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Weekly News Digest

January 4, 2010 — 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.

RIPM Enhances Access to Historical Music Periodicals

A new interface for the RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1800-1950) is now available directly from RIPM Publications (www.ripm.org). Containing some 550,000 annotated records, the index offers access to the content of more than 130 music journals, with new journals added every 6 months. The new interface was designed by RIPM specifically for easy and intuitive access to the recently released RIPM Online Archive of Music Periodicals (Full-Text). The RIPM Index and Online Archive were designed to function as a single entity, with many features not available elsewhere. The interface operates in two browser windows, making it possible to view search results and journals pages simultaneously.

RIPM Online Archive of Music Periodicals (Full-Text) is a full-text version of journals indexed in the RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals. The archive's first installment contains 51 rarely available music periodicals selected by specialists. The archive is a unique collection of primary source material for the study of music and musical life and is the only extensive collection available online of music periodicals dating from the Early Romantic to the Modern periods, from Beethoven to Britten and from Haydn to Hindemith.

Created with the cooperation of libraries worldwide, the RIPM Online Archive offers an almost daily chronicle of musical activities, with immense possibilities for original research. It provides high-quality grayscale images using the latest technology to create digitized versions of these difficult-to-obtain music periodicals. The RIPM Online Archive allows researchers to explore its content while viewing images that convey the historical nature of the documents.

RIPM is a nonprofit organization functioning under the auspices of the International Musicological Society and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres. RIPM's principal function is the coordination, editing, and publication of the RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1800-1950) and the RIPM Online Archive of Music Periodicals.

Source: RIPM

Thomson Reuters Acquires Discovery Logic, Inc.

Thomson Reuters (www.thomsonreuters.com) announced that it has acquired Discovery Logic, Inc. (www.discoverylogic.com), a provider of customizable analytics and decision support solutions for scientific research. Effective immediately, the company is part of the Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The acquisition of Discovery Logic is designed to enhance current research analytics offerings and provide increased decision support and workflow solutions to academic, government, nonprofit, and commercial professionals. Key assets and benefits which Discovery Logic will bring to Healthcare & Science's Scientific & Scholarly Research group include the following:

• ScienceWire, a highly customizable and proprietary software and database platform

• Complementary capabilities in analytics, data management- and value-added services

• Experienced management team with a highly skilled, scientific-oriented staff

• A successful track record of deploying decision support systems

"There is an increasing global need for analytics on grants, experts and research outcomes," said Keith MacGregor, executive vice president of the Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters. "Combining superior content, tools and services from Thomson Reuters with the customizable data analytics from Discovery Logic will enable our business to deliver a one-of-a-kind solution for evaluation and outcomes measurement."

Source: Thomson Reuters

Nitro PDF Express v2.0 Launched

Nitro PDF Software (www.nitropdf.com) announced the release of version 2.0 of Nitro PDF Express, a solution for comprehensive PDF creation and conversion. New features include PDF-to-Word conversion, enhanced PDF creation technology for faster speeds, and a redesigned user interface.

The announcement follows the release of updated Enterprise and API versions of PrimoPDF, as well as a completely new website. In November 2009, Nitro's PDF Download, the popular PDF web-browser extension, reached the 15-million-download mark at Mozilla's Firefox Add-ons website.

Nitro Express provides the power of PDF creation from 200-plus file types and full control over document security; it also claims to be the only product in its class with the capability to quickly combine multiple files into one PDF or extract individual PDF pages.

With an array of new features, Nitro Express v2.0 includes all-new PDF-to-Word conversion; improved PDF creation technology that performs up to 50% faster; a completely revised user interface; and major improvements to the underlying PDF library for faster processing of all files. The company calls it the "Adobe Acrobat Alternative."

Nitro PDF Express is available for a free trial and immediate download at www.nitropdf.com/express. It sells for $49.

Nitro PDF Professional ($99) is a full-featured PDF creation and editing application that offers all the features of Nitro PDF Express plus interactive editing, commenting and review, and forms.

Source: Nitro PDF Software

Thomson Reuters Links Drug Discovery and Literature Citation Databases

Thomson Reuters (www.thomsonreuters.com) announced it has connected its drug discovery database, Prous Science Integrity, to Web of Knowledge, its research platform (http://isiwebofknowledge.com). Prous Science Integrity, the largest commercial database available on bioactive compounds, is designed to support the drug discovery and development activities for thousands of pharmacologists and medicinal chemists as well as other scientific researchers. Thomson acquired Prous Science (www.prous.com) in September 2007.

New developments to Prous Science Integrity advance the way users search and export information within the database and allow users to access full-text literature through a number of sources. The enhancements will enable the following:

• Support management of research findings with new literature tools, including new export formats (EndNote, Reference Manager, and RefWorks) and links to Web of Knowledge, as well as providing users with direct access to full-text scientific articles that are part of their company's internal holdings via OpenURL link resolver technologies.
• Accelerate scientific insights into the relationship of drug mechanisms, patents, and experimental pharmacology results via integrated content and visualizations.
• Enhance searching capabilities to identify relevant biomarker uses through new search fields-for example, finding biomarkers that can predict the efficacy of drugs with a particular mechanism of action.

Source: Thomson Reuters

Kaleido Search Adds Faceted Searching Built on dtSearch APIs

Built on the dtSearch Engine APIs, Contegra Systems' Kaleido Search now makes faceted search easily available to content-rich applications and ecommerce sites. Faceted search provides end users the ability to dynamically filter search results by attributes, letting users browse through results selecting criteria relevant to their search.

To date, faceted search has remained out of reach for many businesses because of design and programming costs. Contegra launched Kaleido Search to offer companies an out-of-the-box, attractive user interface with an easy way to deploy faceted search, including "plug and play" operation with existing data sources. Contegra chose to partner with dtSearch for this new product after many years of working with its APIs for clients.

The dtSearch Engine can index more than a terabyte of data in a single index-as well as create and instantly search an unlimited number of indexes. The software offers more than 25 search options, including Unicode support covering hundreds of international languages. Proprietary file format support highlights hits in popular file types. A built-in Spider supports searching of local and remote, public and secure, dynamic and static web data, with WYSIWYG hit-highlighted displays. The dtSearch Engine API supports .NET, Java, C++, SQL, etc., including native 64-bit Windows/Linux support.

For more than 2 decades, Contegra Systems (www.contegrasystems.com) has designed and developed search applications for Fortune 500 companies, leading universities, major online publishers, and many other clients. dtSearch (www.dtsearch.com) offers 18 years of experience in text search. The dtSearch product line includes enterprise and developer text search products, meeting some of the largest-capacity text retrieval needs in the world.

Source: Contegra Systems and dtSearch

EBSCO to Launch EBSCONET ERM Essentials

Following successful beta testing by 25 library customers in 2009, EBSCO (www.ebsco.com) is planning for the launch at ALA midwinter of EBSCONET ERM Essentials, which offers key features that librarians need to simplify management of their e-resources. Feedback from beta testers has been positive as they discovered a new way to manage their e-resources, eliminating the challenge of maintaining multiple email chains, paper files, spreadsheets, and other decentralized information spread across multiple departments and staff.

ERM Essentials is prepopulated for orders of ejournals and e-packages purchased through EBSCO with daily updates to ensure accuracy. According to Chris Spencer, library procurement and systems development manager, Bournemouth University, U.K., integration across EBSCO platforms, such as EBSCO A-to-Z, saves time because "you only have to enter the data into one place to populate other applications."

ERM Essentials offers unique integration with other EBSCO tools that librarians already know and use. Dana Taylor, department head, collection management at Louisiana State University, says that "all the functionality is there. I can click and go straight to A-to-Z and EBSCONET and then go back to another-all products are in one place."

ERM Essentials provides librarians with a user-friendly system, intuitive design, and a central location to manage all their e-resources. The often cumbersome job that most librarians face when trying to manage large groups of e-resources, such as ejournal collections, becomes easier with ERM Essentials, claimed to be the first full-featured electronic resource management tool that automatically populates and maintains more than 100 data fields for ejournals and e-packages purchased through EBSCO.

Source: EBSCO