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Weekly News Digest

October 8, 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.

Vivisimo Unveils New Release of Velocity Enterprise Search Platform

Vivisimo, Inc. (http://vivisimo.com) has launched the Velocity Enterprise Search Platform 7.5. Available as a stand-alone search solution or as an embedded OEM version for partner applications, Velocity 7.5 introduces significant enhancements in extensibility, scalability via on-demand index management, and performance via triple data compression. In addition, new traceable accuracy metrics can accurately prove and defend that all data has been crawled and can identify any documents that were not indexed due to corrupt file types.

Velocity 7.5 marks Vivisimo's most significant step in extending the power of Velocity for partners and customers looking to build and deliver search-centric applications. By building out and expanding the open API layer, Vivisimo is providing customers, OEMs, partners, and systems integrators greater access to the entire Velocity architecture and its rich feature set. These organizations can now leverage the search development platform to add value to existing applications and develop new solutions that take advantage of the volumes of information assets within every enterprise.

Source: Vivisimo, Inc.

RefWorks Adds New Direct Export Partners

RefWorks-COS (www.refworks-cos.com), a business unit of ProQuest, LLC (www.proquest.com), has added several new direct export partners to RefWorks, its web-based research management service. The online databases EMBASE.com, ebrary, Scitopia (www.scitopia.org), and Explorit (from Deep Web Technologies; www.deepwebtech.com) join hundreds of others in linking directly to RefWorks. RefWorks users can export search results from the databases directly into a RefWorks account by simply clicking a RefWorks button on the results screen. This direct export link greatly expedites the process of gathering research information, seamlessly transferring information from one service to the other.

The direct export occurs via a special API built by RefWorks and made available to any information providers who wish to provide their users with added convenience. More than 300 organizations have implemented the RefWorks Direct Export API, including those of many of the world's largest online information providers such as LexisNexis, Elsevier, OCLC, IEEE, BioMed Central, EBSCO, Google Scholar, JSTOR, and the entire ProQuest range of information services.

RefWorks-COS provides tools and services for every phase of research, from discovering the very latest developments, finding grants, and identifying collaborators and thought leaders to managing research information, sharing resources, and writing papers to locating opportunities to present or publish findings.

Source: RefWorks-COS

NewsGator Expands Collaboration Capabilities in Social Sites 3.0

NewsGator Technologies, Inc., an RSS platform company, announced the general availability of the newest version of its enterprise social computing platform, Social Sites 3.0. It now offers new features for tracking colleagues' statuses, streamlining cross-community knowledge sharing, and discovering in-house subject matter experts. Built into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, these features help NewsGator Social Sites transform content, activity, and connections into valuable social knowledge for business.

The new microblogging feature in Social Sites 3.0 lets users post short Twitter-style status updates to their colleagues. These updates serve as a way to report urgent developments, train colleagues on-the-fly, identify helpful experts, chronicle off-site conferences, mentor/get mentored, float new ideas, build morale, and otherwise harness the value of "weak ties."

The new Socialpedia, a self-assembling, Wikipedia-style knowledgebase, pulls from wikis across SharePoint. Socialpedia enhances Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007's wiki experience, with AJAX editing, tagging, rating, automated table of contents creation, custom wiki tags, and more, creating a single knowledge repository with distributed ownership.

The new Knowledge Explorer let users visualize internal experts clustered around concepts with a graphical expertise map. When users click on a topic in a tag cloud, the map appears with experts arranged according to their automatically calculated expertise ratings. Knowledge Explorer takes advantage of the rich media features in Microsoft Silverlight.

For more information on Social Sites, visit www.newsgator.com/business/socialsites/default.aspx.

Source: NewsGator Technologies, Inc.

Coveo Announces Enterprise Desktop Search

Coveo Solutions, Inc. (www.coveo.com) announced the new Coveo Enterprise Desktop Search application, part of the Coveo Enterprise Search 6.0 platform, which launched in May. The new offering features a central index of information with connectors that access it and administrative tools such as rules and role-based information access. Faceted search is made possible via a desktop search bar, an Outlook plug-in, a mobile device interface, and offline search of the central index.

For knowledge-intensive organizations, Coveo's Enterprise Desktop Search application provides significant increases in productivity. Coveo customers estimate decreases up to tenfold in the time to access information following their Coveo implementations.

The Coveo Enterprise Desktop Search application is powered by the Coveo Enterprise Search 6.0 platform, which is scalable from hundreds of thousands to billions of documents and requires approximately 20% of the server footprint of legacy enterprise search solutions. Claimed to be the most modular and scalable enterprise search solution, Coveo Enterprise Search 6.0 has a reputation for ease of deployment and self-service customization.

Coveo was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Québec City. It employs more than 80 people globally and has some 600 global customers.

Source: Coveo Solutions, Inc.

New Report on Filings in the Google Books Settlement

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the American Library Association (ALA), and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have issued a report that summarizes in a few pages of charts some key information about the hundreds of filings that have been submitted to the federal district court presiding over the Google Books litigation. The report was prepared by ARL law and policy Fellow Brandon Butler.

Some parties expressed important concerns about the settlement, but they chose to urge careful government oversight rather than to oppose the settlement entirely. In fact, this is the position taken by members of the library associations in their comments to the court. Filers with reservations and concerns are listed in their own chart, separate from the supporters and opponents. And the report noted that while many rightsholders and interested observers have announced their views publicly, the charts represent only the views of those parties who filed with the court.

The report is available at www.arl.org/bm~doc/googlefilingcharts.pdf.

Source: ARL

EBSCO Expands Coverage With New Literary Reference Center Plus

EBSCO Publishing (www.ebscohost.com) has released Literary Reference Center Plus. The database expands upon EBSCO's Literary Reference Center and provides additional content including more than 1,100 reference books and more than 125 literary periodicals. Thirty-five extensive volumes of new reference content on contemporary literature from Salem Press also contribute to this new resource relating to fantasy/science fiction, contemporary literature, and world philosophy; it also includes the biographies of the winners of the Nobel Prize in literature.

Users of Literary Reference Center Plus will also have access to 40 full-text literary study guides to help explore novels and plays in American and English literature and to better understand the characteristics of different forms of literature. The database also contains 74 literary videos pertaining to classic literary works and authors.

Source: EBSCO Publishing