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Weekly News Digest
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July 21, 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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Cuadra Joins SydneyPLUS Group of Companies
On July 1, 2008, Cuadra Associates, Inc. (www.cuadra.com) joined the SydneyPLUS group of companies (www.sydneyplus.com). For more than 25 years, Cuadra has provided versatile information management and retrieval software. The Cuadra management team, led by Carlos A. Cuadra, Ph.D., and Judy Wanger, will remain with the company, as will Cuadra’s technical support and development staff.The addition of Cuadra to the SydneyPLUS family is expected to accelerate innovation by bringing together two companies with a common vision for agile and adaptable KM solutions. SydneyPLUS is known for helping Fortune 1000 companies, top law firms, and industry leaders to better collect, manage, and disseminate information with their multilingual, Unicode-compliant MS-SQL and Oracle-based solutions. Cuadra has a reputation for delivering flexible, world-class "corporate memory" systems to manage library, archive, museum, and media collections and support competitive intelligence, publishing, and records management operations. Together, Cuadra and SydneyPLUS plan to provide a group of complementary products and services to help their customers meet their key business objectives—reduced costs, increased revenues, and improved productivity. Customers and business partners will benefit from both the combined solutions and the strength of a larger software vendor. The synergies created by the merger will allow clients to deploy web-based solutions for a broad range of information management needs more quickly and cost-effectively. Cuadra will continue to protect and reward its customers’ investment in STAR products by adding new features and capabilities, as well as new applications. The company recently released STAR Knowledge Center for Libraries, a completely web-based library application, and will soon introduce web-based versions of its STAR/Media and STAR/Archives applications. Source: Cuadra Associates, Inc.
NPR Launches Open API
NPR (National Public Radio) has launched an Open API (application programming interface) designed to make NPR news and information content available to access, include, and share on individual websites and blogs. The API will also allow the 860 NPR Member public radio stations around the country to incorporate more NPR news and information content in their digital media products and services, and establish a framework for eventually sharing their own content. Additionally, it will extend third-party content partnership opportunities for NPR and member stations. Information about the use of the NPR Open API is available at www.npr.org/api.NPR says this launch represents one of the first comprehensive Open APIs introduced by a major national media organization. It is also the latest step in NPR’s multifaceted digital media strategy, which has included expansion of the NPR.org site, NPR Podcasts, the NPR Music destination site, and NPR Mobile on-demand services. The NPR Open API will provide access to more than 10 years of NPR-produced content, primarily NPR News: This includes audio, text, and photography for developers to easily incorporate into their sites and blogs and share with larger audiences. The user can curate personal collections of news based on topics of interest, favorite programs, or current events. The range of content available includes NPR breaking news, books, politics, health and science, arts and culture, and international subjects. Also, a wide variety of nonperformance NPR Music content—such as artist interviews, features, and reviews—is available. Future NPR Open API plans include enabling member stations to share their own locally produced news and other content. NPR is a producer and distributor of noncommercial news, talk, and entertainment programming. A privately supported, not-for-profit membership organization, NPR serves a growing audience of 26 million Americans each week in partnership with more than 860 independently operated, noncommercial public radio stations. Source: NPR
Really Strategies and TEMIS Announce Technology Alliance
Really Strategies, Inc. (www.reallysi.com), maker of RSuite, a browser-based content management system (CMS), and TEMIS (www.temis.com), maker of Luxid, a content enrichment and discovery solution, announce a technology partnership agreement that offers content management along with automated semantic annotation and categorization services.Really Strategies claims that RSuite is the industry’s only award-winning CMS built on top of a native XML repository. In addition to managing XML, RSuite also manages non-XML content, including PDF, InDesign/InCopy, JPG, Word, and audio files. Along with core CMS features and functionalities (e.g., check in/out, version control, web-based accessibility, etc), RSuite also offers many unique features including drag-and-drop workflow administration tools, automated action handlers, customizable user interface, and metadata management at the element level. Luxid is a content enrichment and discovery platform for publishing and media companies. Using patent protected technology, Luxid identifies, annotates, and extracts semantic entities and relationships to help publishing and media companies turn both legacy and new digital assets into new information products. Luxid has already been adopted by companies such as Elsevier, Thomson-Reuters, AFP, Hachette-Filipacchi Media, Springer, and LexisNexis. RSuite is powered by MarkLogic Server (www.marklogic.com) and provides native support for XML content storage services, full-text search in combination with XQuery, a full suite of editorial capabilities for XML and other content formats, content reuse at many levels, and editorial workflow tools. To learn more, visit www.rsuitecms.com. Source: Really Strategies, Inc.
Peer-to-Patent Project Extended and Expanded
New York Law School (www.nyls.edu), in cooperation with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), announced the extension of the Peer-to-Patent project designed to streamline the patent examination process by opening it to scientific and technical experts. The project will be extended until June 15, 2009, and expanded to include applications in the automated business data processing technologies or business methods. View the USPTO announcement at www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/speeches/08-26.htm.Peer-to-Patent, founded by professor Beth Noveck, is the first social networking project with a direct link to decision making by the federal government. Data from the first year of the pilot shows that an open network of peer reviewers can improve the quality of information available to patent examiners. The project’s full anniversary report is available at http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/P2Panniversaryreport.pdf. Due to the success of Peer-to-Patent, the law school has launched the Center for Patent Innovations (CPI), a group that will focus on developing community-building technology to improve the patent system. CPI will incorporate the Peer-to-Patent project and expand it by developing software-based service solutions that can be used by governments and communities of interest, designing methods for government and corporate partners to work together to produce better patents, and drafting legal frameworks to enable and enhance collaborative opportunities. Noveck will serve as chairman of the board of advisors. The CPI launch is made possible by a generous $800,000 grant from the Omidyar Network. Founded in 1891, New York Law School is an independent law school located in lower Manhattan near the city’s centers of law, government, and finance. Source: New York Law School
Digital Bookmobile to Launch National Tour
The Digital Bookmobile (www.digitalbookmobile.com), a traveling community outreach exhibit for public library download services, will kick off a national tour on Aug. 10 in Central Park with The New York Public Library (http://ebooks.nypl.org). The inaugural event will allow readers of all ages to experience digital audiobook, ebook, music, and video downloads from their public libraries and immerse themselves in an interactive learning environment. Events are scheduled at Queens Borough Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library in the days following the Central Park launch.The Digital Bookmobile will travel coast-to-coast promoting digital downloads at public libraries through 2009. Libraries in Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Cleveland, St. Louis, Phoenix, and places in between will play host to the 18-wheeler as it weaves across America. The Digital Bookmobile, developed inside a 74-foot, 18-wheel tractor-trailer, is a high-tech update of the traditional bookmobile that has served communities for decades. The community outreach vehicle creates an engaging download experience around the host library’s digital media collection and "Virtual Branch" download website. The vehicle is equipped with broadband internet-connected PCs, high-definition monitors, premium sound systems, and a variety of portable media players. Interactive computer stations give visitors an opportunity to search the digital media collection, use supported mobile devices, and download and enjoy ebooks, audiobooks, music, and video from the library. The Digital Bookmobile is hosted by individual libraries in support of their download services and operated by OverDrive, Inc. OverDrive powers download media catalogs at thousands of libraries, including institutions in New York City, Singapore, Boston, and Toronto. Source: OverDrive, Inc.
LexisNexis Adds Country News Feeds From Esmerk
LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.com), a provider of business information and technology solutions, announced a partnership with Esmerk, a business information service, to enable customers to access a huge wealth of news and content on Northern Europe, Central Europe, and the post-Soviet states. The Esmerk content complements the existing LexisNexis coverage of these countries, such as from EIU, Datamonitor, and Business Monitor International.The partnership, which marks the largest licensing agreement ever completed by Esmerk, provides access to more than 30 country news feeds from Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia—areas of increasing importance to businesses and investors. Delivered daily, the expanded service provides LexisNexis customers with concise English-language summaries on key business issues, abstracted from thousands of local language sources and on the day of publication. The service will provide more than 2,500 stories each week. Esmerk (www.esmerk.com) was founded in 1975 in Finland and has subsidiaries in France, Germany, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S. Esmerk monitors thousands of sources from more than 130 countries worldwide, providing tailored current awareness services based on English-language abstracts to nearly 900 corporate clients in 28 countries, with end users worldwide. Esmerk is a subsidiary of Helsinki-based Sanoma Corp., a division of SanomaWSOY, a media group with activities in more than 20 countries.
Source: LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.co.uk)
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Brandi Scardilli
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