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Weekly News Digest
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December 15, 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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NursingCenter.com Launches New Features
NursingCenter.com from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW; www.lww.com), a site for online nursing continuing-education and peer-reviewed content, has been updated with improved navigation and search and new interactive multimedia tools. It now provides more than 900 peer-reviewed continuing-education activities and free access to 11,000 articles from more than 50 leading nursing journals.NursingCenter.com was created in 1986 as an electronic bulletin-board service to help spread clinical information to nurses in rural areas who would otherwise not have access to the latest journals and technology. Today, NursingCenter.com includes free access to thousands of articles from more than 50 of LWW’s peer-reviewed nursing journals, including the American Journal of Nursing, Nursing2008, Nursing Management, The Nurse Practitioner, Nursing2008 Critical Care, and many more specialty journals. More than 350,000 nurses and other clinical professionals are registered users, which gives them access to the full scope of the site’s no-cost or low-cost offerings. LWW will continue to refine and upgrade NursingCenter.com based on customer input, and it anticipates ongoing quarterly upgrades to the platform. LWW is part of Wolters Kluwer Health, a provider of information and business intelligence for students, professionals, and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy, and the pharmaceutical industry. Wolters Kluwer Health is a division of Wolters Kluwer (www.wolterskluwer.com), a global information services and publishing company. Source: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
Vivisimo Powers Health Sciences Online Portal
Erica Frank, a medical doctor and researcher at the University of British Columbia, believes people anywhere in the world working to remedy sickness and to save lives should have access to the best medical information—not just people who happen to be located near research institutions in wealthy countries. Frank’s idea led her to develop Health Sciences Online (HSO; www.hso.info). The newly launched portal is powered by the Vivisimo (www.vivisimo.com) Velocity Search Platform.Free and accessible to anyone, the up-to-date, authoritative information is aimed primarily at healthcare practitioners and public health providers, enabling their training, continuing education, and delivery of effective treatments to patients. The search technology from Vivisimo allows users to easily see comprehensive search results and quickly find the answers they need with an intuitively navigated graphic interface. Through integration with Google Translator, users can search and read materials in 22 languages. HSO is a portal that includes more than 50,000 world-class health sciences resources. Information is selected by clinicians and other experts from existing, reliable sources and is maintained and updated by HSO’s partner organizations, including medical specialty societies, accredited continuing-education organizations, governments, and top-ranked universities. Founding collaborators for this site include CDC, World Bank, the American College of Preventive Medicine, and the University of British Columbia, and financial support has come from the World Health Organization (WHO), the NATO Science for Peace Program, the Canadian government, the Annenberg Physician Training Program, and many volunteers. HSO’s next phase will be developing programs using the gathered materials to help train and educate public and clinical health providers around the world. Former CDC director Dr. Jeff Koplan calls HSO "a visionary undertaking" and the World Bank heralds it as "globally democratizing health science knowledge." HSO is expected by the WHO "to make a considerable contribution to the advancement of e-learning worldwide." Source: Health Sciences Online and Vivisimo, Inc.
New Scholarly Journal ticTOCs Service Launches
ticTOCs (www.tictocs.ac.uk) is a new, scholarly Journal Tables of Contents (TOCs) service. It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it provides access to the most recent tables of contents of more than 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It is designed to help scholars, researchers, academics, and anyone else keep up-to-date with what’s being published in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject. You select TOCs by ticking those of interest—thousands of TOCs, within a tick or two (hence the name ticTOCs).ticTOCs has been developed by a consortium that consists of the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute. ticTOCs has been funded under the JISC Users and Innovations program (www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_users_and_innovation.aspx). Using ticTOCs, you can find journals of interest by title, subject or publisher; view the latest TOC; link through to the full text of more than 250,000 articles (where institutional or personal subscriptions, or Open Access, allow), and save selected journals to MyTOCs so that you can view future TOCs (free registration is required if you want to permanently save your MyTOCs). ticTOCs also makes it easy to export selected TOC RSS feeds to popular feedreaders such as Google Reader and Bloglines. In addition, you can import article citations into RefWorks (where institutional or personal subscriptions allow). Source: ticTOCs
SirsiDynix Adds Community Review Features
SirsiDynix announced a partnership with ChiliFresh, offering libraries and patrons an easy way to create and read reader reviews, with complete customization abilities for libraries. The partnership gives libraries seamless integration between SirsiDynix OPACs, SirsiDynix Enterprise, and the review engine.At present, library patrons from around the world view ChiliFresh review content from library catalogs in excess of 60 million times each month. ChiliFresh currently has patrons reading and writing reviews through library OPACs in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. The ChiliFresh Review Engine enhances the value of a library’s website by giving patrons a way to interact with the online catalog by reading and writing book reviews and providing ratings right in the catalog interface. With SirsiDynix OPACs and ChiliFresh, libraries enjoy immense flexibility: - Customize the look and feel to match your local site and/or catalog
- Choose how reviews from patrons are presented
- Determine what reviews are displayed
- Moderate reviews
For a free 30-day trial, go to www.sirsidynix.com/Partners/profile_ChiliFresh_form.php. For more information about ChiliFresh and other SirsiDynix partners, go to www.sirsidynix.com/Partners/strategic.php. Source: SirsiDynix
Expert System Introduces COGITO Answers
Expert System (www.expertsystem.net), a provider of semantic software that searches, discovers, classifies, and interprets text information, announced the launch of COGITO Answers, a semantic search platform incorporating a natural language interface (NLI) designed for enterprise search and customer self-help. The new platform is designed to improve corporate search and customer support through websites, email, or mobile devices.With COGITO Answers, enterprise employees can easily access unstructured information found in databases, manuals, intranets, and other corporate resources to complete their daily tasks. Unlike standard technologies, the solution takes into account a companies’ unique language (e.g., acronyms and other lingo). COGITO Answers uses its semantic engine to analyze sentences and identify the meaning of the text rather than matching keywords. Because COGITO Answers is built with a NLI, customers in need of help or service can receive the most accurate answers to any question asked with the least amount of keystrokes. Users can type in everyday language, expressing their requests as they would with a colleague and receive an accurate, immediate, and direct answer to their queries. For example, if a user typed "How can I check my work email from my mobile device?" or "How can I forward my work email to my mobile device?" COGITO Answers understands that the context in which the words are used within the two sentences are completely different. As such, users receive the correct response because the meaning of the sentences is interpreted correctly. Source: Expert System
Task Force Issues Interim Report on Digital Preservation and Access
The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access issued its Interim Report (http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Interim_Report.pdf), citing an urgent need to identify sustainable economic models to provide access to the ever-growing amount of digital information. The Task Force was launched late last year by the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in partnership with the Library of Congress, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the U.K., the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the National Archives and Records Administration. It will issue a final report in late 2009.The interim report traces the contours of economically sustainable digital preservation, and it identifies and explains the necessary conditions for achieving economic sustainability. The report also synthesizes current thinking on this topic, including testimony from 16 leading experts in digital preservation representing a variety of domains. In reviewing this synthesis, the task force identified a series of systemic challenges that create barriers to long-term, economically viable solutions. Continuing its work for a second and final year, the task force will issue its final report in late 2009, proposing practical recommendations for sustainable economic models to support access and preservation for digital data in the public interest. Links Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access: http://brtf.sdsc.edu/index.html
National Science Foundation: www.nsf.gov
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: www.mellon.org
Council on Library and Information Resources: www.clir.org
Joint Information Systems Committee of the United Kingdom: http://www.jisc.ac.uk
Library of Congress: www.loc.gov/index.html
National Archives and Records Administration: www.archives.gov
OCLC: www.oclc.org
San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC): www.sdsc.edu Source: Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access
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Brandi Scardilli
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