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Weekly News Digest
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April 21, 2003 — 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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Ask Jeeves Upgrades Ask.com
Ask Jeeves Web Properties, a division of Ask Jeeves, Inc., introduced upgrades to the experience, performance, and design of Ask.com. Dubbed Smart Search, the new features should enable users to conduct more effective searches by helping narrow, broaden, or more directly answer user queries.Ask Jeeves Smart Search features prompt the user with interactive tools, refinement suggestions, or sets of highly relevant links around popular subjects. For some queries, such as images, news, state and country capitals, and dates for holidays, Smart Search also delivers direct content to the Ask Jeeves results page. The company said the site now loads 50-percent faster than the previous architecture. Design improvements include bolding the search terms; more clearly differentiating between the different types of search results; and replacing tabs with radio buttons. Ask Jeeves' proprietary spell check technology, now out of Beta, recognizes misspelled words and offers correction suggestions. Source: Ask Jeeves Web Properties
Gale Taxonomies Now Available Through Taxonomy Warehouse
Gale, a Thomson company, announced that it has partnered with Synapse Corp. to offer a range of Gale's professional taxonomies for license or sale through Synapse's Taxonomy Warehouse (http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com). Gale's 70,000-node subject taxonomy may be licensed or purchased in its entirety or in smaller, more specific domains, such as accounting, anatomy, banking, law, computing, electronics, and nearly 50 others. Updated continuously, Gale taxonomies are available independently or delivered prepackaged in the Synaptica thesaurus management software application.Taxonomy Warehouse provides access to an extensive catalog of taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, classification schemes, and databases of company, personal, and geographic names, together with an alerting service and other resource discovery features. Synapse, which has secured agreements to license and sell many of the taxonomies, also will offer value-added fulfillment services, such as scheduled updates and the reformatting of taxonomies into various user-specified formats. Also available from Taxonomy Warehouse are taxonomies from West, ProQuest, and others. Access to the taxonomy directory is free. Source: Gale
EBSCO Publishing Adds Databases
EBSCO Publishing recently announced a number of new database additions. It has acquired Computer Literature Index (CLI) from Applied Computer Research, Inc. The company plans to make the database available via EBSCOhost by fall 2003. CLI offers indexing and abstracts for nearly 300 computer-related trade publications, business magazines and journals, and other reference sources, dating back to 1996. EBSCO plans to extend the archive back to 1984 and enhance the abstracts.EBSCO Publishing also announced it will distribute the OCLC PAIS International database online through EBSCOhost. The PAIS International database provides global coverage of public affairs and world issues, with an emphasis on practical information. It includes references to more than 514,000 journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, gray literature, research reports, Internet documents, conference reports, and other sources from more than 120 countries. In addition, 4,200 Web sites are included in PAIS International. EBSCO plans to release this database in early 2004. H.W. Wilson will also make 11 more of its databases available soon to libraries via EBSCOhost, bringing the total number of Wilson databases available on EBSCOhost to 17. The full range of Wilson databases—over 50 in all—continue to be available through the recently released WilsonWeb platform. Source: EBSCO Publishing
Send correspondence concerning the Weekly News Digest to NewsBreaks Editor
Brandi Scardilli
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