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Weekly News Digest

October 20, 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.

EBSCO Adds Textile Database, Announces Backfile Project

Textile Technology Complete, a new full-text database from EBSCO Publishing (www.ebscohost.com), is now available. The database provides coverage of the scientific and technological aspects of textile production and processing. Textile Technology Complete is the full-text counterpart of Textile Technology Index, formerly the Institute of Textile Technology’s Textile Technology Digest. The database traces the body of knowledge in textile science and technology dating as far back as the early years of the 20th century. Textile Technology Complete includes full text for more than 50 journals as well as more than 50 books and monographs. The database contains indexing and abstracting for more than 460 periodical titles and for thousands of titles drawn from books, conferences, theses, technical reports, trade literature, and more.

The International Political Science Association (www.ipsa.org) and EBSCO Publishing are bringing all the bibliographic records in International Political Science Abstracts (IPSA), starting with the first volume, exclusively on EBSCOhost—making an additional 24 years available. The backfile project allows researchers to access IPSA records, via EBSCOhost, that date back to 1951 for the first time. The International Political Science Abstracts has provided nonevaluative abstracts of articles in the field of political science since 1951. The newly digitized content adds more than 45,000 records to the database.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Hoover’s and D&B Unveil Mobile Product

Hoover’s, Inc. (www.hoovers.com) and its parent company D&B, a provider of global business information, tools, and commercial insight, announced the first two releases within a new mobile product line: Hoover’s Mobile, a browser-based application, and Hoover’s MobileSP, a device-enabled application. Both products are available in beta to existing Hoover’s subscribers supporting iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile smartphones. The products are scheduled for general availability in North America and the U.K. early in 1Q 2009.

Customers who typically use Hoovers.com to identify and evaluate potential sales leads or markets can now use mobile devices to access, sort, and synchronize millions of company records on-the-go. In addition, business professionals on the road, in the airport, or at a tradeshow can now integrate with other key features such as GPS custom location, radius search, and custom call queue abilities.

Throughout the beta period, Hoover’s will collect subscriber feedback and suggestions for additional mobile content and features. The company will work to expand its mobile functionality based upon that feedback. Visit www.hooversmobile.com for more information.

Source: Hoover’s, Inc.

Serials Solutions Enhances Its 360 E-Resource Access and Management Services

Serials Solutions (www.serialssolutions.com), a business unit of ProQuest, has announced a new federated search Connection Development Framework for the Serials Solutions 360 Search and WebFeat federated search services. The connection development framework provides developers with new tools and processes to create better, faster, and higher quality connections. For librarians, this means an increased number of resources available by federated search and better search results for patrons.

The company also announced that a new Data Retrieval Service is now available for subscribers to its Serials Solutions 360 Counter e-resource assessment service. The Data Retrieval Service enables librarians to bypass the time-consuming tasks of downloading and correcting vendor data before it can be used for usage reporting and assessment. This means that 360 Counter subscribers can spend more time using data to make more informed collection-development decisions and reduce costs.

Serials Solutions data retrieval specialists collect Project COUNTER-compliant reports from resource vendors, clean up the reports, and then load the corrected data into 360 Counter. Once this data is uploaded, 360 Counter normalizes titles, assigns costs, and formats subject headings. Then, 360 Counter calculates cost-per-click by title, database, subject, and platform and provides the results in customizable report formats. These customizable cost-per-use reports and graphics enable librarians to quickly analyze and assess cost and usage data to give library stakeholders the information they need to make better decisions.

Source: Serials Solutions

Lexalytics Enhances Salience Engine

Lexalytics, Inc. (www.lexalytics.com), a software and services company specializing in text analytics and social media monitoring, has released Salience 4.0. This latest version of the Salience Engine marks the first major software release for Lexalytics since the merger with Infonic’s Text Analytics Division. The new version offers significant improvements to entity extraction, sentiment scoring, and thematic extraction, as well as several new features. Salience technology is widely used by professionals in the marketing, public relations, enterprise search, and financial services industries to manage brand reputation and improve the business value of information.

The Salience 4.0 software delivers a new inferred entity engine which will allow companies to identify products and brands from within text without the use of massive product lists or dictionaries. Salience 4.0 also allows for better entity recognition, with initial test results showing up to 90 % accuracy for people and more than 80 % for companies. Improvements also include the ability to detect entity relationships. For example, "John Smith is CEO of XYZ Co. which is located in Amherst, Mass.," would show relationships between John Smith, his company, the location, and his job title.

Salience 4.0 includes two new enhancements to sentiment scoring: adjective amplifiers and coreference. Adjective amplifiers solve problems in text such as "perfectly awful," where the two descriptors would normally negate each other for sentiment. The coreference enhancement will draw correlations between a person and a pronoun such as, "John Smith is being promoted. He has taken a new position as CEO." It will recognize that "he" is "John Smith."

Lastly, Salience 4.0 has dramatically improved the theme extraction capabilities and will return longer themes or concepts from a document with more accuracy to the subject matter, and it can role those themes up to a parent theme more easily. The result is delivery of data to the user that immediately provides relevant context around the entities and themes with which they are associated, arming business leaders with the ability to monitor and react quickly.

Source: Lexalytics, Inc.

Quintura Launches Site Search Solution in U.S. Market

Quintura (www.affiliates.quintura.com), a provider of a site search, analytics, and monetization platform for online content publishers, announced the official launch of its site search into the U.S. market and the awarding of its first U.S. patent.

Quintura has developed a hosted site search platform that provides intuitive, visual-based search and navigation for site visitors. The websites of consumer magazines, such as Maxim in the U.S. as well as Russian Newsweek and Cosmopolitan in Russia have been the first to implement Quintura’s visual-based search on their websites. So far, more than 1,000 publishers have registered to use Quintura’s site search solution. The company has a monthly audience of 10 million site visitors.

Quintura site search can be easily and immediately implemented to monetize banner ad placements along with sponsored ad links. Publishers can increase advertising revenues by delivering more ad impressions as driven by users’ behavior as they mouse over keywords in the Quintura cloud.

Awarded on Oct. 14, Quintura’s first U.S. patent was for a search engine graphical interface using maps and images. The patent validates technology based on neural network techniques to improve the contextual accuracy and relevance of search results. Quintura currently has several other patents pending.

Quintura’s entrance into the site search market adds new features for web publishers and users. These include enhanced back-end analytics for its publishing affiliates. New analytical tools give publishers real-time access to their site search information, including search term rankings, trends, and analyses for identifying new content requirements based on search interest.

The site search solution is also available to content publishers who do not wish to use its advertising features as a service. It is offered on a subscription-fee basis.

Source: Quintura, Inc.

New Collaboration Project of Publishers, Repositories, and Researchers Launched—PEER

PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research), supported by the European Union (EU), will investigate the effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts (so-called Green Open Access or stage-two research output) on reader access, author visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research. The project is a collaboration among publishers, repositories, and researchers and will last from 2008 to 2011.

Peer-reviewed journals play a key role in scholarly communication and are considered essential for scientific progress and European competitiveness. The publishing and research communities share the view that increased access to the results of EU-funded research is necessary to maximize their use and impact. However, they hold different views on whether mandated deposits in open access repositories will achieve greater use and impact. There are also differences of opinion as to the most appropriate embargo periods. No consensus has been reached on a way forward so far.

The lack of consensus on these key issues stems from a lack of clear evidence of what impact the broad and systematic archiving of research outputs in open access repositories might be, but this is about to change. The aim of PEER is to build a substantial body of evidence, by developing an "observatory" to monitor the effects of systematic archiving over time. Participating publishers will collectively contribute 300 journals to the project and supporting research studies will address issues such as: 

  • How large-scale archiving will affect journal viability 
  • Whether it increases access 
  • How it will affect the broader ecology of European research 
  • Which factors influence the readiness to deposit in institutional and disciplinary repositories and what the associated costs might be 
  • Models to illustrate how traditional publishing systems can coexist with self-archiving

The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM; www.stm-assoc.org), the European Science Foundation, Göttingen State and University Library, the Max Planck Society, and INRIA will collaborate on PEER, supported by the SURF Foundation and University of Bielefeld, which will contribute the expertise of the EU-funded DRIVER project.

Source: STM



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