connections to non-standard domains;
- social site monitoring to spot message exchanges containing new Dark Web domains;
- hidden service monitoring of new sites for ongoing or later analysis;
- semantic analysis to track future illegal activities and malicious actors;
- marketplace profiling to gather information about sellers, users and the kinds of [goods] exchanged.
For more information, read the press release.
DPLA Updates KriKri Metadata Aggregation Engine
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) launched KriKri version 0.1.3 (a Ruby on Rails engine for metadata aggregation, enhancement, and quality control), which is used as part of the DPLA’s metadata ingestion system Heiðrún (Heidrun).
The newest version of KriKri includes features such as the ability to harvest metadata from OAI-PMH providers and support from other harvesters, metadata parsing and mapping to resource description framework (RDF) graphs using a domain-specific language, and enrichments for mapped metadata. For more information, read the press release.
New Bill Could Increase Students’ Technology Access
According to FedScoop, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) proposed a bill that would allow teachers, principals, and district leaders to upgrade their curricula to emphasize technology as an avenue for student achievement. Titled Enhancing Education Through Technology Education, the bill is designed to improve educational outcomes and help students get ready for college.Baldwin said in a statement that the bill would “level the playing field and give schools the resources, infrastructure, hardware, software and human capacity needed to prepare students for the 21st century global economy.” For more information, read the article.
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Brandi Scardilli
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