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Weekly News Digest
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January 19, 2009 — 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. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.
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ProQuest Partners with National Security Archive to Offer Peruvian Documents
ProQuest (www.proquest.com) announced the first-ever digital release of a collection of primary source documents from the U.S. embassy in Lima, Peru, U.S. military officials, and U.S. intelligence. The documents in Peru: Human Rights, Drugs and Democracy, 1980–2000 provide a compelling portrait of Peru’s civil war and growing authoritarianism during three successive Peruvian administrations. It’s available in ProQuest’s Digital National Security Archive (DNSA), considered to be a powerful primary research and teaching tool in the areas of U.S. foreign policy, intelligence, and security affairs dating from post-World War II through the present.A complement to DNSA’s six other Latin American collections, Peru: Human Rights, Drugs and Democracy, 1980–2000 documents U.S. foreign policy at work in Latin America and illuminates internal, domestic politics in Peru. The documents were collected by the National Security Archive (NSA; www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv), an independent, nongovernmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University. Peru: Human Rights, Drugs and Democracy, 1980–2000 includes 1,997 documents collected from archival sources, hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests, and direct State Department releases to Peruvian truth and congressional commissions. The collection covers the 1980 inception of civil war between insurgent militants from the Shining Path (and later from the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) and official and nonofficial government forces. The digital version of this set is being published in two installments, revealing the growing political crisis faced by consecutive Peruvian presidents Fernando Belaúnde, Alan García, and Alberto Fujimori. The first installment, which is already available, includes documents dating from 1966 up to President Alberto Fujimori’s inauguration in 1990, chronicling the new system of electoral democracy in the 1980s and the rise of the bloody civil conflict that shadowed consecutive democratic regimes. The second installment, to be released in 2009, covers the Fujimori era and beyond, with documents dating from 1990–2004. Source: ProQuest
OCLC Releases NetLibrary Media Center
OCLC (www.oclc.org) has released the new NetLibrary Media Center, a full-featured desktop application that allows library patrons to easily search, manage, transfer, and listen to downloadable eAudiobooks. The free software application allows users to connect to NetLibrary and then download and begin listening to eAudiobooks with just one click.The Media Center combines familiar user functions available from NetLibrary’s web-based platform to browse, search, and check out materials. It adds enhanced features and functionality such as a full-featured audio player; seamless download to a portable listening device; a new, feature-rich, easy-to-use interface; and desktop access to a library’s entire eAudiobook collection. eAudiobooks from NetLibrary are digital versions of audiobooks. Library patrons can search for, check out, and download eAudiobooks to a computer. These eAudiobooks can also be transferred to a wide range of portable devices. Check the OCLC website for system specifications (www.oclc.org/us/en/audiobooks/default.htm). NetLibrary offers an expanding selection of more than 9,000 eAudiobook titles spanning a variety of subject areas in both unabridged and abridged formats. The latest best-sellers, book club favorites, timeless classics, and award- winning literature may now be delivered over the internet in an easily accessible format for listening anytime, anywhere. Partnerships with leading audiobook publishers ensure comprehensive and current collections that meet the diverse needs of libraries and their users. An online demonstration of the new Media Center can be found at http://www5.oclc.org/downloads/tutorials/netlibrary/mediacenter/demo.htm. Source: OCLC
Wiley Announces Online Books Agreement With YBP Library Services
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (www.wiley.com) announced a new agreement with YBP Library Services (www.ybp.com), a Baker & Taylor company and provider of materials to academic libraries. Nearly 7,000 online books will be available on YBP’s main collection planning and acquisitions tool, GOBI (Global Online Bibliographic Information; www.gobi3.com).Under the agreement, YBP will add Wiley’s full range of online books, book series, and online reference works to its GOBI database, enabling YBP’s library customers to view and select online books alongside print and ebooks, with no change to the library’s existing workflow. The result will be a fully integrated library acquisition process, from selection and profiling to ordering and invoicing. Wiley’s expansive Online Books program comprises high-quality titles published from the 1940s to the present. The program consists of books in the life sciences, physical sciences, medicine, engineering, social sciences, and humanities and includes multivolume book series and essential reference titles available on Wiley InterScience. The companies say the deal marks a milestone in the industry, making Wiley the first large publisher to fully integrate its entire list of online research books with one of the leading academic library book distributors in the country. The partnership was formed to address the growing need of libraries to discover and order book content in the format of their choice using one consolidated book-purchasing channel. Source: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
New OCLC CONTENTdm 5 Supports Unicode
OCLC (www.oclc.org) has released CONTENTdm 5, a new version of CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management software that now fully supports Unicode, the industry standard used to recognize text in most of the world’s non-Western languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek, and Hebrew, among others. In direct response to input provided by more than 1,000 CONTENTdm users, OCLC development staff designed new features and improved existing features as part of CONTENTdm 5. The new release includes fundamental changes for both end users and libraries.For end users, CONTENTdm 5 provides a new experience with powerful search improvements, including the integration of Find—the search engine behind OCLC’s WorldCat.org. Offering capabilities beyond full Unicode searching, CONTENTdm 5 also features faceted browsing to help refine search results, as well as relevancy ranking similar to what end users experience when searching WorldCat.org and other popular search engines. These improvements are designed to ensure that a library achieves its ultimate goal for its digital collection—to help end users find, get, and use the digital items they need. For libraries, the new CONTENTdm includes a totally redesigned Project Client, offering more streamlined collection-building workflows that will reduce the time needed to create a digital collection, reducing project costs and maximizing results. Other CONTENTdm 5 enhancements include a new reports module designed to better track and assess collection usage; nine integrated thesauri, which will improve efficiency by providing controlled vocabularies; and increased capacity that supports more collections, items, and metadata fields as well as larger volumes for batch processing. CONTENTdm 5 also offers improvements for handling EAD (Encoded Archival Description) files, including how finding aids are imported, displayed, and searched. To see how some libraries are using CONTENTdm, visit www.oclc.org/contentdm/collections. More information about CONTENTdm can be found at www.oclc.org/contentdm. Source: OCLC
Cleveland Public Library First to Offer EPUB Ebook Downloads
Cleveland Public Library (http://emedia.clevnet.org) became the first public library to offer ebook downloads in the industry standard EPUB format. Readers at both Cleveland Public Library and CLEVNET member libraries can check out and download EPUB eBooks from the library’s download website. The EPUB files are optimized for the Sony Reader and can also be read on a PC or Mac with free Adobe Digital Editions software. More than 8,500 libraries powered by OverDrive (www.overdrive.com) will soon be able to offer ebooks in the EPUB format, along with more than 150,000 titles in audiobook, ebook, music, and video formats, many of which are compatible with both Mac and iPod.Patron-defined lending periods are also available for the first time at http://emedia.clevnet.org. The new feature allows libraries to offer a variety of borrowing options, such as 7-day, 14-day, or 21-day lending periods. Fast readers can now select a shorter checkout time, allowing them to borrow more titles from their libraries. Patron-defined lending periods, EPUB ebooks, and other upcoming enhancements will be demonstrated by OverDrive at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting 2009 (www.ala.org/ala/conferencesevents/upcoming/midwinter/home.cfm), Jan. 23–26. EPUB is a reflowable, XML-based format for ebooks and other digital publications developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (www.idpf.org) and adopted by leading publishers and technology firms as the industry standard for ebooks. OverDrive, an IDPF member company, claims to be the only library-download service that supports EPUB, and it integrates the format into a single platform for delivering digital audiobooks, ebooks, music, and video to library customers. More information on the EPUB format is available at http://overdrive.com/resources/mediaformats/ebooks.asp. All EPUB ebook downloads from the OverDrive-powered library-download website are borrowed just like a print book. A library customer can browse a library’s digital catalog for titles, check out a title with a library card, and download the ebook to a home computer. The titles can be transferred from the library customer’s home computer to a Sony Reader PRS-505 (with proper firmware installed) or PRS-700 using the Adobe Digital Editions software. At the end of the lending period, the file automatically expires and Adobe Digital Editions prompts the user to delete the title from his or her computer. OverDrive powers download media catalogs at thousands of libraries worldwide. To see if your library is a member of the OverDrive network, visit http://search.overdrive.com. OverDrive also operates the Digital Bookmobile (www.digitalbookmobile.com), a high-tech 18-wheeler that travels coast-to-coast raising awareness about free library downloads. Source: OverDrive, Inc.
Readex Announces Digital Edition of Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1941–1974
In 2009, Readex (www.readex.com), a division of NewsBank, Inc., will begin providing online access to Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports published between 1941 and 1974. To be full-text searchable for the first time, FBIS Daily Reports, 1941–1974 will offer online access to international news and broadcasts from around the world on topics ranging from the Axis alliance and colonialism in Africa to the new Islamic countries of the Middle East and the Vietnam War.As the U.S.’s principal record of political and historical open source intelligence, FBIS Daily Reports offer researchers at all levels valuable insight into decades of turbulent international politics and world history. Many of these FBIS translations of foreign broadcasts and firsthand accounts may be all that remain from what vanished into the airways or onto the classified recording disks of various national intelligence services. Scheduled for initial release in fall 2009, FBIS Daily Reports, 1941–1974 will serve as an essential complement to Readex’s FBIS Daily Reports, 1974–1996. Source: Readex
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Brandi Scardilli
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