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Weekly News Digest

November 6, 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.

ProQuest Introduces Redesigned Website

ProQuest has launched a redesigned website (www.proquest.com) that enables customers, partners, end users, and other visitors to find what they’re looking for with greater ease. The new site accommodates the recent growth of the company with its acquisitions and new products. The redesigned site—the result of extensive librarian and user feedback, testing, and focus groups—gathers information on ProQuest brands and products and enhances discovery with new search capabilities and tools. Among the key features of new site are the ProQuest Support Center, a more powerful search engine, and an all-new product access feature that directs end users to library gateways.

The ProQuest Support Center brings ProQuest’s customer service, technical support, and training onto the web 24/7. With a virtual decision-tree, the Support Center allows users to diagnose and fix problems, plus answer all types of questions from "How do I login to products from home?" to "How do I run usage reports?"

Website visitors can also quickly zero in on products that meet their needs with an enhanced search engine that includes more precise ways to find product information. Searches can be narrowed by subject, library type, or name, and results can be filtered by key criteria. The outcome is fast, intuitive navigation of the breadth of ProQuest’s products and brands, designed to deliver users to just the right solution.

Additionally, with its new Product Access feature, ProQuest helps end users understand how to connect to content through their libraries. For example, a consumer who reads about a ProQuest product can start at ProQuest.com and learn how to access it through a library gateway by clicking on the easy-to-find "Begin your research" button. This feature will develop significantly over time, allowing more direct access for both libraries and their patrons. ProQuest says the redesigned website will continue to evolve over the coming months, creating an even more seamless user experience for ProQuest customers, partners, and researchers.

Source: ProQuest, LLC

LexisNexis Acquires IDEX—Expert Witness Database

LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.com) announced that it has acquired IDEX, Inc. (www.idex.com). Based in Overland Park, Kan., IDEX provides expert witness content to the legal market. The company maintains an authoritative, exclusive database of more than 1 million records on 200,000-plus experts, including expert profiles, testimonial histories, verdict awards, settlement amounts, authored content, expert depositions, and court testimony.

LexisNexis says the acquisition solidifies its position as a leading provider of expert witness identification and evaluation information. New content from IDEX complements expert witness data currently available from LexisNexis through directories, court dockets, documents, briefs, and public records offered through its Lexis.com, Martindale-Hubbell, LexisNexis Total Litigator, CourtLink, and CaseMap platforms.

The acquisition is designed to provide litigators with access to a comprehensive set of expert witness information, enabling them to quickly identify leading experts, perform due diligence on experts they might consider hiring, and thoroughly research opposing experts. Integration of this content into the LexisNexis suite of litigation case assessment tools, including CaseMap and Total Litigator, delivers key litigation workflow efficiency and analytical aids essential to today’s litigators.

IDEX expert witness information will also bolster the client development offerings from LexisNexis. In particular, IDEX content will expand the Martindale-Hubbell Directory of Experts & Services.

Founded in 1984, IDEX, Inc. is a privately held corporation with more than 30 employees. The name IDEX is meant to reflect the research and storage of information on expert witnesses as in "ID"ing and inDEXing experts.

Source: LexisNexis

Automatic Categorization Added in Hot Neuron’s Clustify 2.0

Hot Neuron, LLC announced the release of version 2.0 of its Clustify document clustering software, which features automatic document categorization and other tools to help corporations and law firms explore and organize large document sets. Clustify groups related documents into clusters, allowing the user to explore the document set and efficiently and consistently categorize documents by categorizing entire clusters of documents with a single mouse click. The addition of automatic categorization further leverages any manual labor put into categorization by automatically categorizing new documents based on the categories assigned to similar documents that were categorized in the past. Documents that aren’t sufficiently similar to previously categorized documents are put into clusters for efficient manual processing.

Other features added since version 1.0 include keyboard shortcuts for faster manual categorization, the ability to drag and drop one document onto another to display a side-by-side comparison that highlights common text, options for greater control over the clustering process, and handling of many additional file formats on Windows via the same IFilter technology that is used in Microsoft’s search products.

Clustify can generate concept-based clusters, or it can require documents in the same cluster to contain identical passages of text in order to detect near-duplicates (i.e., different revisions of the same document). Version 2.0 builds on the excellent scalability of previous versions with even faster near-duplicate detection. It also features better handling of documents having widely varying lengths, with improved conceptual analysis for very short documents.

Hot Neuron is an information retrieval software and services company located in Bryn Mawr, Pa. It owns and operates MagPortal.com (www.magportal.com), a search engine and directory for finding online magazine articles. For more information on Clustify, visit www.cluster-text.com.

Source: Hot Neuron, LLC

ebrary Offers a QuickView for Documents

ebrary (www.ebrary.com) announced the availability of ebrary QuickView, which enables end users to instantly view documents in many of the leading web browsers. It even works on the iPhone. And, no software downloads or installations are needed. It is offered in conjunction with ebrary’s new Java-based Reader, which offers a richer and more productive research experience. For example, an end user can use QuickView to quickly browse through a document online and then use ebrary’s Java-based Reader for added functionality such as printing, copying and pasting, highlighting, note taking, and working with ebrary InfoTools.

ebrary QuickView currently offers the following key features: 

  • Instant viewing and page flipping in a web browser 
  • Relevancy-ranking at the chapter level with links to specific sections 
  • Navigating to search terms or specified pages 
  • Searching within documents for key words 
  • Viewing and navigating to highlights and notes created using an ebrary Reader 
  • Multiple viewing magnifications

ebrary offers a flexible econtent platform, which customers may use in a number of different, integrated capacities: ebrary customers may purchase or subscribe to ebooks and other content under a variety of pricing and access models, and they may license the ebrary platform to distribute, sell, and market their own content online. All options are delivered using a customizable interface and include the ebrary Reader with InfoTools software. ebrary currently offers a growing selection of more than 170,000 ebooks and other titles from more than 300 leading publishers and aggregators. Founded in 1999, ebrary is privately held and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

Source: ebrary, Inc.

Ingram Digital to Resell Greenwood Databases

Ingram Digital Group (www.ingramdigital.com), an Ingram content company focused on solutions for digital content management, hosting, distribution and promotion, announced that it has entered into an agreement to resell Greenwood Publishing Group’s (www.greenwood.com) online databases. The databases will be made available through MyiLibrary, Ingram Digital’s next-generation econtent aggregation platform. MyiLibrary will also facilitate the integration of rich metadata that links directly to Greenwood’s databases.

ABC-CLIO (www.abc-clio.com) recently announced that it had reached an agreement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Greenwood Publishing Group’s parent company, to grant ABC-CLIO a perpetual license to use the imprints and to publish the titles of Greenwood Publishing Group. The agreement with Ingram Digital will continue in force under the new arrangement with ABC-CLIO.

Greenwood offers nine online databases covering topics from pop culture to world folklore and folk life. Each one comprises several digital resources, compiled to meet the needs of students, teachers, librarians, patrons, and researchers.

The addition of the Greenwood databases to MyiLibrary’s content repository comes on the heels of several premium collections launched on the platform in 2008. Ingram Digital adds an average of 1,000 titles to MyiLibrary each week, making it one of the fastest growing econtent aggregators today.

Source: Ingram Digital Group

Open Text Releases Next Generation Web Solutions

Open Text Corp. (www.opentext.com ), a provider of enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, unveiled a major new release of its Web Solutions Suite powered by RedDot (www.reddot.com), which gives enterprises new web solutions to rapidly deploy intranets, extranets, and Enterprise 2.0 solutions to meet the expanded demands of new digital strategies. It delivers a complete set of tightly integrated Web 2.0 tools to give customers far greater security and control over social media than possible with a set of point solutions.

Open Text Web Solutions powered by RedDot technology lets customers manage globally accessible, public websites in concert with internal web initiatives from a single comprehensive solution. It ensures a dynamic and engaging user experience by integrating, managing, and optimizing content. It also provides seamless access to information across a variety of existing applications and repositories, including SAP and Microsoft SharePoint, as well as all Open Text content repositories, databases, file systems, and Web 2.0 applications. Content can be managed, translated, and distributed across dozens of countries and sites globally.

As employees experience social sites such as Facebook or Wikipedia, they expect a similar experience in the workplace. They want personal, relevant information and open sharing with peers. However, many enterprises are reluctant to make strategic moves to 2.0 technologies due to legal, privacy, and compliance concerns. In an industry first, Open Text Web Solutions can intelligently monitor content posted to internal and external wikis and blogs and automatically notify moderators and site managers of content that potentially violates company policy.

Source: Open Text Corp.



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