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Weekly News Digest
May 4, 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.

Perfect Search Adds a Layer of Data Harmony

Access Innovations, Inc. (www.accessinn.com) and Perfect Search Corp. (www.perfectsearchcorp.com) announced a joint solution for cutting-edge search technology at competitive prices. Perfect Search has the added presentation layer from Access Innovations' Data Harmony software suite (www.dataharmony.com) to give the user the ability to improve search results through taxonomy-enhanced methods, such as automatic completion based on the synonyms and taxonomy terms, related terms to broaden the search, narrower terms to refine the search, browsing of taxonomies associated with document sets, spell check, and recursive sets.

"The combination of blazingly fast search with tools to increase precision and recall means that the relevance can be based on concepts rather than statistical ‘guess-timates' and real ‘find-ability' achieved" says Jay Ven Eman, CEO of Access Innovations.

Access Innovations, Inc. of Albuquerque, N.M., has been providing document processing, database construction, and project management for its customers' information needs since 1978. In those roles, Access Innovations adds value to customer knowledgebases and improves data conversion, document retrieval, content classification, search design, display, and portability of information assets.

Perfect Search Corp. of Orem, Utah, specializes in the development of search solutions. A total of eight patents have been applied for around the developing technology. The suite of search products is available on multiple platforms, from small mobile devices to single servers to large server farms.

Source: Access Innovations, Inc.

Alexander Street Press Launches New Online Jazz Library

Electronic publisher Alexander Street Press (http://alexanderstreet.com) announced the launch of Jazz Music Library, a new, continuously growing, online collection that currently includes more than 18,000 audio tracks featuring more than 3,800 artists in streaming audio. Available to universities and libraries worldwide and the latest release in Alexander Street's growing suite of Music Online products, Jazz Music Library gives library users, music faculty, and students at subscribing institutions access to what the company says will be "the most comprehensive online collection of recorded jazz available."

The collection includes works licensed from dozens of record labels, including Audiophile, Concord Jazz, Contemporary Records, Fantasy, Jazzology, Milestone, Nessa Records, Original Jazz Classics, Pablo, Prestige, and Riverside. Labels being added include Circle Records, GHB, Good Time Jazz, GRP, Impulse, Peak, Solo Art Records, Stretch Records, Verve, and dozens more. Future releases of the collection will include the NPR radio broadcast series of Marian McPartland's Peabody Award-winning radio program Piano Jazz as well as rarely heard live performances from the Monterey Jazz and Newport Jazz festivals, together with live recordings from famous jazz venues including the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note, the Apollo, the Jazz Standard, the Black Hawk, the Five Spot, and many others. Most of these recordings are made available here for the first time.

The company also announced that from May 12 to 14, it will host the first annual Online Jazz Music Festival at http://alexanderstreet.com/jazzfest.htm. Ordinarily accessible only to patrons of subscribing libraries, Jazz Music Library, will be openly accessible to visitors and will include videos, free music downloads, quizzes, contests, a juried playlist competition, and special discount coupons from publishing partners.

Source: Alexander Street Press

Swine Flu Clinical Summary Available Free

Due to the recent global outbreak of Swine Influenza, EBSCO Publishing and the DynaMed editors have made the main elements of the DynaMed clinical summary for Swine Influenza free to healthcare providers and institutions throughout the world (http://hldemo.ebscohost.com/DynaMed-SwineFlu/). The DynaMed topic on Swine Influenza consolidates information from multiple sources for healthcare providers to stay current with recommendations for monitoring, diagnosing, and treating patients with flulike illnesses during this outbreak. DynaMed editors will continue to monitor information and update this topic as needed throughout this global crisis.

DynaMed is a point-of-care reference resource designed to provide clinicians with the best available evidence to support clinical decision making. DynaMed is a medical information database with more than 3,000 clinical topic summaries used in more than 2,500 hospitals around the world. DynaMed is part of the suite of medical products owned and provided by EBSCO Publishing and is updated daily by monitoring medical literature sources.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Serials Solutions Enhances KnowledgeWorks With Medical Resources

Serials Solutions (www.serialssolutions.com), a division of ProQuest, LLC (www.proquest.com), announced a series of medical resource enhancements to Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks, its e-resource knowledgebase. The enhancements are designed to improve e-resource access and management at medical libraries. They include the addition of more than 1 million National Library of Medicine eBook MARC records and Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) data to KnowledgeWorks, as well as a new feature supporting the PubMed LinkOut service within the 360 Link OpenURL link resolver. The changes are based on suggestions from medical librarians.

The knowledgebase now includes 1.2 million National Library of Medicine eBook MARC records, which will be included as a part of the Serials Solutions 360 MARC Updates eBooks service. Serials Solutions has also started development to include MeSH data within KnowledgeWorks. MeSH data will be added as a "subject browse" option within the 360 Core A-Z list before the end of 2009.

Additionally, as an enhancement for the 360 Link OpenURL link resolver, Serials Solutions has begun to provide XML holdings data to PubMed LinkOut to enable libraries to connect patrons from PubMed citations to full text anywhere in the libraries' collection. This is a free service available to subscribers of 360 Link.

Source: Serials Solutions

LexisNexis Warns of Another Data Breach

LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.com) has sent letters to 32,000 people stating that their personal information may have been improperly accessed by former customers in a credit card fraud scheme. A data breach of the databases at LexisNexis and at a Santa Fe, N.M., company called Investigative Professionals, which conducts background checks including employee screenings, took place between June 14, 2004, and Oct. 10, 2007, and the private information viewed included names, dates of birth, and possibly even Social Security numbers.

The letter, reprinted by CBS News, which first reported the breach (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/01/cbsnews_investigates/main4982989.shtml), says the individuals improperly accessing the personal information were operating businesses that at one time were both ChoicePoint and LexisNexis customers but are no longer. The letter also notes that the "United States Postal Inspection Service, a federal law enforcement agency investigating this matter, has already notified you directly if it has reason to believe you have been an actual victim of a crime." The service also issued a statement, but it does not name the data providers. It is available at https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/radDocs/PressRoom/nr090504.html.

The letter from LexisNexis also offers potential victims a year of free credit card monitoring through ConsumerInfo.com, Inc., an Experian company. It includes an initial 3 Bureau Credit Report. So far, LexisNexis has not posted information on its website or issued a press release about the incident. LexisNexis reported a more extensive data breach in 2005 and says it has since taken a number of steps to strengthen its privacy and security safeguards to improve the overall protection of consumers' information.

Sources: CBS News, U.S. Postal Inspection Service

Ovid Expands Medical Ebook Offerings

Ovid Technologies, Inc. (www.ovid.com), a part of Wolters Kluwer Health (www.wkhealth.com) and a provider of customizable electronic research information for the medical, healthcare, and academic markets, announced that 60 ebooks from Clinical Publishing (www.clinicalpublishing.co.uk), an independent medical publisher based in the U.K, are scheduled to be available on OvidSP in 2009. Many of the titles are already for sale and accessible via Books@Ovid, OvidSP's ebook platform. All titles will be available to Ovid's global customer base as an annual subscription or for one-time purchase.

With the addition of Clinical Publishing, Ovid's portfolio of ebook publishing partners now totals 10. Additional partners include Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (Ovid's sister company within Wolters Kluwer Health), Oxford University Press, Springer Science + Business Media, McGraw-Hill, and Jones & Bartlett.

Clinical Publishing is an independent medical publisher with offices in Oxford, U.K.; Barcelona, Spain; and New York. An imprint of Atlas Medical Publishing, Ltd, Clinical Publishing specializes in medical color atlases and medical reference texts for doctors, specialists, and trainees worldwide.

First launched in 2004, Books@Ovid offers a streamlined, efficient search experience to a wide range of novice and advanced user types. Users can search ebooks simultaneously with ejournals and bibliographic databases and can link directly to any other content resource referenced in a book. Features include flexible search, browse, and results-management features; inline abstracts; a variety of search limits; and downloadable MARC records to help librarians manage their online catalogs.

Source: Ovid Technologies, Inc.