News & Events > NewsBreaks Back Index Forward

Weekly News Digest

June 21, 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.

Coveo Launches Version 2.0 of its Customer Information Access Solutions (CIAS)

Coveo, a provider of enterprise search and customer information access solutions, announced Version 2.0 of its Customer Information Access Solutions (CIAS), which include CIAS for Customer 360, CIAS for Contact Centers, and CIAS for Customer Self Service. Coveo's Customer Information Access Solutions were launched in October 2009 and quickly gained marketplace momentum due to the solutions' trademark, unified access into all product, service, and customer information from intuitive and role-specific dashboards, based on Coveo's Unified Indexing Layer. New to CIAS Version 2.0 are several intelligence-revealing, role-centric dashboards with user-profile based interactions.

CIAS for Customer 360: Analytics Dashboards, include the following:

• At-a-glance account information with a single, multi-faceted view into account status and health, compiled from information in multiple, distributed systems.
• Graphical summaries of aggregate account metrics, such as current opportunities correlated to priority support cases, that allow managers to easily identify accounts and important issues that require attention.
• Operational overviews that allow support managers to quickly analyze key metrics and review priorities, to ensure customer satisfaction and operational efficiencies.

The Coveo Usage Analytics module compiles and presents all user interactions within the CIAS solution; explores top queries, documents, interfaces, users, queries without results, and various user behaviors; and helps administrators easily identify trending support issues, knowledge and content gaps, and gather insights to improve usability and adoption, via an intuitive user interface.

Coveo CIAS for Contact Centers provides a configurable agent dashboard that displays relevant, actionable items, including new cases in the support queue, actions required, and new knowledgebase content. It also provides integrated information access, from across the knowledge ecosystem, including CRM systems, knowledge bases, customer communities, chat, support mailbox, product FAQs, bug databases, and more.

Coveo CIAS for Customer Self-Service increases web-based self-service via secure support sites, customer portals, or communities, including consolidated access to information from multiple repositories in a seamless web interface and contextually relevant, guided navigation.

Source: Coveo

IEEE Xplore Mobile Comes Out of Beta With New Features

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has announced the launch of IEEE Xplore Mobile. The new mobile version of IEEE Xplore incorporates enhancements based on user feedback collected from a beta test that began last June. IEEE Xplore Mobile gives users the ability to conveniently perform searches of more than 2 million technical documents with any mobile device connected to the internet.

The following IEEE Xplore Mobile features represent upgrades from the initial beta version. Users can now conduct a basic search from the IEEE Xplore Mobile homepage and then refine it by searching within the results or by using subject filters. A predictive type-ahead feature, which suggests searches as you type, is available for mobile devices that are JavaScript-enabled. All results you would find on the classic IEEE Xplore for abstracts and citations are displayed 10 at a time by relevancy. Users can then decide to read or email the abstracts to a remote computer.

Users with the proper subscription can view the full text of an article by emailing the link to any email address and then viewing the article directly from the main IEEE Xplore website when they are on their personal computers. Nonsubscribers can purchase the articles or subscribe to the IEEE Xplore digital library.

Some users at subscribing institutions will be able to access full-text PDFs using a Wi-Fi-enabled mobile device. Sign in to the Wi-Fi at any institution with an active IP-authenticated subscription and receive full-text access, based on the subscription terms.

Source: IEEE

IMLS Launches National Campaign to Promote Community Engagement

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has announced a national campaign aimed at engaging museums, libraries, and civic leaders in meeting the 21st century learning needs of their communities. The national campaign, Making the Learning Connection, is intended to help communities assess their needs and contribute to a shared vision for 21st century learning. It includes an eight-city workshop tour, a national contest, new online tools and resources, and a series of interactive webinars.

The eight-city tour kicks off on June 21 at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The tour will provide an opportunity for museum, library, and other community leaders to discuss the 21st century learning landscape of their city and explore strategies for furthering 21st century learning goals.

The Making the Learning Connection campaign is part of IMLS' continuing initiative to engage libraries and museums, community stakeholders and policymakers to meet the educational, economic, civic, and cultural needs of communities. This campaign builds upon the release of Museums, Libraries, and 21st Century Skills, which provides an online self-assessment for libraries and museums to encourage a strategic approach to 21st century learning and a report for library and museum practitioners and policymakers.

Workshop participants will leave each session with a better understanding of the role museums and libraries play in the learning landscape. Each workshop will end with a defined set of action steps to ensure museums, libraries, and community stakeholders continue to collaborate in order to meet the 21st century learning needs of their community. In the coming months, IMLS will announce the other workshop tour stops, dates for webinars, and contest details.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute's mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development.

Source: The Institute of Museum and Library Services

Socialtext Connect Creates Social Layer in the Enterprise

At the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Socialtext announced the beta release of Socialtext Connect, a new offering built on open standards that frees vital information currently locked in enterprise applications. Socialtext Connect enables companies to surface critical events from enterprise applications and inject streams into Socialtext's social software platform, where employees across an organization collaborate and take action.

Socialtext Connect works with traditional on-premise as well as cloud-based enterprise applications. It also integrates with and leverages web-based consumer applications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. Socialtext Connect adheres to established and emerging web standards, including Twitter Annotations and Google OpenSocial. Socialtext also plans to support the activitystrea.ms standard.

With Socialtext Connect, companies will get more business value from traditional enterprise applications like CRM, ERP and document management systems. Companies can now let their people subscribe to the events that matter most to them from enterprise systems. They can see those events in the Socialtext application streams they monitor and, where authorized, send updates to the enterprise systems from Socialtext.

There are three core components of Socialtext Connect:

1.      Connectors. A Connector serves as a bridge between an on-premise or cloud-based enterprise application, and Socialtext. Connectors use Socialtext's ReST API, and can be built to connect any application to Socialtext. Connectors can be built by IT developers, system integrators, and third-party developers. Socialtext has pre-built Connectors to Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Connections. A Connector can be hosted in the cloud, as a plug-in to Socialtext's hosted service or appliance, or on the enterprise application itself.

2.      Signals Annotations. A Signals Annotation contains metadata from an enterprise system, including rich media, and accompanies a Socialtext Signals microblogging message. Annotations add context and relevance, enriching the value of application streams. Signals Annotations are built to the emerging Twitter Annotations standard, and will evolve with that standard.

3.      App Bots. An App Bot is a bi-directional software agent that listens for specialized events or information from an enterprise system, a web application, or Socialtext, and writes to these applications.

Source: Socialtext

New OCLC WorldCat Record Use Policy Approved

A new WorldCat record use policy, developed by a Record Use Policy Council and informed by community input, has been approved by the OCLC board of trustees. WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities for the OCLC Cooperative will be effective Aug. 1, 2010.

The new policy outlines the rights and responsibilities associated with stewardship of the WorldCat bibliographic and holdings database by and for the OCLC cooperative, including the use and exchange of OCLC member-contributed data comprising WorldCat.

The policy was drafted by the Record Use Policy Council, a group of 12 library leaders charged by the OCLC board of trustees to craft a replacement for the Guidelines for Use and Transfer of OCLC Derived Records, which was developed in 1987.

In April 2010, the Record Use Policy Council submitted to the library community and to the OCLC board a draft policy that began a 2-month period of community review and discussion. More than 275 comments were gathered via email, phone, meetings, and letters; in an online forum; and by monitoring blogs, listservs, and Twitter. At the end of May, community input was incorporated, and a policy statement was submitted to the OCLC board, which approved the revised document during its June meeting.

"We decided to emphasize a code of good practice for members of the cooperative, based on shared values, trust and reciprocity," said Jennifer Younger, co-chair of the Record Use Policy Council; president-elect, OCLC Global Council; and chair, board of directors, Catholic Research Resources Alliance. "The focus of the new policy is on member rights and responsibilities-instead of data ownership issues, detailed provisions, or restrictions-with the general aim of fostering innovation in our ever-changing information landscape."

The policy is based on the premise that OCLC members value WorldCat as a comprehensive, timely, and accurate reflection of the consolidated holdings of those members. The policy's intent is to encourage the widespread use of WorldCat bibliographic data while also supporting the ongoing and long-term sustainability and utility of WorldCat and of WorldCat-based services such as resource sharing, cataloging, and discovery.

The new policy will become effective Aug. 1, 2010, replacing the Guidelines for Use and Transfer of OCLC Derived Records. Because the data-sharing environment is constantly and rapidly evolving, this new policy will be regularly reviewed to ensure its continued timeliness.

To view the new policy, including an FAQs and a comparison between the draft submitted for community review and the final document, visit www.oclc.org/worldcat/recorduse.

Source: OCLC

SAGE Insight Shines Spotlight on Research

Academic and professional publisher SAGE has announced the launch of a new online resource, SAGE Insight, which links to highly topical articles from across the 560 scholarly journals hosted online on SAGE's online platform, SAGE Journals Online. Drawn from both new and archived content, the articles on SAGE Insight are designed to provide a fresh perspective on major issues facing the public and policymakers.

"SAGE Insight provides content that will inform both public discussion and policymaking, covering everything from crime to medical practices, from psychology to education," said Clive Parry, global marketing director, SAGE.

The articles selected will demonstrate the role of academic research in the understanding of society and human behavior and show how academic research is relevant to both public discussion and policymaking. Each post will link to a free research article on SAGE Journals Online to enable readers to access the research directly. The posts will also appear on Twitter (www.twitter.com/SAGE_insight).

"SAGE Insight provides our journal authors with a new channel to reach out to media, bloggers, policymakers, and the general reader," added Parry. "Initially, content for the site will be selected by our team internally, but our aim is that our authors will direct us to relevant articles that will inform and engage public debate."

Authors contributing to SAGE Journals Online are encouraged to suggest their articles for inclusion on the blog by filling out a "suggest your article" form.

Source: SAGE