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Weekly News Digest
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March 3, 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. 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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Zinio Launches Global Initiatives
Zinio (www.zinio.com), an online publishing, distribution, and retail services company, has announced two global initiatives—the launch of an online Global Newsstand and an international marketing partnership that extends its reach into Europe and Latin America with Acceso Group, a company partly owned by Havas Media. The initiatives are designed to provide publishers with an increased reach and to introduce more variety for consumers with an expanded selection of magazine titles and a choice between online or offline reading capabilities.Zinio’s Global Newsstand offers magazine publishers the ability to circulate their publications worldwide, a task previously limited by constraints of print costs, distribution, and inventory. Today, more than 850 digital consumer magazine titles actively sell and deploy their content online in multiple languages, across more than 200 countries, using Zinio’s platform. Zinio aims to expand that number to more than 2,000 top-tier titles within the year by collaborating with Havas Media global network. Publishers who join will also have access to a new resource center that includes the ability to work closely with Zinio’s Publisher Growth Services Group (PGS Group) to create tailored marketing programs as an extension to their own resources. The PGS Group helps publishers build stronger recognition for their titles and brands while increasing a variety of circulation and advertising revenue streams. Source: Zinio, LLC
New Survey on Enterprise Social Software
Mike Reid and Christian Gray believe that Web 2.0 tools can be powerful new tools for enterprises. For their third of three articles on the topic, they are conducting what they say is the first large-scale study of its kind. To access their survey, visit www.essresearch.com. They would like participants to complete it before March 14. They have been writing about the topic for Searcher magazine. The first two articles appeared in the July/August 2007 (www.infotoday.com/searcher/jul07/Reid_Grey.shtml) and the October 2007 (available online at www.iti-infocentral.com) issues.They hope the survey will reach a broad base of private sector, public sector, and nonprofit organizations in an attempt to create a baseline map of how enterprise social software (ESS) is being used in the enterprise. They also hope to determine the experience organizations are having with their plans and/or implementations. Data collection will include, but not be limited to, the following:
Types of implementations
Plans/strategies for implementation
Departments/functions served and/or involved
Vendors selected
Criteria for vendor selection
Budget
Impetus for plans/implementation
Criteria for measuring success
Self-measurement of success/progress
Level of internal support
Impact on organization Also collected will be select demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics of the organizations and their leaders so that they can segment the organizations and identify patterns (relationships, associations) across variables where possible. The sample will be recruited initially via relationships with a number of industry organizations and media outlets that will promote participation in the survey—initially SLA and Information Today, Inc. The survey will be advertised at the IEEE Computer Society website, www.computer.org. Additional participation will be sought via a "nomination" process whereby respondents will identify colleagues to whom they can send a link for online access to the survey. Incentives for respondents to participate and accurately identify themselves will be offered in the form of information sharing—those who cooperate will have online access to data they can use to track the field and benchmark their own experiences with ESS. The survey is presented and will be analyzed by researchers and data analysts with Sector Intelligence (www.sectorintelligence.com), an independent market intelligence firm, and DATACOLLECTION-TOOLS.COM, an online survey implementer. Source: ESS Research
Hot Neuron Introduces Document Clustering Software
Hot Neuron, LLC (www.hotneuron.com) announced the release of version 1.0 of its Clustify document clustering software (www.cluster-text.com), aimed at helping corporations and law firms explore, organize, and tag large document sets. Clustify uses a proprietary, agglomerative algorithm designed to provide excellent cluster quality and scalability. Clustify can help corporations organize their internal documents. It can also enhance search engines by identifying related documents that may be of interest even if they don’t match the search query exactly.Clustify groups documents into clusters of related documents. It identifies important keywords for each cluster, giving quick insight into the document set. It also allows the user to create a hierarchy of custom tags that can be applied to individual documents, all documents in a particular cluster, or all clusters containing a particular combination of keywords, allowing the user to categorize hundreds of documents with a single mouse click. Clustify provides substantial benefits in litigation, where electronic discovery can be expensive and time-consuming. It produces a quick overview of the document set, allowing the user to prioritize the documents for review. By processing the most promising documents first, litigators can start planning their cases early and ensure they meet deadlines for document requests. Reviewing related documents together allows documents to be tagged more efficiently and more consistently, with a greater understanding of relationships and context. Clustify can reveal evidence that may be missed with search queries, e.g., due to synonyms. Hot Neuron is an information retrieval software and services company located in Bryn Mawr, Pa. It also owns and operates MagPortal.com (www.magportal.com), a search engine and directory for finding online magazine articles. Source: Hot Neuron, LLC
BBC to Syndicate Video Through Mochila
BBC Motion Gallery (www.bbcmotiongallery.com), the footage licensing division of the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, announced a partnership with Mochila (www.mochila.com), the online media marketplace for text, video, and photo content, to distribute its content globally to the more than 3,500 members of the Mochila marketplace. The relationship allows for syndication of approximately 800 video episodes and more than 60 hours of BBC Motion Gallery Short Programs to mainstream media outlets, blogs, and other online entities through Mochila’s ad-supported program.With Mochila’s ad-supported model, BBC Motion Gallery will provide its content to web publishers for free and earn a percentage of the advertising revenue that accompanies that content. The Mochila suite of customizable widgets, including its proprietary video player, is designed to give web publishers options for leveraging content. BBC Motion Gallery is also the exclusive global representative of the CBS News Archive, and it has global distribution deals with NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster; ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corp.; and CCTV, China’s national television station. Mochila’s content syndication platform helps publishers build their businesses, content owners find new value for their content, and advertisers reach highly engaged target audiences. Mochila’s marketplace contains high-quality articles, photos, and videos covering subjects from hard news to business, entertainment, sports, health, and many others. Mochila combines proprietary licensing technology with a customizable suite of ad-supported widgets to provide dynamic content solutions. Source: BBC Motion Gallery
National Library of China to Add Its Records to OCLC WorldCat
The National Library of China (www.nlc.gov.cn/english.htm), the largest library in Asia, will add its bibliographic records to the OCLC WorldCat database (www.oclc.org/worldcat), making those records available to researchers worldwide. The National Library of China will develop software to convert the format of its records before they can be added to WorldCat. Following development and conversion of the records, the library anticipates that some 1.5 million records will be sent to OCLC in 2008. These records, when added to WorldCat, will display Chinese characters. The library will continue adding records to WorldCat beyond 2008 once the format has been converted.OCLC (www.oclc.org), the world’s largest library cooperative, opened an office in Beijing in July 2007 to better serve the growing information needs of libraries and other cultural heritage institutions in China and other parts of Asia. OCLC’s relationship with libraries in the People’s Republic of China began in 1986 when OCLC introduced its CJK system for cataloging Chinese, Japanese, and Korean materials. An OCLC Service Center was established at Tsinghua University in 1996, and access to the OCLC FirstSearch online reference service was made available to about 100 academic institutions in China. In 2004, the CALIS (China Academic Library and Information System) consortium, under the leadership of Peking University, began providing access to a NetLibrary eBook collection for 80 libraries in China. OCLC was selected to be the host site for the 4th China-U.S. Library Conference in October 2007 in Dublin, Ohio. Source: OCLC
EBSCONET Adds Details About Publishers’ License Agreements
EBSCO Information Services (www.ebsco.com) has recently broadened the offerings of EBSCONET, its e-service platform for electronic and print resource management, to provide detailed information about publisher license agreements. Eliminating the need to navigate numerous publisher sites to locate license data as well as the need to develop and manage desktop spreadsheets and databases, the new license details feature provides instant answers to commonly asked questions as well as dozens more not so common. For example, librarians can now obtain information regarding publishers’ policies on perpetual access and learn whether they can access a journal via their libraries’ proxy servers.While following the E-Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) guidelines in collecting license data, EBSCO has identified, with significant input from customers, a manageable list of 50 key data elements to display on EBSCONET. As a result, librarians can view a standardized version of the terms and conditions of use in various publisher license agreements and link directly to the agreements themselves. With its value-added approach to e-resource management, the license details feature is designed to remove much of the burden of researching license information, saving librarians time and frustration while helping them make informed purchasing decisions. Source: EBSCO Information Services
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Brandi Scardilli
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