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Weekly News Digest
March 5, 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. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

New Reports Journals From Faculty of 1000

F1000 Biology Reports (www.f1000biology.com/reports) and F1000 Medicine Reports (www.f1000medicine.com/reports) select and highlight the most significant and interesting articles recently evaluated on Faculty of 1000. They also identify emerging trends within the large F1000 database of articles. F1000 Reports are designed to spot the tips of some new scientific icebergs before they become apparent elsewhere. With so much new literature for scientists and clinicians to read, F1000 Reports are easy routes to the must-read content.

The rise of online publishing has given academics a completely new platform for publishing their findings, which has been beneficial in some respects but has also contributed greatly to doctors’ and scientists’ sense of information overload. With human community-driven filtering, internet users can get straight to the best online content. Faculty of 1000 has added a new level to this model with the launch of F1000 Reports.

Source: Faculty of 1000

Thomson Reuters Partners With CABI to Expand Life Sciences Content

Derived from more than 3,500 journals, plus reports, books and conferences, Global Health contains more than 1.2 million scientific records from 1973 to the present and more than 90,000 records are added each year. The addition of these records provide users access to weekly content updates, the ability to detect emerging trends to pursue successful research and grant acquisition, and help to identify potential collaborators through their publication records.

ISI Web of Knowledge (http://isiwebofknowledge.com), an integrated, versatile research platform, delivers easy access to high quality, diversified scholarly information in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities, as well as search and analysis tools that enhance this content. The platform provides users the ability to search the right content and find relevant information for discovery and research evaluation—whether that information is found in international journals, open access resources, books, patents, or proceedings.

CABI is a not-for-profit, science-based development and information organization with nine centers worldwide. CABI’s mission and direction are influenced by its 44 member countries that help guide the organization’s activities.

Source: Thomson Reuters

Read an E-Book Week March 8–14

With digital reading on the upswing, publications are focused on enhancing their online presence. Many are looking to make their content available for electronic reading devices. Having the right device becomes crucial for a pleasant reading experience. Ebookweek.com provides user reviews on a number of electronic reading devices, including Reader Digital Book by Sony which uses E Ink electronic paper display technology. (Sony and E Ink are supporters of the site.)

Ebooks are growing in popularity and sales are soaring. Ingram Digital’s latest survey indicates that in the education sector, ebook sales have jumped about 400% over last year and the latest figures from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) show that in the retail sector, ebook sales are up about 103% over last year.

Source: Rita Y. Toews, founder of Read an E-Book Week

Autonomy Unveils ControlPoint for Multimedia Solution for Microsoft Customers

Autonomy ControlPoint for Multimedia enables live or recorded speech to be processed, edited, searched, and hyperlinked as freely as text. Users have the ability to combine conceptual ideas and search phrases with metadata such as date, speaker, inbound/outbound, duration, and emotion to quickly cull the most likely content for further processing. A wide range of visualization tools help users categorize files and discern the range of subjects covered by rich media files.

Features include encoding and indexing of audio, video, e-mail, chat, and other rich media content; identification of duplicate and near-duplicate files; contextual and phonetic analysis of words to improve results, analytical tools for scene analysis, audio/text syncing, and speaker and audio segmentation and recognition; and workflow capabilities.

Source: Autonomy Corp. plc

ARL Calls on OCLC to Develop New Policy for WorldCat Records

The task force report includes a brief overview of the policy and the task force’s understanding of the policy’s intent. This is followed by an explication of specific issues and the task force’s findings regarding both the policy itself and the implementation process. The report recommends that a community-wide process be used to develop a new policy. The report concludes with recommendations for OCLC and the library community.

The ARL Board of Directors has accepted the task force’s report and ARL has shared the report with OCLC for the use of its Board of Trustees and its newly established Review Board of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship (www.oclc.org/us/en/worldcat/catalog/policy/board/default.htm).

The report is freely available on the ARL website at www.arl.org/bm~doc/oclc-report-jan09.pdf.

Source: Association of Research Libraries

Tsavo Launches Twithority Search Engine for Twitter

Twithority returns Twitter search results rapidly, looking back as many as 1,000 results. It sequences results by rank (with highest ranking users first) and time (with most recent Tweets first), within the top 10,000 Twitter users. Twitter is a free service that lets users keep in touch with one another through the exchange of quick, 140-character answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Tsavo will integrate Twithority into its new Daymix network of original consumer content sites—www.manolith.com, www.twirlit.com, www.kidglue.com, and www.nibbledish.com. Twithority will serve as an informal metric for Tsavo’s content sites, along the lines of Google’s zeitgeist feature.

Tsavo Media develops highly relevant content experiences for today’s digital consumers, as well as niche content monetization services to publishers. The company is based in Santa Monica, Calif.

Source: Tsavo Media