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Weekly News Digest
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June 12, 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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NISO Announces CORE Initiative
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO; www.niso.org) has approved work on a new standard project, CORE (Cost Of Resource Exchange), to facilitate the exchange of cost, fund, vendor, and invoice information between Integrated Library Systems (ILS), Business Systems, Electronic Resource Management Systems (ERMS), and other interested parties such as Subscription Agents. People interested in joining the CORE Working Group or affiliated interest group are asked to contact NISO. The target date for completion of the draft standard is Dec. 1, 2008.The new work item was first proposed by Jeff Aipperspach, product manager, Serials Solutions; Ted Koppel, AGent Verso (ILS) product manager, Auto-Graphics, Inc.; and Ed Riding, technical product manager, SirsiDynix. In describing the project, Riding says, "We have three main goals. First, we want to develop and refine the list of data elements exchanged between an ERMS, ILS, Business Systems, and other interested parties holding acquisitions metadata to support the population of the ERMS with financial and vendor information in the automated system. Second, we intend to create a transport protocol useful in moving these data elements from one system to another. Third, we will write a small number of use cases which will help all parties understand the capabilities of the protocol." The Working Group expects to complete the XML schema by Nov. 1, 2008, and have an approved American National Standard by spring 2009. People interested in this project should contact Karen A. Wetzel, NISO standards program manager, at kwetzel@niso.org. An initial group roster is expected by July 11, 2008. Source: National Information Standards Organization
iCopyright Launches New Instant Licensing Services
iCopyright (www.icopyright.com) has launched two new instant licensing services designed to help online publishers promote lawful reuses of their copyrighted content while protecting their rights: Instant PDF E-Prints and Instant Web Posting services. These services are responsive to the explosive growth in blogging and social networking, where sharing valued content is appealing to readers but often vexing to the original publishers.Instant PDF E-Prints are designed for websites and intranets that wish to directly host authorized versions of a publisher’s content. The licensee instantly obtains a crisp rendering of the original article in a standard PDF file that can be posted on a site for a defined period. Licensees pay a modest fee to the publisher for the rights according to the duration of the posting. iCopyright monitors the site and automatically prompts the licensee to renew or remove the file when the license term expires. The new Instant Web Post licensing service gives publishers two options for permitting reuse of content—by duration in months and by page view counts. Publishers can enable either of these options individually or give users a choice between the two. In either case, the original content is rendered in HTML and hosted by iCopyright so that the content can be secured and monitored for compliance. Source: iCopyright, Inc.
Comtex to Provide XHTML Format From Business Wire
Comtex News Network, Inc. (www.comtex.com), a provider of electronic real-time news, content, and market products, announced that news from Business Wire in XHTML format will soon be available to all its clients. XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) is a format which retains the features and functionality of the original document while enhancing online search functions.XHTML allows content providers to exercise more control regarding the look and feel of their press releases—issuers are to embed hyperlinks behind keywords, present wider earnings tables that include underlines, and include bullets and superscript notations. Dozens of major portals and websites worldwide have already embraced the XHTML format, including Yahoo Finance!, Google News, and Morningstar. Adoption of these features can also improve search engine rankings of news releases. Appropriate hyperlinks and relevant formatting such as bolded keywords and bulleted highlights may enhance a release’s search engine optimization (SEO) and overall visibility throughout the internet. With a specialization in the financial news and content marketplace, Comtex receives, enhances, combines, and filters news and content received from national and international news bureaus, agencies, and publications, and distributes more than 1 million stories per day. Source: Comtex News Network, Inc.
Newstex Launches NewsTwits, a Twitter-Based Newsfeed
Newstex (www.newstex.com) announced NewsTwits, a new product that delivers Twitter content as a newsfeed to information providers and enterprise customers. Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a social networking and multiplatform messaging service that allows users to broadcast short-form updates known as "Tweets" (text-based posts up to 140 characters) to their online colleagues in real time. Messages sent via Twitter are displayed on the sender’s profile page on the Twitter website and are instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.Updates can be sent via cell phone SMS (short messaging system), instant messaging, or third-party applications, such as Twitterrific, Twhirl, and Facebook. Recipients get their updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email, and, now, through the NewsTwits newsfeed from Newstex. Like its Blogs on Demand service, Newstex licenses full-text Twitter content directly from Twitter users and then uses its proprietary NewsRouter technology to aggregate and deliver to distributors and enterprises in real time. The NewsTwits newsfeed from Newstex easily integrates as a headline feed into enterprise-grade applications that people use daily. For bloggers, content creators, and other media professionals, NewsTwits is a syndication model that is designed to increase their profiles. Media organizations, financial firms, and government agencies that already use Newstex’s Content on Demand service for millions of their users are finding that NewsTwits makes accessing Twitter-based content a snap. Already, hundreds of syndicated bloggers from Newstex’s Blogs on Demand network have signed up for NewsTwits. Source: Newstex, LLC
Hoover’s Launches Enhancements and Adds Millions of Professional Contacts
Hoover’s, Inc. (www.hoovers.com) announced several enhancements, including the addition of millions of new business professionals. This addition brings Hoover’s global database coverage to more than 34 million professionals at more than 26 million companies, with millions more to be added on a quarterly basis throughout 2008.In addition, Hoover’s interface changes are designed to make it easier to uncover all contacts at a given company. Customers can now find more mid- and lower-level contacts at headquarters, branch, and subsidiary locations and then filter by job function to target the right decision makers. Enhancements also include a People Self-Listing tool that allows customers to add their own profiles to a company with which they are affiliated. They simply add themselves to a company record by creating a profile detailing their work history, affiliations, and biography. They also have the ability to opt in to receive emails from other users. By opting in, they can be more visible in the business community and network with other self-listed contacts. Now available to Hoover’s subscribers, this new tool will become available to all users in the coming months. Source: Hoover’s, Inc.
Microsoft’s Article Authoring Add-In Now Available in Beta
At the recent annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in Boston, Microsoft Corp. announced the wide availability of the Beta 1 release of the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Word 2007. In addition to enabling Word users to open and save documents using the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) XML Journal Publishing format, used for the authoring of scientific articles, the Beta 1 release adds support for the NCBI Book format, used for authoring book chapters for digital books.A key value of the Article Authoring Add-in is in enabling editors at scientific and technical journals to create article templates, tailored for their individual journals’ requirements. These templates will assist authors in writing articles with greater consistency in relation to the structure of the articles, better reflecting the content requirements of the journals, and in expressing semantic information which is key for the search and consumption of articles in digital form. In addition to preserving information that is native to Microsoft Word, the Beta 1 release of the Article Authoring Add-in also preserves math information from controls, such as Design
Science’s MathType, when saving Word documents to the NLM XML format. Information on how to download the Beta 1 release can be found at www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=09c55527-0759-4d6d-ae02-51e90131997e&displaylang=en&tm Additional resources are available at the following sites:
Pablo Fernicola’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/exscientia
Microsoft Research, scholarly/scientific publishing website: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/tc/scholarly-publishing.mspx Source: Microsoft Corp.
Send correspondence concerning the Weekly News Digest to NewsBreaks Editor
Brandi Scardilli
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