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Weekly News Digest

March 1, 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.

ebrary Announces 2010 Ebook Starter Packs

ebrary announced the availability of 24 new Starter Packs, designed to make it easier for librarians to purchase important titles in high-use academic subject areas. This year ebrary has extended its selection to include topics such as Career Guides, Infectious Disease, Southern U.S. Studies, and Special Needs Education. The packages were developed based on feedback from the library community. A complete listing is available at www.ebrary.com/corp/librariesPerp.jsp#starter.

Available under a perpetual access model, ebrary Starter Packs include 15-40 essential ebooks that are not available in any ebrary subscription database. Librarians and other information professionals may purchase Starter Packs in their entirety at a discount or use them as selection tools to pick and choose individual ebooks from publishers such as McGraw-Hill, Oxford Press, Princeton University Press, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.

Starter Packs can be seamlessly integrated with any ebrary products and include all of ebrary's features and services including the following:

• No Reader required with QuickView
• Powerful research capabilities such as InfoTools, which networks every word with other online resources; highlighting and annotating; automatic citations; copying and printing; and personal bookshelves
• COUNTER-complaint usage statistics
• Free MARC records
• Text-to-speech and other accessibility features
• 24/7 training with a live person

Source: ebrary

DSpace 1.6 Is Now Available

The nonprofit DuraSpace organization (http://duraspace.org) announced the long-awaited release of DSpace 1.6, the turnkey open source application for managing and providing access to digital content used to create more than 800 repository instances worldwide. The release of DSpace 1.6 was led by Stuart Lewis, community release manager and IT Innovations analyst and developer at the University of Auckland Library. Lewis worked closely with DSpace developers, community members, and DuraSpace staff to make the best possible version of DSpace 1.6 publicly available.

Community-requested features in the new release include an enhanced statistics package that provides more information about how your repository is being used, an embargo facility so items can be kept dark for a period of time, and a batch metadata editing tool that can be used to change, add, find/replace metadata as well as facilitate mass moves, reorder values, or add new items in bulk. And there's more, such as authority control, which contains an integration with the Sherpa Romeo Service for publisher names, as well as the Library of Congress Name Service.

Other new features include the following:

• Delegated administration
• OpenSearch
• Command launcher
• OAI-PMH harvesting of items from remote repositories
• Configurable OAI-PMH dublin core output
• Move item functionality in XMLUI
• If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified header support in XMLUI
• Change to logging behavior to ensure better log retention and management
• Update to the latest handle server library
• Ability to perform batch imports and exports from zip files of items
• New test scripts to test database and email settings
• Ability to set legal jurisdiction in Creative Commons licensing

Download DSpace 1.6 at www.dspace.org/current-release/latest-release.

Lewis has published a blog post explaining what key changes and improvements in DSpace 1.6 will mean for you. Read the post at http://blog.stuartlewis.com/2010/02/10/dspace-1-6-what-will-be-in-it-for-me.

The February issue of the DSpace newsletter, NewSpace, features in-depth information about DSpace 1.6. Read the newsletter at www.dspace.org/newsletter-newspace/NewSpace-Volume-3-Issue-19.html.

Source: DuraSpace

Elsevier Launches New Online Book Series: Elsevier Insights

Elsevier (www.elsevier.com) announced the launch of Elsevier Insights, a new online book series covering topics in areas such as life and physical sciences, engineering, computer science, tourism, and finance. Elsevier Insights is designed to provide high-quality, cutting-edge, specialized content through fast-track online publication.

The first two volumes, Aging, Ageism and Abuse: Moving from Awareness to Action, edited by Gloria M. Gutman and Charmaine Spencer, and A History of Weed Science in North America by Robert L. Zimdahl are now available, and 19 more volumes are currently planned for 2010.

Elsevier Insights volumes are included in the ScienceDirect eBooks program and are also available for individual purchase via www.elsevierdirect.com and third-party platform partners. Online delivery offers the benefits of 24/7 availability, multiuser simultaneous access, fully linked references, increased discoverability, and the availability of usage and download statistics. In addition, all Elsevier Insights volumes are also available in print.

Source: Elsevier

IEEE-Wiley eBooks Collection Added to IEEE Xplore Digital Library

IEEE (www.ieee.org), the world's largest technical professional association, announced that the IEEE-Wiley eBooks collection is now available online as part of the IEEE Xplore digital library. IEEE and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. have partnered to offer IEEE customers online access to the more than 400 ebooks that comprise the IEEE-Wiley eBooks collection, which spans numerous content areas including bioengineering, power and energy, and communication technologies, among other growing areas of research. The new IEEE-Wiley eBooks Library is available as an add-on to existing IEEE Xplore subscriptions or as a stand-alone subscription.

The collection of titles includes practical handbooks, introductory and advanced texts, reference works, and professional books with an emphasis on leading areas of research. Features and benefits include the following:

• One-stop, 24/7 access to more than 400 titles, with approximately 40 new titles to be introduced each year
• Various subscription options, including an annual subscription or perpetual access option
• More than 7,800 individual chapters available as PDF files
• Advanced search capabilities by subject or keyword to quickly find and download relevant chapters within larger ebooks
• Ebook homepages include a content overview, bibliographic information, book abstracts, cover scan, and a table of contents with links to chapter PDFs
• Cutting-edge titles on emerging technologies authored by leaders in the field
• Backlists to 1974 with 70% of titles published since 2000

For more information or to sign up for a free trial of the IEEE-Wiley eBooks collection, visit www.ieee.org/go/ebooks.

The news follows a major upgrade to IEEE Xplore digital library. For details, see the NewsBreak at http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/IEEE-Upgrades-Its-emXplore-em-Digital-Library-61121.asp.

Source: IEEE

Clarabridge Announces Beta Launch of Self-Service Text Analytics Product

Clarabridge, Inc. (www.clarabridge.com), a provider of text analytics software, announced the beta launch of Clarabridge Self Service, a new product version designed to enable smaller organizations to upload and analyze their text-based emails and to survey open-end verbatims, transcripts, social media content, and any other textual data sources via a fully self-service online portal. This offering builds on the widely deployed technology of Clarabridge Enterprise, which focuses on customer experience management and other text analytics initiatives for large enterprises. For a limited time, beta users can analyze up to 10,000 text verbatims free of charge. General availability and pricing models will be announced later this year.

Clarabridge Self Service delivers similar functionality found in the Enterprise product and provides organizations with a quick and easy-to-use way to upload and analyze their text-based data. With the introduction of Self Service, any organization can use the same sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) technology on its customer feedback and other textual data. Clarabridge Self Service automatically organizes text into categories, determines multiple levels of positive and negative sentiment, identifies emerging trends, and includes online interactive exploration, reporting, exporting, and root-cause analysis features.

The Clarabridge Self Service offering enables the following capabilities:

• Automatic linguistic reading of text and ad-hoc searching and filtration
• Categorization of the text at detailed subdocument, sentence, and clause levels
• Identification of varying levels of positive and negative sentiments and what they relate to
• Analysis of root cause, emerging issues, and trends
• Drill down to the original text to understand any areas of interest

Source: Clarabridge, Inc.

Wordnik Launches Smartwords Initiative as Open Standard

Wordnik (www.wordnik.com), the online dictionary, is launching its Smartwords initiative (http://smartwords.wordnik.com) to develop a new platform that enables ebook publishers and software developers to add layers of information about words to their products and devices. The first version of Smartwords, an open-data standard, will be available in the summer.

Smartwords will be context aware and real time but also lightweight, easy to use, and versatile. Wordnik is developing this standard with help from its first Smartwords partners, including The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post, O'Reilly, Vook, Scribd, ibis reader, and the Internet Archive.

With Smartwords, you'll be able to access not just traditional "dictionary-style" information but also metadata, such as how frequently a word is used, where words are used, and who uses particular words. You'll also be able to publish information about words-if you create a word, you can put a flag in the ground and claim it for your own-and Smartwords will enable social features, such as sharing and tagging.

Source: Wordnik