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Weekly News Digest

June 5, 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.

SAGE Acquires CQ Press

CQ’s corporate parent, Times Publishing Co. of St. Petersburg, Fla., announced on January 3 that it would divest CQ Press in order to direct investment resources to other opportunities, notably the core CQ publishing business and the company’s newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times.

CQ Press serves the library, college, and professional markets with a diverse array of print and online products. It publishes about 100 new titles each year, with a growing list of textbooks and reference titles focusing on political science, mass communication, and related disciplines. SAGE plans to keep CQ Press intact as a separate division based in Washington, D.C., bearing the CQ Press imprint, and retaining all CQ Press employees under the senior management team that will remain in place, including publisher John A. Jenkins, who will also carry the title of president of CQ Press.

SAGE, founded in 1965 as a publisher of academic journals, has expanded into a global education publisher of books, journals, and electronic products. In four locations around the world, SAGE publishes more than 500 journals and 700 books a year encompassing 40 disciplines within the academic and scholarly arena.

Source: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Teragram Integrates Linguistic Tools With Apache Lucene

Teragram’s full suite of products, including TK240 taxonomy management, automatic categorization, and automatic metadata generation enhance Lucene’s basic search function. As a result, adopters of the open source search engine (for embedded search on both internal- and external-facing sites) can provide consumers with a more comprehensive experience that includes a searchable index. The faceted index is built using Teragram’s taxonomy tools that classify words into relevant topics and subtopics.

Teragram’s multilingual natural language processing tools provide linguistic modules such as morphological stemming, spelling correction, parts-of-speech tagging, related queries, and more. Teragram also offers dictionaries in a variety of Eastern and Western European, Asian, and Middle Eastern languages. SAS acquired Teragram in March 2008.

Source: Teragram Corp.

Alacra Launches Alacra Affiliate Widget

The Alacra Affiliate Widget is complementary to a site’s existing advertising programs. The widget, which can be installed on a blog with just a few mouse clicks, is configured to retrieve content that is contextually relevant to the page. Utilizing proprietary entity extraction technology, the Alacra Affiliate Widget scans the content of a page in order to deliver relevant ads. If a blog post or web article is discussing a planned company acquisition, for example, the widget would display recent credit and investment research and analyst call transcripts about the deal. For pages that are not focused on a specific company, the widget can be configured to serve ads with links to timely research on markets, venture capital, technology, and more.

The Alacra Affiliate Widget can be freely installed on any blog or website. To get the Alacra Widget or for more information, visit www.alacrastore.com/widget.

Source: Alacra, Inc.

NewspaperDirect Adopts ACAP for Its Digital Publishing Networks

ACAP is a nonproprietary, global permissions tool that puts content owners in control of their online content. It is backed by the World Association of Newspapers, the European Publishers Council, and the International Publishers Association and developed by publishers in collaboration with search engine vendors. Supporters say it is anticipated to "revolutionize the creation, dissemination, use, and protection of copyright-protected content on the worldwide web." (For background information, see the Feb. 14, 2008, NewsBreak "Publishers Try—Again—to Reach the Open Web: ACAP," at http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=40927.)

ACAP expands on the aging Robots Exclusion Protocol, introducing indexing instructions with a significantly higher level of precision and granularity. This allows publishers to assign permissions and restrictions to individual sections of webpages, giving them more control of how their content is viewed and used.

Source: NewspaperDirect.com

JustSystems Announces XMetaL Integrated Authoring Solution

XMetaL is designed to help organizations dramatically improve the quality and consistency of product and technical documentation, policies, procedures and other published content, while improving reuse and reducing the time and cost of creation, localization, and maintenance. XMetaL for ECM allows organizations to pursue a content reuse and single-source publishing strategy using the repositories they already have, without the cost and complexity of creating and maintaining custom integrations.

XMetaL for ECM leverages IBM WebSphere Information Integrator Content Edition, a middleware technology that provides bidirectional access to multiple, disparate content repositories. JustSystems has entered into an OEM agreement with IBM, which allows JustSystems to resell this IBM technology as the adapter framework for XMetaL.

Source: JustSystems, Inc.

EBSCO Acquires Austrian Subscription Agency Minerva

This new business opportunity resulted from Springer’s efforts to streamline its activities and focus on its core business of publishing. Joining the EBSCO network will enable Minerva to offer improved services to its clientele, particularly in the areas of online journals and databases. EBSCO will continue Minerva operations in Vienna. Accordingly, Minerva customers will retain their current customer service contacts and, therefore, should expect no change in their existing services.

Source: EBSCO Information Services