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Weekly News Digest
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February 14, 2008 — 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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SIIA Releases Survey Results on Business Use of Web 2.0 Technologies
The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) has released the results of a survey on business use of Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, social networking, and user-generated content, which indicated that businesses are increasingly embracing these new technologies. Conducted to coincide with SIIA’s Information Industry Summit, the survey explored the ways in which business-oriented content companies are using the various forms of Web 2.0 capabilities to enhance their connections to their users.Nearly 42% of respondents are currently using social networking technologies such as MySpace and Facebook, while another 35% plan to do so in the near future. Only a third place user-generated content on their sites, while more than half carry at least one blog. The survey found that B2B users expected social networking to enable them to reach new markets and increase user engagement and loyalty. While slightly more than 80% of respondents expected to achieve these goals, about 40% feel they have already reached new markets, and a third believe they have increased customer engagement. Those surveyed about the utility of blogging had a mixed reaction. While more than half of survey respondents indicated that they do publish blogs, almost two-thirds believe that their influence on the industry has been mixed. Only 15% view blogs as "critically important" to the industry’s market environment. To view the full results of the SIIA survey, visit: www.siia.net/content under Recent Publications. Source: SIIA
dtSearch Integrates With ExPub’s Chemical Data
Expert Publishing, LLC (ExPub; www.expub.com), a provider of chemical hazard information for the global environmental, health, and safety (EH&S) community, and dtSearch Corp. (www.dtsearch.com), a developer of text search software, announce the integration of dtSearch developer products into ExPub’s online and portable media offerings. This is designed to provide fast, reliable access to ExPub’s data, covering nearly half a million unique chemical substances. EH&S customers rely on the databases for emergencies, such as responding to fires, spills, or chemical explosions, as well as more day-to-day needs like creating and maintaining healthy and compliant workplaces, MSDS authoring, product labeling, regulatory submissions, and developing site safety plans.ExPub originally chose dtSearch Web with Spider for searching on the web. ExPub then tried dtSearch Publish for publishing different segments of its data on portable media for customers requiring offline access—and found it was able to maintain the same data security in the portable media applications as it had on the web. The dtSearch product line can index more than a terabyte of text in a single index—as well as create and simultaneously search an unlimited number of indexes. Indexed search time is typically less than a second, even across terabytes of data. dtSearch products provide more than 2 dozen search options, with Unicode support for hundreds of international languages. dtSearch developer products offer an "out of the box" approach to publishing and searching data online and offline. For developers seeking additional programmatic flexibility, dtSearch developer products also include C++, Java, and .NET APIs, in native 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Source: dtSearch Corp.
CrossRef Launches Free Citation Look-Up Tool for Bloggers
CrossRef (www.crossref.org) announced that it has launched the beta version of a new plug-in that allows bloggers to look up and insert DOI-enabled citations (Digital Object Identifier) in the course of authoring a blog. The plug-in, which is available for download at https://sourceforge.net/projects/crossref-cite, allows the blogger to use a widget-based interface to search CrossRef metadata using citations or partial citations. The results of the search, with multiple hits, are displayed, and the author can then either click on a hit to follow the DOI to the publisher’s site or click on an icon next to the hit to insert the citation into a blog entry (as either a full citation or as a short op. cit.).At present, the CrossRef plug-in is available for the WordPress platform; a Moveable Type version is under development. The tool is designed with the bulk of the functionality contained in a shared back end hosted at CrossRef, making the plug-in GUI readily portable to other blogging and authoring platforms. CrossRef is a nonprofit membership association founded and directed by publishers. Its mission is to enable easy identification and use of trustworthy electronic content by promoting the cooperative development and application of a sustainable infrastructure. CrossRef operates a cross-publisher citation linking system, and it is the official DOI name registration agency for scholarly and professional content. Source: CrossRef
National Criminal Justice Database Now Available From EBSCO
The National Criminal Justice Reference Service Abstracts (NCJRSA) database is now available from EBSCO Publishing (www.ebscohost.com). NCJRSA is sponsored by the Department of Justice and the Executive Office of the President. The service is federally funded and supports research, policy, and program development around the world.NCJRSA contains summaries of more than 190,000 criminal justice, juvenile justice, and substance abuse resources covering corrections, courts, crime statistics, domestic preparedness, drugs, juvenile justice, law enforcement, and victims. The collection features U.S. and international publications, including citations for federal, state, and local government reports, books, research reports, journal articles, audiovisual presentations, and unpublished research. The content in the database dates from 1970 to the present. The database will complement other sociology databases available on the EBSCOhost platform, such as SocINDEX with Full Text and Social Work Abstracts. Source: EBSCO Publishing
Mochila Introduces Open Standards API for Publishers
Mochila (www.mochila.com), an online media marketplace for text, photo, and video content, introduced an open standards RSS Atom API that allows publishers to automatically connect their content management and web publishing systems to access Mochila’s rights-managed content. Mochila members can customize real-time feeds through this open standards XML-based API using keyword, category, byline, source, and many other parameters. Farlex, Inc. (www.farlex.com), owner of TheFreeLibrary.com and TheFreeDictionary.com, is the first publisher to integrate with Mochila and to use the Mochila API to enhance the content experience for its users.This new API marks a new way for web publishers to fully integrate with the Mochila platform by providing a fully customizable application that is able to communicate with a publisher’s existing content management and web publishing technology. By connecting with Mochila’s API interface, Farlex will provide its visitors with enhanced search functionality that includes relevant information from the Mochila content database. With more than 300 trusted content providers, including wire services, photo agencies, television, newspaper, and magazine publishers, Mochila offers TheFreeDictionary.com and TheFreeLibrary.com content across a broad range of topics, such as entertainment, sports, health, and business news. Source: Mochila
Scopus Adds 600 Titles at No Extra Charge
Scopus, the abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and web sources, announced that it will add 600 titles to its database of 15,000 peer-reviewed journals. To ensure it covers all information deemed relevant to scientific researchers, Scopus established a content strategy that puts the research community’s voice at its core. Users are invited to submit titles for inclusion (www.info.scopus.com/suggesttitle), which are then evaluated by librarians and researchers represented in the independent Content Selection & Advisory Board (CSAB). More than 1,700 titles were suggested by librarians and researchers, and, after extensive evaluation of all titles by the CSAB, 600 titles were selected (35% of the suggested titles) to be added to Scopus in the course of the next year. These additional titles will become available at no extra cost.Despite the broad selection of suggested titles, there is a constant focus on content from emerging countries and social sciences. Almost 20% of the new titles originate from Central & South America reflecting the growing importance of this region’s scientific output. In social sciences, 200 new titles will be added to the already extensive coverage of 2,800 titles. For an overview of all new titles, visit www.info.scopus.com/detail/what/documents/titles2008.xls.
Source: Scopus
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Brandi Scardilli
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