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Weekly News Digest
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April 18, 2005 — 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. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
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Innovative Interfaces to Offer Institutional Repository System
Innovative Interfaces, Inc. (http://www.iii.com) announced its plans to offer a full-featured institutional repository system. Called Symposia, the company says this Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant solution provides all that a community needs to collect, manage, and promote its knowledge assets more effectively than ever before.Innovative's institutional repository initiative began in 2004. As with all Innovative products, Symposia was developed with direct input from libraries. Development partner Northeastern University Libraries is currently using Symposia to build its digital institutional repository, IRis. Innovative's product will support content creators, such as academic faculty or public officials, who desire to or are mandated to make their work available to the widest group possible. It will also help library professionals embrace a new opportunity for community engagement. Symposia is designed specifically for users involved in day-to-day knowledge management—the actual creators, managers, and consumers of content—rather than IT specialists. Content creators will find that Symposia allows them to submit both "born-digital" and converted documents, such as word-processing files, scans, image files, Web pages, and more to the repository with the same ease as sending e-mail. Users of Symposia will be able to create communities in cyberspace that closely mirror the departments, committees, and outreach partnerships to which they belong. Metadata will be stored in XML and will be made available for harvesting via the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting as a data provider. This will facilitate indexing by search engine crawlers and harvesting by other information managers. Source: Innovative Interfaces, Inc.
Civic Introduces BusinessDecision GIS Product for Libraries
Civic Technologies, Inc. (http://www.civictechnologies.com), a provider of geographic information systems (GIS) for public libraries, announced its new BusinessDecision Web-based service, which lets public libraries offer access to comprehensive business-to-consumer market data to small and medium-sized businesses. Libraries can license either a starter or a more advanced version of the integrated database and GIS mapping service for an annual subscription. An interactive demonstration of the service is available at http://www.businessdecision.info.From any desktop computer through a library's Web site, users can obtain consumer and demographic information for a designated geographic area—from an entire region down to a specific home or business address—and then create reports and maps that are e-mailed to them as PDF files. BusinessDecision uses data, reports, and maps from ESRI Business Information Solutions (ESRI BIS), a supplier of GIS software. BusinessDecision Basic, the starter version, and BusinessDecision Pro, which includes additional robust data and analytical tools, are each designed for local businesses and the reference and business librarians who support them. Both services include detailed demographic data, Census 2000 Summary information, consumer expenditure data, and site maps of the area. Civic's flagship LibraryDecision product helps librarians get a picture of their service area by mapping the demographics of their user population. A variety of public libraries throughout the U.S. are using LibraryDecision to better match library services to user needs, reallocate resources, revise service area boundaries, and plan for new facilities. Source: Civic Technologies, Inc.
HighBeam Offers New Blogging Tools
HighBeam Research, Inc. (http://www.highbeam.com) has launched some new blogging tools for its members: HighBeam Blog Enhancer and HighBeam RSS. The new tools allow bloggers to track, search, and share HighBeam Research content within blogs or Web sites.Blog Enhancer makes it easy for bloggers to incorporate content from the HighBeam Research Engine's collection of 33 million articles. To share their research, bloggers need only click the "Blog this Article" link found within previews and articles on HighBeam Research and, at their option, create a custom welcome message, add an excerpt from and include notes about any article. HighBeam Research then provides the HTML code (ready for pasting into a blog) for a robust citation for the article—including title, publication, and excerpt as well as a link to the blogger's personalized page on HighBeam Research that includes the article preview or full-text article. Bloggers who are HighBeam Research Full Members (those who pay a monthly or annual subscription fee) can share full-text articles with their readers—even with readers who are not members of HighBeam Research. Readers can access full text for 7 days from the time of posting, after which blog readers will still see the citation and article abstract, which do not expire. Bloggers who are HighBeam Basic Members (free membership) have the ability to share article previews. HighBeam RSS lets users track dynamically created topics. RSS feeds can easily be created based on keywords and/or by publication; users will receive an update in their favorite RSS reader as soon as new articles related to their research are added to the HighBeam Research Engine. Source: HighBeam Research, Inc.
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Brandi Scardilli
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