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Weekly News Digest
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April 16, 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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Innovative Announces YBP Integration and a Mobile Worklists App
Innovative and EBSCO Information Services announced that YBP Library Services’ GOBI ordering was integrated with Innovative’s Sierra Services Platform to streamline the ordering process and make workflows more efficient. Orders can be automatically created in Sierra’s acquisition system within seconds of being placed in GOBI. Additionally, the EBSCOhost Collection Manager ebook-ordering solution and EBSCONET Subscription Management journal procurement and renewal system will undergo a similar integration to enhance the process for ingesting YBP approval shipments and invoices. In other news, Innovative rolled out a Mobile Worklists app for iOS devices that is the company’s first completely cloud-based offering. It is built on Innovative’s OLS (Open Library Stack) and fully integrates with Sierra. Librarians can use it to reduce their travel between the stacks and their desks, cut down on repetitive material handling, and rely less on paper reports. For more information, read the press releases.
SAGE Business Researcher Offers Materials for In-Depth Study
SAGE Publications launched SAGE Business Researcher, a resource composed of biweekly in-depth reports, data, short articles, expert views, and other materials for investigating topics in business and management. The first in a suite of resources, SAGE Business Researcher is suitable for students in all stages of undergraduate and graduate schooling. Topics include Big Data use, digital marketing, and crowdfunding.By issuing material every 2 weeks, researchers have access to more current scholarship than journals can provide. Reports give foundational information on a topic, cover new developments and trends, and offer resources for further study. They also feature a user-friendly design with downloadable data from a single location, objective reporting to help students form their own inquiries, and a variety of content types (datasets, chronologies, pro and con debates, and bibliographies, etc.). For more information, read the press release.
Sponsoring Organizations Set Date for OpenCon
The second OpenCon will be Nov. 14–16, 2015, in Brussels. This conference exposes students and early-career academic professionals to topics in open access (OA), open education, and open data. Eleven organizations (including hosts SPARC and the Right to Research Coalition), announced the international event, which will help participants learn about issues, develop critical skills, and prepare actions toward a more open system for information sharing.There will be 2 days of keynotes, panels, and workshops, with a third day of advocacy training and in-person meetings with policymakers throughout Brussels. Keynote speakers include Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen, two co-founders of PLOS (Public Library of Science). Applications will open on June 1, and full travel scholarships will be provided for many applicants. For more information, read the blog post.
Lookeen Offers Free Desktop Search Tool
Lookeen launched a free desktop tool for Windows that can search an unlimited number of files on the main drive. Lookeen Free is a home-use version of the Lookeen 10 software (released in March 2015), with powerful capabilities that provide an alternative to using native Window Search. Anyone using Windows 7, 8, or 10 or Windows Vista can download the tool from Lookeen’s website.Lookeen Free’s features include a search-as-you-type function for quick feedback; full-fidelity previews of PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files; advanced search filters and wildcard functions; and an editing mode for text files (e.g., from Word or Excel) in previews. For more information, read the press release.
Springer and Altmetric Deliver Book and Chapter Metrics via New Platform
Springer and Altmetric introduced the Bookmetrix platform, which offers real-time title- and chapter-level metrics across all of Springer’s books. This data—showing how often books and chapters are mentioned, shared, reviewed, or read online—is displayed on book pages in SpringerLink. Springer’s Papers reference manager also includes Bookmetrix data.There are five tabs of information from Bookmetrix on book overview pages: Citations (based on data from CrossRef), Mentions (traditional and social media discussions collected by Altmetric), Readers (information about people who saved the book or chapter in a reference manager), Reviews (excerpts of book reviews), and Downloads (monthly and total downloads of books and chapters from SpringerLink). For more information, read the press release.
LexisNexis Newsdesk Provides Media Monitoring, Analysis, and Distribution
LexisNexis Legal & Professional rolled out LexisNexis Newsdesk, a comprehensive media aggregation, monitoring, and analytics solution for business, legal, and information professionals. It helps them quickly find, review, and share key insights about the company, industry, and competitive environment of their business or client. The curated and indexed collection of information features more than 4 million daily news articles, broadcast media resources, blogs, and social media channels from 150-plus countries.The solution comes from LexisNexis’ acquisition of Moreover Technologies, whose own Newsdesk is now integrated with LexisNexis’ collection of licensed news and business information to create a single interface for making near real-time, data-driven decisions. Features such as analytics (with data visualization) and metadata (an information panel with Klout Score and sentiment, etc.) were improved for this new solution. For more information, read the press release.
UNESCO Report Analyzes Global Education Trends
UNESCO released its 2015 Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report, “Education for All 2000-2015: Achievements and Challenges,” which found that one-third of countries have achieved the EFA goals they set in 2000. Other key findings are as follows:- In 2015, nearly 100 million children are not completing primary education.
- About 50 million more children are enrolled in school in 2015 than were enrolled in 1999.
- In 2015, the percentage of illiterate adults decreased to 14% (from 18% in 2000). Half of sub-Saharan African women lack basic literacy skills.
- The number of primary school students per teacher decreased in 121 of 146 countries between 1990 and 2012.
“The world has made tremendous progress towards Education for All,” says UNESCO’s director-general Irina Bokova. “Despite not meeting the 2015 deadline, millions more children are in school than would have been had the trends of the 1990s persisted. However, the agenda is far from finished. We need to see specific, well-funded strategies that prioritize the poorest—especially girls—improve the quality of learning and reduce the literacy gap so that education becomes meaningful and universal.” For more information, read the press release.
HathiTrust Adds Duke University Press Backlist Titles
Duke University Press made an initial set of 145 backlist titles available in HathiTrust under a CC BY-NC-ND license. Topics covered in this collection include literature, history, critical theory, political science, and sociology.“Even if these titles no longer have commercial value sufficient to justify the expense of creating e-book versions, they should still be available for reading in good digital editions. That’s why open access through HathiTrust makes sense for these books,” says Steve Cohn, director of Duke University Press. For more information, read the press release.
3M Cloud Library Expands Into the U.K. and Australia
3M Library Systems now offers its 3M Cloud Library to public libraries in the U.K. and Australia. This end-to-end, easily implemented and managed service provides comprehensive training and support tools, as well as a content acquisition tool that helps libraries curate their own collections. 3M Discovery Stations—interactive touchscreen devices—allow patrons to browse the library’s digital collection and check out ebooks and e-audiobooks.The 3M Cloud Library is currently used by more than 1,000 libraries in the U.S. and Canada. To support its entry into the new markets, 3M will supply dedicated sales and support resources across the U.K. and Australia. For more information, read Library Technology Guides’ press release.
TLC Introduces New Release of CARL-Connect
The Library Corp. (TLC) announced the availability of CARL•Connect 1.2, the latest general release, with extra flexibility for library patrons and a more proactive patron experience. The release offers a paperless registration process so library staffers can capture and store new patrons’ signatures, customize library policy information, and access a signature canvas to eliminate data entry from paper forms.“TLC’s second major release of the CARL•Connect product was developed to support exciting opportunities for providing new and re-imagined workflows to our library customers. Our strategic direction for this product focuses on putting more power in the hands of library staff for engaging with their communities and meeting users on ‘their own terms,’” says Lorrie Ann Butler, TLC’s director of product strategy and customer relations, Denver. For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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