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Weekly News Digest

September 10, 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.

EBSCO Publishing Makes Evidence-Based Flu Resources Freely Available

Concerns about Pandemic H1N1 and the upcoming flu season have people on alert, and the medical and nursing editors from EBSCO Publishing are responding by making the latest evidence-based, flu-related information available for free. The site (www.ebscohost.com/flu) will provide evidence-based clinical information from DynaMed and Nursing Reference Center, EBSCO's clinical and nursing point-of-care databases, along with patient education information in 17 languages from Patient Education Reference Center.

The information provided in the "For Clinicians" and "For Nurses" sections consolidates the best available evidence from multiple sources along with the latest evidence-based content for healthcare providers to stay current with recommendations for monitoring, diagnosing, and treating patients with flulike illnesses.

The "For Patients" section includes current, easy-to-understand articles written for nonmedical professionals. The site adds patient education information in 17 languages including Arabic, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), English, Farsi, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese.

The goal of the site is to be open to all and easy to share among medical colleagues, parents, students, faculty, employees, and co-workers so that preventative measures are well-known and symptoms and treatment options are understood. Medical institutions, organizations, universities, schools and public libraries will be able to easily add links to the EBSCO influenza portal to their own flu resources pages and websites.

In April, EBSCO Publishing was the first clinical information provider to make the clinical summaries on the Pandemic H1N1 virus available for free. The medical and nursing editors responsible for EBSCO's point-of-care resources continually monitor current information and update the resources in order to ensure that the worldwide medical community has the best available medical evidence. The new site pulls together the information collected about the Pandemic H1N1 outbreak and other strains of the flu, ensuring that the best available medical evidence will be easy to find going into the 2009-2010 flu season.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Rare Sound Recordings Now Available Free Online

The British Library (BL; www.bl.uk) has made nearly 28,000 rare music and sound recordings from its massive collection, reputed to be one of the largest sound archives in the world, available for free online (http://sounds.bl.uk). Rare, unpublished, and previously unavailable recordings have been launched online thanks to funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC; www.jisc.ac.uk) for BL's archival sound recordings project. The recordings, covering 2,000 hours of sound, are now online as part of JISC's digitization program, which has invested more than £22 million (about $36 million U.S.) in making available a wide range of heritage and scholarly resources of national importance.

All recordings in the Archival Sound Recordings project are available for free to licensed U.K. higher and further education institutions and can be accessed from BL reading rooms. In addition, where permission has been granted, these recordings can be listened to by the public online via the website. Music clips range from the lament of the organic gardener in Gloucestershire to songs in praise of oxen sung by Karamojong herders in remote villages of Northeastern Uganda, offering a glimpse of cultural experiences around the world.

Source: British Library

AIP UniPHY Offers New Networking Platform for the Physical Sciences

The American Institute of Physics (AIP; www.aip.org) launched a new website, AIP UniPHY (http://aipuniphy.org), a first-of-its-kind scientific networking platform for physical scientists. Through AIP's partnership in this venture with Collexis Holdings, Inc. (www.collexis.com), a developer of semantic technology and knowledge discovery software, the site will continue to evolve and develop.

AIP UniPHY claims to be the world's first literature-based, professional scientific networking platform that allows physical scientists to identify and connect directly with individuals whose expertise they may need in future collaborations. Utilizing Collexis' proprietary Fingerprint technology, AIP UniPHY enables fast and accurate knowledge retrieval and allows individuals to search for and locate documents, researchers, trends, and new discoveries more quickly, precisely, and thoroughly than ever before.

A unique feature of AIP UniPHY is the profiling of individual scientists based on their publication history. "By providing pre-populated profiles" said John Haynes, AIP's vice president, publishing, "we hope to facilitate the process by which researchers connect and share data. We expect that this will both increase the number of significant breakthroughs made across a range of disciplines, and decrease the time it takes to bring these innovations about."

AIP UniPHY enables researchers to see the networks that connect more than 180,000 physical scientists from more than 100 countries. They will discover the research each of these individuals has conducted and follow a web of connections showing each co-author with whom the investigator has worked. AIP UniPHY reveals with whom each of these co-authors has collaborated, as well.

The American Institute of Physics is a federation of 10 physical science societies representing more than 135,000 scientists, engineers, and educators and is one of the world's largest publishers of scientific information in the physical sciences.

Source: The American Institute of Physics