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Weekly News Digest
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March 29, 2004 — 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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Vanderbilt Television News Archive to Be Digitized
More than 30,000 videotaped hours of television news programming will be preserved digitally through a grant awarded to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/) by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Vanderbilt University officials announced that they had been notified that the grant for $281,154 had been approved. (For background on the archive, see the article in the October 2002 issue of Information Today: http://www.infotoday.com/it/oct02/hane.htm.)At stake is an important and always-growing cultural history of the United States and a rich database for researchers investigating a wide array of issues, from bias in the news media to how advertising has changed over the years. The grant funds a 2-year project to transfer programming recorded by the archive dating back to 1968 from three-quarter-inch U-Matic videotape to MPEG-2 digital video. The three-quarter-inch videotape format is nearly defunct, with playback equipment and spare parts increasingly hard to find. The archive will have wider availability after the transfer to digital format. Currently, in order to view the material, researchers must either visit the archive in Nashville or request a videotape loan. The Vanderbilt Television News Archive was conceived by the late Paul C. Simpson, a Nashville insurance executive and Vanderbilt alumnus. Simpson championed the concept of an independent archive for television news, and persuaded Vanderbilt University to take on the project initially as a 3-month experiment in 1968. The archive was sustained in its early years primarily through foundation funding. Recently, a fee-based subscription service has been launched to provide financial support. The Vanderbilt Television News Archive works in close partnership with the Library of Congress, which will be the permanent repository of the digital content it records. Source: Vanderbilt University
Education Department Awards Contract for New ERIC
The U.S. Dept. of Education has awarded a 5-year, $34.6 million contract to Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) of Rockville, Md., along with its subcontractors, to develop and operate a new database system for ERIC. The ERIC database will use the latest search and retrieval methods to cull education literature and give high-quality access to educators, researchers, and the general public.The ERIC database is the world's largest education database. Begun in 1966, it comprises more than one million bibliographic records. The goal of the new ERIC is to provide more education materials quicker, and more directly, to audiences through the Internet. With the new ERIC, individuals will be able to go to one Web site to search a comprehensive database of journal articles and document abstracts and descriptions and, for the first time, directly access full text. The database will include as much free full text as possible, and links will be provided to commercial sources so that individuals can purchase journal articles and other full text immediately. Materials will be added to ERIC within 1 month of release, and authors will submit conference papers through an online system. During the development and transition to the new ERIC, the ERIC database will continue to be available at http://www.eric.ed.gov, and materials selected in 2003 will continue to be added. Until the new model is operational in 2004, no new materials will be accepted for the database. The department will post updated information about the transition on the ERIC Web site and will contact publishers, education organizations, and other database contributors when the new model is ready to begin adding journal articles and other materials this year. Source: U.S. Department of Education
ISI ResearchSoft Upgrades Reference Manager
Thomson ISI ResearchSoft has shipped a major upgrade to Reference Manager (http://www.refman.com), its bibliographic software that streamlines research, writing, and publishing for corporate, government, and academic researchers. The new Reference Manager 11 delivers new ways to view and share reference collections—publish Reference Manager databases on the Web, create subject bibliographies instantly, exchange references with colleagues, connect to data visualization tools in one step, and support workgroups with new network utilities.Users can quickly post up to 15 Reference Manager databases to the Web or to an intranet with Reference Manager's built-in Web server and simple Web publishing tool. Colleagues can access the Web publisher site to search, add, edit, and export references in RIS and XML formats. Reference Manager 11 databases can also be accessed by third-party applications and enterprise portals using SOAP and WSDL standards. Users can capture references directly from colleagues' Microsoft Word papers with the export traveling library feature. Reference Manager 11 can also import and export files in XML format enabling use with other applications. Users can move references between Reference Manager 11 and data visualization tools, such as RefViz by ISI ResearchSoft, in one step to explore research literature visually for major themes and topics. Reference Manager 11 helps users locate full text faster by connecting to an institution's online resources using OpenURL standards. Source: Thomson ISI ResearchSoft
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Brandi Scardilli
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