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Weekly News Digest
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June 18, 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.
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LC and NEH Celebrate Millionth Page in Chronicling America Program
The Library of Congress (LC; www.loc.gov) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH; www.neh.gov) marked a major milestone in their partnership to digitize historic U.S. newspapers and make them widely available to the public on the internet. During an event held at the Newseum, Deanna Marcum, associate librarian for library services at the LC, announced that the Chronicling America website (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov), a free, national, searchable database of historic American newspaper pages published between 1880 and 1922, recently posted its millionth page.
Launched by the NEH and the LC in March 2007, Chronicling America is a part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the two agencies to provide enhanced access to historically significant U.S. newspapers. NEH Acting Chairman Carole M. Watson announced grant awards to seven new NDNP state projects during the event as well. New state partners in Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, and South Carolina will select historically important newspapers published in their respective states and oversee the digitization of those newspapers for posting to the Chronicling America website.This online resource will eventually contain 20 million pages of historic American newspapers dating from 1836 to 1922. In addition to the digitized pages, Chronicling America offers educational essays on every title represented and a directory of all newspapers published in the U.S. dating from 1690 to the present.
In celebration of the milestone, Marcum announced that the LC has uploaded to its popular Flickr site 52 images from weekly 1909 editions of the New York Tribune's illustrated Sunday supplement. The richly illustrated supplements were printed at a time when the use of the halftone technique was still relatively novel in newspapers. The site includes links to high-resolution images at persistent URLs on Chronicling America. Additional images will be added in coming weeks. More information and a link to the new Flickr set can be found at www.loc.gov/blog/?p=552. Source: Library of Congress
Elsevier, NextBio Sign Partnership to Enrich ScienceDirect Content
Elsevier (www.elsevier.com) announced a new partnership agreement with NextBio (www.nextbio.com), the provider of a platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data to enrich ScienceDirect content (www.sciencedirect.com). This agreement allows for an integration of NextBio's unique set of ontology-based semantic tools and a compilation of high-quality sources of public data on ScienceDirect.While most scientific information on genes, pathways, diseases, tissues, and compounds is available online, it currently resides in various, disconnected locations. Enhancing ScienceDirect with NextBio's biomedical ontology framework enables life sciences, health sciences, and chemistry researchers to analyze ScienceDirect content and search ScienceDirect peer-reviewed literature together with publicly available research data from PubMed, clinical trials, experimental data, and news articles, on one single platform. The new enhancement will become available on ScienceDirect and will be accessible to subscribed users in summer 2009. Source: Elsevier
Dialog to Distribute Innography
Dialog, LLC (www.dialog.com), part of the ProQuest (www.proquest.com) family of brands, has been chosen by Innography (www.innography.com) as the exclusive distributor of its intellectual property business intelligence software to the corporate library market. Innography's web-based software enables users to more easily manage, protect, and leverage their patent portfolios.Innography's intellectual property business intelligence application provides a unique way of viewing search results to uncover patterns and trends at a glance. For example, it correlates patent data with financial, litigation, and other key business information, instantly generating a variety of unique visualizations so users can perform strategic market trending, competitive analysis, and other IP-related activities. Using this comprehensive perspective, it streamlines tasks such as patent disclosure and prior art research, freedom-to-operate analyses, inventory maintenance, competitive assessments, gem finding, and more. Plus, it reveals underlying connections between data that might otherwise be missed, stimulating new ways of identifying potential market opportunities. Bottom line: It is designed to allow users to do more in less time. Source: Dialog, LLC
SLA’s Click University Offers Free Credo E-References to Members
Click University (Click U), the online learning center of the Special Libraries Association (SLA; www.sla.org), will provide members with free access to a special collection of e-reference titles from Credo Reference (www.credoreference.com). Available references include dictionaries and encyclopedias covering information and library management, business, finance, legal, medical, and language issues from publishers such as A&C Black, Collins, and John Wiley."SLA is committed to providing our members with benefits and resources that allow them to provide their organizations with the best information available," said SLA CEO Janice R. Lachance. "Free electronic access to important reference material is only one of the steps we have taken this year to make sure that SLA membership is an especially good value for information professionals during these challenging economic times." As part of its strategy to improve on an already successful member benefit, the Click U team is implementing free access to this collection for SLA members only. The SLA collection from Credo provides members with information and resources that will allow them to access high-quality reference materials and resources free of charge from their desktops. The free titles available include the following: - BUSINESS: The Ultimate Resource-Dictionary of Business and Management
- Dictionary of Information and Library Management
- Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms, Barron's Business Dictionaries
- Collins Dictionary of Economics
- The Ultimate Business Library, Wiley
- The Columbia Encyclopedia
- The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style
- Dictionary of Law
- Encyclopedia of the European Union
- Black's Medical Dictionary, 41st edition
- Encyclopedia of Ethics
- Collins Concise Dictionary of Quotations
Source: SLA
New Online Content From the Middle East
East View Information Services (www.eastview.com), a provider of information products and services in world languages and English translation, announces the addition of Arabia Inform (www.arabiainform.com) online databases to its growing offerings from the Middle East.
Mohamed Elewa, CEO of Arabia Inform, says, "Since 1997, Arabia Inform has provided cover-to-cover monitoring, indexing and analysis for Arabic print media through our Middle East Monitor service. Academic institutions and commercial entities throughout the Middle East have subscribed to our AskZad database, which is the largest library databank of Middle East content" (www.askzad.com/English)."We will launch a new business this summer-Acumen Media Intelligence-targeted to corporations with branches or interests in the Middle East. With East View's help, AskZad and Middle East Monitor have been localized to include an English user interface, pricing models, and access methods that are in line with North American and European academic, corporate, and government users."
Since 1989, East View Information Services has built and represented content emanating from Russia; the former Soviet Union; Asia; and, beginning in 2008, the Middle East. East View will give the public its first official view of the AskZad platform at the Special Libraries Association meeting in Washington, D.C., June 14-17. In summer 2009, Acumen Media Intelligence will launch with a focus on media monitoring and analysis for business. Arabia Inform is headquartered in Cairo, Egypt, with offices in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and Doha, Qatar. Source: East View Information Services
New White Paper on Special Libraries’ Recession Survival Strategies
J.J. Keller & Associates, Inc. (www.jjkeller.com), a provider of regulatory compliance information on HR, safety, and transportation issues, announced the availability of a new, free white paper, "Economic Impact: How Information Professionals Are Coping With Change." The paper details the results of a survey in which information professionals revealed their recession survival strategies. The survey, conducted on J.J. Keller's behalf by Free Pint Ltd. (www.freepint.com), was promoted to subscribers of ResourceShelf, a FreePint-published resource of web-based resources used by information professionals in North America and around the world. A J.J. Keller-sponsored mailing that was sent to all subscribers invited participation in the survey this spring. Most of the 308 respondents reported that they work in professional services, in organizations with more than 5,000 employees; a significant portion of respondents work in academic libraries and nonprofit organizations. The survey revealed the following: - Making do with free resources is the most important tactic for coping with reduced content budgets.
- Using technology and/or automation is most relevant for coping with staffing changes.
- Doing more with less is the information professional's new mantra.
- Helping library users become more self-sufficient is key.
- Promoting their information center's vital contributions to management is a must.
Those who participated in the survey received a complimentary copy of the white paper. A free copy can also be obtained by visiting J.J. Keller's new webpage for information professionals, http://jjkeller.com/infopros. J.J. Keller will be exhibiting at SLA 2009, the Special Libraries Association's centennial convention, June 14-17 in Washington, D.C. Those attending the event are invited to stop by booth 10 and share their feedback on the survey and resulting white paper. Copies of the white paper will also be available at the booth. Source: J.J. Keller & Associates, Inc.
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Brandi Scardilli
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