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Weekly News Digest

October 16, 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.

OCLC WorldCat Links Up With Questia eBooks

OCLC (www.oclc.org) and Questia Media America, Inc. (www.questiamedia.com) are linking records in WorldCat.org to previews of more than 67,000 ebook titles from Questia.com (a subscription service). By clicking the Questia Read tab in WorldCat.org, users will be able to access the table of contents; preview the first 20 pages of a book and the first page of each chapter; and read available publisher descriptions for each of the more than 67,000 books in the Questia.com online library collection. Online access to the complete work is available through a subscription account. More than 5,000 ebooks are available free of charge.

By linking records in WorldCat.org to Questia ebooks, authenticated Questia.com users can view the location of the nearest library that holds a physical copy of the virtual book they find in Questia. The Questia online library focuses on books supporting academic research in the humanities and social sciences and contains high-quality previously published digital content from more than 260 renowned university and commercial presses.

Questia offers an online library of copyright-cleared books, plus 1.5 million articles and a reference set complete with dictionary, encyclopedia, and thesaurus. A subscription to Questia.com also includes digital productivity tools for highlighting text, taking notes, and generating footnotes and bibliographies in seven different styles. Questia School is a carefully selected collection of online, full-text books that support inquiry and research for secondary school students, K–12 faculty, and their library/information communities.

Sources: OCLC and Questia

CABI Health Archive Comes to EBSCOhost

EBSCOhost (www.ebscohost.com) received an infusion of medical know-how, thanks to a deal with CABI.

The publisher’s Global Health Archive database, which includes more than 800,000 records on public health, tropical and communicable diseases, nutrition, helminthology, entomology, and mycology, is now accessible via the service. A companion to Global Health, a public health database already featured in EBSCOhost that includes more than 1.2 million records, Global Health Archive will provide a global picture of international health research over time.

The database features research carried out over the course of several decades on topics including bioterrorism, disease control, patent protection, food security and malnutrition, and the effects of economic development on health. Its goal is to put international and public health problems in a historical context by reviving research that otherwise might have been lost to time.

While many of the database’s records may be old, CABI has taken steps to increase accessibility for modern audiences, reindexing the database to complement the current Global Health file. Global Health Archive will also take advantage of EBSCOhost’s features, allowing users to directly link to full-text articles in other EBSCOhost databases, other materials in a given library’s collection, and EBSCO’s Image Collection. In addition, folder, citation, bookmarking, email, and RSS alert tools will be available for use.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

New Nstein CMS Puts Publishers First

Nstein Technologies, Inc. (www.nstein.com) is giving publishers part of their wish list with its new WCM 4.0 content management system, which provides tools for the creation and management of complex websites and microsites. According to the company, customer feedback was the driving force behind many of the product’s new features.

"Part of our success as a company is listening to the needs of our customers and the market in general," says Nstein president and CEO Luc Filiatreault. "To meet their readers’ needs, publishers have a dizzying array of new dissemination channels that they need to fill with content. The key is to have a development platform that is both nimble and easy to use so you can meet those needs before someone else does."

The new release features a role-based interface for editorial teams that includes the following:

  • Multisite and multichannel content management
  • Out-of-the-box conversion and importation of content from XML formats
  • Role-based configurable editorial dashboards
  • Automatic search and association of assets
  • On-the-fly content association
  • Real-time semantic generation of tags and metadata
  • Faceted search
  • Search engine optimization toolkit

WCM 4.0 will also integrate with Nstein’s TME and DAM for on-the-fly semantic tagging and association of stories. In addition, its open design means it will work with third-party content modules—such as Facebook, Twitter, forums, blogs, and wikis—as well as other content management systems and repositories.

Source: Nstein Technologies, Inc.

Access Innovations and Dow Jones Partner for Enhanced Indexing Solution

Access Innovations, Inc. (www.accessinn.com), a provider of efficient information management and database construction products and services for industry, academic institutions, and government agencies, and Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group (www.solutions.dowjones.com), a provider of semantic technology solutions, have announced a joint marketing agreement. Together, the two companies bring together machine automated indexing (M.A.I. from Access Innovations) and a powerful thesaurus tool (Dow Jones’ Synaptica) for a robust indexing solution designed to meet increasing global demand across various industries.

The announcement formalizes and launches joint efforts by Access Innovations and Dow Jones. Under the agreement, Access Innovations and Dow Jones will strengthen the quality of indexing and indexing productivity for a host of clientele, including database producers, online and web-based directory publishers, corporate libraries, web portals, and corporations and associations with large intranets. This strategic move is designed to create value by improving time to revenue realization. The companies say that existing and new clients can experience clear and quantifiable increases in knowledge worker production output, as well as lowered staff and operating costs from those productivity gains.

A collective M.A.I. indexing and Synaptica thesaurus solution can also help organizations increase their search engine capabilities and effectiveness. With tens of millions of business users involved worldwide in knowledge production, the market opportunity to help address business challenges and enhance operational efficiency, profitability, and competitiveness is considerable.

Source: Access Innovations, Inc.

Near-Time Adds Social Networking to Its Collaborative Solution

Near-Time (www.near-time.net), an Enterprise 2.0 hosted collaboration service, announced the availability of comprehensive social networking functionality for the Near-Time platform, including a member interest engine, community-level dashboard, and advanced search facilities. These capabilities are built on an integrated platform that now marries the best of social networking functionality to an organization’s collaborative workspaces.

With this major update, business professionals can now create, collaborate, discover, and engage with customers, partners, and co-workers in a unified collaboration solution. Near-Time’s on-demand delivery model allows community managers and members to immediately leverage these new social networking features in their collaborative spaces. They can then create networks of communities, linking to other users and groups across Near-Time-enabled organizations and institutions, based on their interests, profiles, and needs. The platform update also offers improved search functionality, the ability to tag interests and users, new member profiling features, integration with Google Maps, and richer group calendaring.

Near-Time is priced between $1,000 and $5,000 per community, depending on the size of the community. The company says that Near-Time communities can be deployed within minutes, delivering high utility and low total cost of ownership when compared with other collaboration solutions. For detailed information about this update visit http://social.near-time.net.

Source: Near-Time, Inc.

University of Cambridge Teams Up With iTunes U

Take a look at a University of Cambridge student’s iPod and you may be surprised to find the university’s professors sharing space with Britney Spears and the cast of The Office. That’s because the school (www.cam.ac.uk) is offering free educational content that includes lectures, short films, and interviews online via iTunes U, an offshoot of the iTunes Store.

"The old adage that ‘Cambridge ideas change the world’ has just received a new twist," says John Naughton, a Fellow of the university’s Wolfson College. "Now they’re on your desktop."

Available to users worldwide, Cambridge’s iTunes U channel features a variety of content from faculty members and other experts. Currently, more than 300 audio and video tracks are available, including podcasts from David Starkey’s history of Cambridge, interviews with the university’s Nobel Prize winners, and an exploration of the school’s code-breaking exploits during World War II.

Users can also download the latest podcasts from The Naked Scientists, the radio show of Chris Smith and his band of physicians and researchers of the same name. In these videos, which top the science download charts in the U.S. and hover in the top 20 throughout the world, Smith and his team break science down to its basics.

Prospective students who find themselves confused by the university’s application process can also download video walkthroughs that will take them through the process.

All content from the Cambridge channel will work on both Macs and PCs and can be transferred to an iPod or iPhone.

Source: University of Cambridge 



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