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Weekly News Digest
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March 9, 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.
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Plan Now to Participate in Open Access Week Oct. 19–23
To accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward Open Access to scholarly research results, Oct. 19–23, 2009, will mark the first international Open Access Week. The now-annual event, expanded from 1 day to a full week, presents an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public.Open Access Week builds on the momentum generated by the 120 campuses in 27 countries that celebrated Open Access Day in 2008. Event organizers SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for Free Culture welcome key new contributors, who will help to enhance and expand the global reach of this popular event in 2009: eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries), OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook), and the Open Access Directory (OAD). This year’s program will highlight educational resources on Open Access that local hosts can use to customize their own programs to suit local audiences and time zones. OASIS will serve as the centerpiece of the 2009 program, delivering resources for every constituency and every awareness level. The OAD will again provide an index of participants on five continents, as well as their growing clearinghouse for all OA resources. Through the collaborative functionality of the two initiatives, OA videos, briefing papers, podcasts, slideshows, posters, and other informative tools will be drawn from all over the web to be highlighted during Open Access Week. The organizers will also work with registrants to develop a variety of sample program tracks, such as "Administrators’ introduction to campus open-access policies and funds," "OA 101," and "Complying with the NIH public access policy" that take full advantage of available tools. Participants are invited to adapt these resources for local use and to mark Open Access Week by hosting an event, distributing literature, blogging—or even just wearing an Open Access t-shirt. For more information about Open Access Week and to register, visit www.openaccessweek.org. Source: SPARC (www.arl.org/sparc)
Baker & Taylor in Licensing Partnership With ebrary
Baker & Taylor, Inc. (www.btol.com) has launched the first phase of its integrated digital media distribution platform. The company announced a strategic worldwide licensing partnership with ebrary (www.ebrary.com), a provider of econtent services and technologies. The partnership enables Baker & Taylor to develop its own digital content products and services, as well as to integrate tens of thousands of ebooks and other titles that ebrary has aggregated from more than 350 leading publishers. The new Baker & Taylor digital media distribution platform will be seamlessly integrated to deliver physical and digital content across its customer markets.Baker & Taylor says the first piece of its comprehensive digital supply chain will be rolling out in the coming weeks. The company says its customers are ready and eager for bundled physical and digital products and services. The integration of ebrary’s technology and products within Baker & Taylor’s infrastructure and workflow will allow librarians to have greater access to print and digital content, will allow publishers to see new revenue streams, and will allow end users to have the tools they need to discover, use, and manage digital information. "This gives publishers a premium avenue to distribute their content in both print and electronic formats," said George Coe, president of library and education for Baker & Taylor. "There is already great demand in the academic library market, but this digital infrastructure will also serve the growing needs of our government, corporate, and international customers as we integrate collection development, cataloging, and workflow services with the advanced technology and usage statistics in the ebrary platform." Ebrary has developed 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 a choice of ebrary Readers with QuickView for instant viewing in a browser and InfoTools software, which provide contextual searching and integration with multiple online resources. ebrary currently offers a growing selection of more than 170,000 ebooks and other titles from more than 350 leading publishers and aggregators. Source: Baker & Taylor, Inc.
Alexander Street Press Launches New Primary Source Collection on The Sixties
Electronic publisher Alexander Street Press (http://alexanderstreet.com) announced the release of The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960–1974, the first online collection of primary sources to document the key events, trends, and movements—as well as the look and feel of everyday life—in 1960s America. When complete, the collection will contain 150,000 pages of cross-searchable content, including thousands of artifacts from "hidden" archives and other materials not available anywhere else.The collection includes a wide range of interviews—with the Beatles, the Weathermen, commune members, and women beat writers—as well as memoirs and diaries from Vietnam War veterans, civil rights workers, feminists, and regular people caught up in the times. Included are autobiographies of Abbie Hoffman, Medgar Evers, Bill Graham, and Roger Mudd; Civil Rights Commission hearing transcripts; and books documenting the 1960s. Additional content is being added monthly. The collection will also include more than a dozen critical essays from prominent humanities scholars that lend context and serve as practical guides, introducing students to the process and methodology of scholarly research with primary sources. The Sixties can be accessed online at http://sixt.alexanderstreet.com. Anyone may browse this collection for free. Document-level access requires authentication. Source: Alexander Street Press
Attributor and Creative Commons Launch FairShare Service
Attributor Corp. (www.attributor.com), a content monitoring and monetization company, announced a collaboration with Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) to launch FairShare, a free service allowing bloggers and individual content creators to understand how their work is shared across the web. FairShare allows anyone creating text content to submit an RSS feed of his or her work and choose a Creative Commons license to determine how it can be shared. Users then receive license-specific results via RSS with detailed insights into how and where their work is reused.The FairShare service enters public beta supporting six Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative reuse of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. The FairShare service will be integrated with the Creative Commons license selection process and will be available in each of the 12 languages that FairShare currently supports. FairShare leverages Attributor’s proprietary tracking index of more than 35 billion webpages that automatically finds reuse of as little as a few sentences. For the first time, individual bloggers and content creators will have the same visibility in the uptake of their work as large publishers. To keep it free, Attributor has placed some limits on the amount of content users can add. If users run into these limits, Attributor offers a subscription service. For more information or to sign up for the free public beta of FairShare, visit www.fairshare.cc. Source: Attributor Corp.
Thomson Reuters Launches InCites
The Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters (www.thomsonreuters.com) announced the launch of InCites, a customized web-based solution that provides users with the tools needed to demonstrate the impact and importance of their institution’s research. Through InCites, Thomson Reuters empowers its customers with a one-stop system to quantitatively evaluate productivity and influence in order to make strategic decisions.InCites is designed to provide value through the delivery of customer-defined data sets in a web interface for research and analysis. The product enables users to conduct analyses on their own institution’s productivity and benchmark its output against peers in both a national or international context. InCites also enables users to create subsets around entities such as departments or authors, providing additional analysis at a local level. This product integrates the same high-quality citation content users have come to expect from Thomson Reuters. Data sets derived from Web of Science include bibliographic data and citing articles, current metrics, inbound linking to full records, and the ability to export data and graphs. For more information about InCites, visit www.isiwebofknowledge.com/incites. Source: Thomson Reuters
Serials Solutions’ Summon Service Adds Content and Development Partners
Serials Solutions (www.serialssolutions.com), a business unit of ProQuest, LLC (www.proquest.com), has signed new beta development partners and new content providers to its new Summon unified discovery service. University of Sydney and University of Liverpool join Dartmouth College and Oklahoma State University as beta development sites. New content will be contributed from such publishing leaders as the American Psychological Association (APA) and Alexander Street Press, well-known sources of scholarly journal content. The new beta site and content additions are part of the Summon service’s aggressive growth and development program in preparation for its launch mid-year.Announced in January (see the NewsBreak at http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=52370), the Summon unified discovery service enables Google-like searching of the full breadth of content found in library collections—from books and videos to e-resources at the article level. The Summon service addresses what research shows is a fundamental barrier between libraries and users: a simple, obvious starting point for searches. The service is being developed in close cooperation with library beta partners, with a goal of not only bringing the researcher back to the library but also providing a channel for greater return on the library’s content investment. The University of Sydney and University of Liverpool library systems, particularly good fits because of their user-centered technologies and services, will provide feedback that will refine all aspects of the service. The participation of content providers is also a vital component of the service’s development. The Summon service surpasses federated search in favor of a single search against preharvested content enabling fast results, in true relevancy-ranked order. With lead participants ProQuest and Gale, the Summon service’s list of contributors has expanded dramatically in 2 months. The journals of APA and Alexander Street Press join the works of Springer, Taylor & Francis, SAGE Publications, and other organizations. To learn more about the Summon unified discovery service, visit www.serialssolutions.com/summon. Source: Serials Solutions
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Brandi Scardilli
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