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Weekly News Digest
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April 12, 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.
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Wall Street Journal Professional Edition Launches for Consumers
The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition for consumers has launched, offering readers customized news, alerts, and business search that until now was only available to enterprises. The new service (http://wsj.com/pro) combines the news coverage and analysis of The Wall Street Journal with the global business and news sources from Dow Jones Factiva and the worldwide network of Dow Jones Newswires. With a powerful search capability and a team of dedicated editors, The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition helps users analyze and quickly understand the issues, industries, companies, people, and ideas beneath the headlines. Anchored by the news and analysis from WSJ.com, it provides a view into key industries with immediate access to news from Dow Jones' 2,000 journalists, as well as the ability to search more than 17,000 global business and news sources-thousands of which are not available on the free web. This premium service is available to consumers for $49 per month. Existing WSJ.com subscribers can upgrade to The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition for a discounted rate. Multiple features and tools of The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition allow users to personalize the service to suit their individual needs. Wall Street Journal editors will monitor and select top news and trends across key industries-including pharmaceuticals, healthcare, energy, media and marketing, finance and technology-as well as a range of additional topics and individual companies. Users can customize news alerts and company profiles for industries and topics that are most relevant to them. Source: Dow Jones & Co. (www.dowjones.com)
SAS Social Media Analytics Tool Extracts Marketing Data from Social Networks
SAS (www.sas.com), a provider of business analytics software and services, delivers business intelligence to more than 45,000 client sites. Its new enterprise solution product, SAS Social Media Analytics, will tap into online conversation data to help medium and large companies understand, predict, and act on social media data. The new service can archive and analyze more than 2 years of social media conversations from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, discussion forums, blogs, and more. The on-demand software shows marketers how people feel about their products or brands, who is influencing them, and how social media conversations affect business results. The service should assist in brand strategies, media placement, public relations, and customer care activities. The company says that SAS Social Media Analytics offers seven distinct advantages: - Enterprise-level capabilities -- It can collect and analyze huge quantities of data, both structured and unstructured, from internal and external sources. Integrating with CRM and marketing systems, the solution aligns social media monitoring with overall business strategy and tactics.
- A long-term view - A continuous archive of 2+ years of online data enables the system to understand trends and update historical analyses based on new information.
- Predictive analytics - The software can quantify influence, forecast future volume of social media conversations, and then predict their impact on the business.
- Extensible language processing - SAS lets marketers and analysts adjust the rules that assign sentiment to topics and apply subject-matter expertise to improve statistical approaches and better classify text.
- Multi-language support - SAS Social Media Analytics can understand and classify conversations in 13 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
- Ability to take action - The service delivers real-time insights through web-based dashboards, reports, and workflow-enabled alerts.
- Industry expertise - SAS Social Media Analytics provides industry-specific language processing to ensure higher accuracy and relevance.
Source: SAS
John Wiley & Sons’ eReaderResource.com Compares eReaders Online
The new eReaderResource service (http://ereaderresource.com/) from John Wiley & Sons, Inc. helps consumers identify which eReader is best for them. It has gathered information about the various eReaders, including what can be done with each. The interactive service compares the following eReaders: Amazon Kindle 2, Amazon Kindle DX, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple iPad, Cybook Gen 3, Cybook Opus, IREX DR 1000s, IREX Dr 800, IREX Iliad 2 Standard, Skiff Reader, Sony Daily Edition, Sony Pocket, and Sony Touch. Source: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (www.wiley.com)
The British Library’s Electronic Table of Contents File Now Part of EBSCO Discovery Service
A new partnership will add the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents File (ETOC) to EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS). ETOC was created to identify journal articles and conference papers from the British Library's Document Supply collections. ETOC combines article-level access to the top 20,000 research journals requested from the British Library along with papers from 16,000 annual conference proceedings-totaling nearly 40 million records. The content goes back to 1993 and ETOC is updated daily. The addition of ETOC to EBSCO Discovery Service means EDS customers have an added resource to augment the deep, broad indexing and the complexity of subjects already available from the growing discovery service from EBSCO. EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized index of an institution's information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box-searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage. Source: EBSCO Publishing (www.ebscohost.com)
Credo Reference Launches Topic Pages as ‘Librarian’s Answer to Wikipedia’
The data is undeniable-a significant majority of today's researchers turn to Wikipedia at some point in the research process, very often at the beginning, or "presearch" phase of research. Now, Credo Reference (www.credoreference.com) has announced an easy-to-use alternative for researchers-Credo Topic Pages-that help answer the question, "Where do I start?" Designed to provide contextualized, orderly access to authoritative content, each of the more than 10,000 Credo Topic Pages is an all-in-one starting point that assembles topical material from many resources from within and outside the library. Librarians can choose which resources will be displayed on their customized version of Credo Topic Pages, helping their users gain: - Subject orientation
- Context and vocabulary
- Pathways to further exploration
Credo Topic Pages create value for libraries. Presenting and utilizing the library's resources at the point of need, Topic Pages function as an "anytime" reference interview. The Topic Pages are designed to drive additional traffic to the library from the open web, increase the usage and value of library resource investments, and bring together unconnected databases into one easy-to-use research gateway. Libraries who have participated in the beta testing of Credo Topic Pages are giving it rave reviews. "Topic Pages are a great starting point. They give our students a wealth of useful and reliable information," commented beta tester Doug Frazier, university librarian, Armstrong Atlantic State University. "The Credo Topic Pages are a great tool to help connect the students and the library's resources." Source: Credo Reference
New Google Docs Upgrades Cloud Services, Improves Collaboration
Google has launched a new version of its office suite, Google Docs (http://docs.google.com). The new infrastructure of Google Docs offers greater flexibility, improved performance, and a better platform for quick feature development. In particular it emphasizes fast and flexible collaboration features, such as viewing character-by-character changes among collaborators. A sidebar chat feature lets collaborators discuss documents directly. New document formatting features have improved import/export fidelity. There is a revamped comment system, real margins and tab stops, and improved image layout within documents. The upgrade also includes new spreadsheet editors and a new stand-alone drawings editor. The faster spreadsheet editor includes a formula bar for cell editing, auto-complete, drag and drop columns, and simpler navigation between sheets. The new collaborative drawing editor allows users to collaborate on drawings and makes them accessible directly from the docs list. Stand-alone drawings can include flow charts, designs, diagrams, and other fun or business graphics. Users can copy the drawings into documents, spreadsheets, or presentations using the web clipboard or share and publish them as Google Docs. Source: Google (http://googledocs.blogspot.com/)
Send correspondence concerning the Weekly News Digest to NewsBreaks Editor
Brandi Scardilli
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