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Weekly News Digest

January 28, 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.

Elsevier Launches Digital Learning Platform for Health Science Education: Pageburst

Elsevier (www.elsevier.com) announced the launch of Pageburst (www.pageburst.com), an interactive digital learning platform for Elsevier health science education content. The company says Pageburst surpasses existing ebook platforms because it is designed for the way students learn, with features such as integrated multimedia, text-to-speech, social networking tools, and an integrated instructor grade book. The Pageburst platform is designed specifically for nursing and health professions students in North America who require anytime/anywhere access to course material and utilize texts as reference guides throughout their careers.

Pageburst is built upon easy-to-use and recognizable software tools that allow painless implementation and support for health science educators, students, and practitioners seeking superior teaching, learning, and clinical outcomes. The platform enables users to master course content quickly and easily by working with their entire collection of Elsevier health science titles in text, video, and audio formats and by collaborating online with faculty and classmates within the context of the content.

Elsevier's community of health education experts designed Pageburst to enhance the way health profession students think, learn, and study. For example, students will be able to create personalized study guides and instantly link content within the text to expert definitions and descriptions in dictionaries and other Elsevier reference works. They will also be able to view a video or animation within the context of applicable textbook content to help clarify complex concepts. Additionally, students can increase retention and easily learn terms that look alike, sound alike, or are hard to pronounce by clicking a button to hear the correct pronunciation and meaning.

Pageburst is web-based, so it can be accessed anytime on any device with a supported web browser. Students can also download their content to their desktop or laptop computers to study offline. More than 550 of Elsevier's most-used book titles are available on the platform, including Potter's Fundamentals of Nursing, Chabner's The Language of Medicine, and Lewis' Medical-Surgical Nursing.

Source: Elsevier

EOS International Offers Electronic Resource Management Module

It provides a single solution to control how electronic resources are found by patrons and how the information is presented through the web OPAC. The following features are available:

• Filtered list control
• View all ERM records or display records according to status
• Force or passively allow the display of license agreements as patrons use a resource
• Retrieve records by name, title, statement, or vendor
• Edit, delete, or view the bibliographic record from the List Screen
• Edit the web subscription, edit the order, report problems with a subscription, email stakeholders, or renew a resource
• Enable or disable authorization to add, delete, and edit ERM records on a by-user basis
• Stores all record-specific information for resources in the ERM record itself, including: license agreement, terms of use, and security concerns associated with a resource

Professional collaboration between the knowledge manager and stakeholders is an additional feature of EOS ERM that helps to streamline the approval phase of e-resources. ERM allows specific phases to be completed before a new phase can begin, and staff members are able to solicit responses directly from other stakeholder groups. Stakeholders can manage and submit responses through EOS.Web OPAC, and the library staff receives stakeholder responses by email.

Source: EOS International

SIIA, Newstex Announce iPhone App for Digital Content Industry

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA; www.siia.net), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries, has launched its first mobile application in partnership with Newstex, LLC (www.newstex.com) for accessing social media content from SIIA and across the digital content industry. The application-dubbed "Content Industry Content"-is now available for iPhones and iPod touches from the Apple iTunes Store.

Ed Keating, vice president of the SIIA content division, says, "The new SIIA app, powered by Newstex, our Authoritative Content partner, drives multiple forms of content from multiple sources into one easy-to-use mobile resource. It's not just an RSS reader or a Twitter app or a video viewer. It's all those things and more."

The SIIA mobile application offers a free, public trial version for download. Members of the SIIA content division may request complimentary access to a limited number of licenses for a premium content package that contains a much deeper range of content. SIIA and Newstex will be making the application available on Android-based phones at a later date.

Source: SIIA

Apple Launches iPad Tablet

Apple, Inc. introduced iPad (www.apple.com/ipad), a tablet device for browsing the web, reading and sending email, enjoying photos, watching videos, playing games, reading ebooks, etc. Its high-resolution multitouch display lets you interact with content-including 12 innovative new apps designed especially for iPad and almost all of the 140,000 apps available on the App Store. At just 0.5" thick and 1.5 lbs., iPad is thinner and lighter than any laptop or notebook. Wi-Fi models of iPad will be available in March starting at $499; 3G models will ship in April.

The iPad has a high-resolution, 9.7" LED-backlit, IPS display that the company says is remarkably crisp and vivid. Because it uses a display technology called IPS (in-plane switching), it has a wide, 178° viewing angle. So you can hold it almost any way you want and still get a brilliant picture with excellent color and contrast. The lithium polymer battery technology will provide use for up to 10 hours on a single charge. iPad is available with a choice of 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash storage.

With built-in 802.11n, iPad can take advantage of the fastest Wi-Fi networks. iPad also comes with Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR (enhanced data rate), which lets you connect to devices such as wireless headphones or the Apple wireless keyboard. iPad will also be available in a 3G model, with data speeds up to 7.2Mbps. The iPad with Wi-Fi plus 3G and 64GB will cost $829. The 3G data plan will be sold separately.

Source: Apple, Inc.

Open Book Alliance Urges a Public Guardian for Digital Book Database—Not Google

The letter outlines the way to fully maximize the potential of the mass digitization of books:

• Open Process: Only an open and deliberative conversation in Congress will appropriately weigh the concerns of all stakeholders and create bright-line laws that apply equally to all consumers, companies and stakeholders.
• Public Guardian: To ensure the widest participation by content holders and greatest public benefit, the digital book database should be entrusted to a neutral, civic, not-for-profit organization. Respected librarians, like Harvard's Robert Darnton, have suggested a public guardian that is a not for profit or public sector library, such as the Library of Congress. In a similar vein, the governments of France and the Netherlands have entrusted public institutions with the administration of digital libraries.
• Public Interest: Any successful digitization effort must not be exclusive to a single for-profit company as a result of legal arrangements delivering unfair monopoly. It also must uphold the rights of authors and copyright.

Source: Open Book Alliance

TV Archive Project to Supply Europeana

EUscreen is a 3-year project funded by the eContentplus programme of the European Commission. During that time more than 30,000 items that capture Europe's television heritage (videos, photographs, and articles) will be channeled into Europeana. EUscreen will also develop its own multilingual portal that will specialize in information about TV archives and television research.

The portal will be launched in 2011 and will be directly connected to Europeana. The EUscreen consortium is coordinated by Utrecht University and consists of 27 partners (audiovisual archives, research institutions, technology providers and Europeana) from 19 European countries.

Europeana is Europe's digital library, museum, and archive. Launched in prototype in November 2008, it now brings together 5 million digitized items from Europe's cultural and scientific heritage organizations. Europeana's fully operational service will launch later in 2010, giving access to 10 million items. This new content is coming in from a group of projects that are working with heritage organizations across Europe. EUscreen works with television archives. Archives Portal Europe brings in collections from national archives, and the European Film Gateway brings films, scripts, and stills from cinematheques and film archives to Europeana. The full list of projects is available at http://group.europeana.eu/web/guest.

Source: EUscreen