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Weekly News Digest
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October 29, 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.
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Remote API Searching of Nature.com Through OpenSearch
Remote API Searching of Nature.com Through OpenSearchNature Publishing Group (NPG) now offers remote searching of the nature.com platform via nature.com OpenSearch (www.nature.com/opensearch). The new service allows application software to query nature.com and return results in a machine-readable format that can be reused and redisplayed. Nature.com OpenSearch is the latest example of NPG's drive to improve availability of article metadata on the nature.com platform, maximizing usability for the research and information communities. As a demonstration of the new OpenSearch service, NPG has developed nature.com search desktop widgets (www.nature.com/widgets). Available for both Mac and PC, the widgets allow users to search nature.com without visiting the website. Searches are put together and sent by the widget, and results can be browsed with links back to the relevant article on nature.com. The widgets are available for download at Apple Downloads and Yahoo! Widgets gallery. See the screencast on YouTube for an introduction (www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqf_ew4o3U8). Nature.com OpenSearch takes advantage of public protocols, using the emergent Search and Retrieve via URL (SRU) protocol and supporting the industry-standard OpenSearch conventions for accessing search engines. Federated searching, which enables the search of numerous resources via a single search interface, is now fully supported. Queries can be sent as a simple keyword list or as more complex descriptions, and the results are returned in a machine-readable, list-based format for easy integration. Source: Nature Publishing Group
Microsoft Announces Public Beta of SharePoint 2010
Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) announced the public beta of SharePoint Server 2010. New features include a ribbon user interface for customization of SharePoint sites, enhanced Office integration via social tagging and document life-cycle management, web content management capabilities with multilingual support and one-click page layout, SharePoint tools in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and new APIs and support for Silverlight, representational state transfer (REST), and language-integrated query (LINQ) for application development.Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is part of the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products, which includes Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Project 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and Microsoft Visio 2010. These are designed to give people the best productivity experience across PCs, cell phones, and browsers. The public betas of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Office 2010, Project 2010, and Visio 2010 will become available in November 2009; more information is available at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9689707. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 will be available in the first half of 2010. More information about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 can be found at www.microsoft.com/sharepoint. Source: Microsoft Corp.
Dialog All A-Twitter
Dialog (www.dialog.com), a ProQuest company, has launched a Twitter site, DialogLLC, to help users keep up with the latest happenings at Dialog. Dialog intends to tweet news and opportunities of all types. For example, in its first live week, the Twitter site included links to free trials, intellectual property webinars, and information on applying for Dialog's program for unemployed librarians. Because of Twitter's brevity, Dialog feels the site can enable followers to stay abreast of company initiatives with a minimum impact on their time. Each tweet will include a link that allows readers to get more information. Dialog is inviting customers, journalists, and anyone interested in professional searching to follow at http://twitter.com/DialogLLC.Source: Dialog, LLC
Royal Society of Chemistry Delivering Ebooks via Ovid
Ovid (www.ovid.com), a part of Wolters Kluwer Health, has announced a partnership with the Royal Society of Chemistry to deliver ebooks to the scientific and medical research community. The first 46 books going onto the OvidSP scholarly search and discovery platform will cover chemistry, pharmaceutical sciences, and related disciplines.The Royal Society of Chemistry is a world-renowned, U.K.-based professional association and publisher of books, journals, and databases in the chemical sciences. As a leading aggregator of online scientific information, Ovid works with more than 150 international and society publishers. In making the announcement, Andrew L. Popper, vice president of publishing and eproducts at Ovid, noted, "The inclusion of these titles from one of the leading global publishers in the chemical sciences strengthens Ovid's offerings in biological chemistry, drug discovery, toxicology, food science, and energy and environmental science." All 46 books are the latest editions and were published between 2006 and 2008. They will be available as annual subscriptions or as one-time purchases for perpetual access on Books@Ovid. All books are scheduled to be available on OvidSP by the end of October. With the addition of books from the Royal Society of Chemistry, Books@Ovid now offers access to more than 2,500 books. In addition to the Royal Society of Chemistry, Ovid's portfolio of ebooks 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. Source: Ovid
Barnes & Noble Introduces Ebook Reader; Collaborates on Standards
Barnes & Noble, Inc. (www.barnesandnobleinc.com) announced the launch of nook (www.nook.com), its wireless ebook reader. The new device is an Android-based wireless touchscreen ebook reader with an E Ink display and a secondary color touchscreen for navigation. Features include AT&T 3G wireless, Wi-Fi, 2-week digital-book lending, free browsing in Barnes & Noble stores, e-reader software for other mobile devices that are synced with the nook, memory for up to 1,500 ebooks, removable 16GB MicroSD card, and support for the open EPUB ebook format.The company says that nook features many industry firsts as it is the first Android-based ebook reader and the first reader to offer a color touchscreen for navigation along with an E Ink display. For fast connectivity, nook is the first ebook reader to provide, at no additional costs to customers, both 3G wireless access on AT&T's mobile broadband network and access to Wi-Fi for Barnes & Noble in-store browsing and enjoyment. And to help friends share their reading, nook is the first ebook reader to offer digital lending for a wide selection of ebooks. nook will begin shipping at the end of November with a price of $259. Barnes & Noble is taking pre-orders now in stores and at www.nook.com. In related news, Barnes & Noble and Adobe Systems, Inc. (www.adobe.com) announced plans to collaborate to standardize the open EPUB and PDF ebook formats as well as develop a content protection standard based on their technologies. Barnes & Noble is adopting the Adobe Content Server to copy protect ebooks, and Adobe is integrating Barnes & Noble's e-reader social content protection technology into Adobe Content Server and Adobe Reader Mobile SDK (software development kit). Source: Barnes & Noble
Upgrade Released for All My Books
Bolide Software (www.bolidesoft.com) announced a new upgrade for All My Books, its popular book organizer. The new version 1.8 offers further functionality expansion for the visual display of book collections and advanced features for ebooks and audiobooks collecting.Version 1.8 includes the following features: - Added: Loan history browser, access from Tools menu
- Added: Ability to sort books by price
- Added: Ability to extract an image from MP3 tags (cover image for audiobooks)
- Fixed: Import book details from Amazon sites
- Fixed: Cover image download from Barnes & Noble
- Fixed: Quick filtering by personal mark in book shelf view mode
All My Books will automatically load book-related information from online book databases and will provide support for ebooks. It offers a large number of standard fields in the book card (author, title, ISBN, genre, publishing house, binding, number of pages, number of copies, location, rating, and others) and supports user-defined fields (an unlimited number of additional text and Boolean fields). All My Books version 1.8 runs on Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista/7 and costs $34.95; a free 30-day trial is available. The company also offers All My Movies, All My Software, and Image Comparer (analyzes digital images to locate duplicates and similar images). Source: Bolide Software
Send correspondence concerning the Weekly News Digest to NewsBreaks Editor
Brandi Scardilli
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