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Weekly News Digest

June 1, 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. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

Ingram Digital Creates iPod-Compatible Audiobook Service

MyiLibrary Audio users can access and download audiobooks through Ingram Media Manager, a Mac- and PC-compatible application that manages the circulation of digital content. MyiLibrary Audio also offers full control of lending periods and lets libraries send patrons title availability alerts and gather feedback on current inventory.

The Baltimore County Public Library, the Califa Group, and the Los Gatos Public Library were the first institutions to adopt MyiLibrary Audio.

Source: Ingram Digital (www.ingramdigital.com)

Browser Plug-ins Now Available for Major Science Search Engines

OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for sharing search results. Created by A9.com, an Amazon.com company, the OpenSearch format is now in use by hundreds of search engines and search applications around the internet. Deep Web Technologies utilizes the OpenSearch format for each of their target search portals, bringing Web 2.0 accessibility to the most important science search portals available. 

Of the six OpenSearch plug-ins created, five are to federated search applications developed by Deep Web Technologies that search some of the best deep web science content available. Federated search performs real-time, parallel searches of multiple information sources, merging the results into one page. Freely searchable value-added content is available through federated search engines surfacing it to a variety of users, who might otherwise not be aware of its existence. Federated search is an information discovery tool that enables the rapid and cost-effective integration of multiple, valuable information sources into one web-portal without significant expense or effort on the part of content owners.

Deep Web Technologies plans on expanding its current scientific and technical plug-ins as well as creating plug-ins in more subjects. To learn more about Deep Web Technologies and its Explorit Research Accelerator federated search product, visit www.deepwebtech.com. 

Source: Deep Web Technologies

InnoCentive and NPG Launch Nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion

Companies and not-for-profit organizations (known as "seekers") can post "challenges" in life sciences, physical sciences, and clinical medicine on the Nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion. These challenges are briefs allowing seekers to tap into external expertise to solve research problems or drive development of new products and technologies. Successful "solvers" receive financial rewards. Seekers can call on the expertise from Nature.com's 5 million monthly visitors and InnoCentive's community of more than 175,000 solvers.

The Nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion provides the Nature.com user community and InnoCentive's solver community with a rich set of challenges to tackle, specifically tailored to their interests and expertise. InnoCentive and NPG will work together to maximize the visibility of these challenges to Nature.com users, readers of NPG journals, and current InnoCentive solvers. Nature.com users will be invited to become InnoCentive solvers; a larger pool of expertise should increase the chances of solving issues of worldwide concern. Current InnoCentive clients will have the opportunity to post challenges in the nature.com Pavilion, taking advantage of this new larger community of solvers.The Nature.com Open Innovation Pavilion is already home to five challenges, with a cumulative award amount of $100,000. There are more than 1,200 open solver project rooms, with solvers working to solve these challenges.

Source: Nature Publishing Group

Credo Reference Slices Rates for FEDLINK Libraries

Under the agreement, FEDLINK member libraries are eligible for discounted subscriptions to Credo's collection of cross-searchable entries, available via a single interface that provides seamless searching from Credo into other library resources. The collection consists of more than 3 million cross-referenced entries from more than 415 titles and 63 publishers.

Credo was included in the Library Journal's Best of Reference 2008 feature, as well as the New York Library Association's Best of Reference 2008 list. The company also received the highest scores of every resource evaluated in the Library Journal's 2009 E-Reference Ratings that earned four stars in every category.

Source: Credo Reference (www.credoreference.com)

HighWire Press Boosts Content for Books Program

The following book and reference work sites have recently rounded out the product line:

• Oxford Medical Handbooks, from the Oxford University Press
• Handbook of Practice Management, from The Royal Society of Medicine Press
• CSH Symposia on Quantitative Biology, from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
• The Lyell Collection, Special Publications, from the Geological Society of London
• The Carlyle Letters Online, from the Duke University Press

HighWire's offerings now feature more than 100 sites for books, reference works, and other nonjournal content. The company also hosts the definitive editions of more than 1,200 full-text journals in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and humanities, as well as cross-content products for niche markets that integrate content from many sources.

Source: HighWire Press (http://highwire.stanford.edu)

New Google Search Appliance Makes Its Debut

• Scale to billions of docs-With its new dynamic scalability, users can easily connect multiple GSAs, to scale to large document counts, or search data across departments and geographies, while providing employees a unified, easy-to-navigate set of results.
• Customize across the board-Customizable administrative, security, and relevancy features allow users to fine-tune search results and provide more control to automate common tasks. GSA 6.0 also enables flexible security policies, allowing users to customize to their needs.

• Achieve higher-quality search results-Social search features aggregate knowledge across the organization for more precise search results, while multilingual features such as Language Bundles and Cross-Language Enterprise Search enable users in all languages to achieve better search results.

• Upgraded platforms-Google now offers two powerful hardware platforms to new customers. The GB-7007 will support all license counts up to 10 million documents and delivers three times the computing power of the previous GB-1001. The GB-9009 searches up to 30 million documents out of the box and can scale to search billions of documents.  

"With the GSA 6.0, it's easy for companies to give all employees the powerful Google search experience inside their business-even if they are searching among billions of documents in dispersed intranets, data stores, languages or geographies," said Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise. "With the improved architecture and software for the search appliance, global businesses can provide secure search across the largest enterprise content repositories-with one GSA system that can scale to billions of documents without limits." 

Source: Google