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Weekly News Digest
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July 6, 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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BibApp 1.0 Released—Campus Research Gateway and Expert Finder
The BibApp development team announced the 1.0 release of BibApp, a campus research gateway and expert finder. It matches researchers on a campus or research center with their publication data and mines that data to see collaborations, create visualizations of areas of research, and find experts in research areas. With BibApp, it is easy to see what publications can be placed on the web for greater access and impact. BibApp can push those publications directly into an institutional repository. BibApp allows researchers and research groups to promote research, find collaborators on campus, and make research more accessible. It also allows libraries to better understand research happening in local departments, facilitate conversations about author rights with researchers, and ease the population of the institutional repository. Finally, BibApp allows campus administrators to achieve a clearer picture of collaboration and scholarly publishing trends on campus. BibApp is the result of a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois provided generous funding for the development of the 1.0 release of BibApp. BibApp is a Ruby on Rails application, coupled with the Solr/Lucene search engine, and either MySQL or PostgreSQL as its datastore. It uses open standards and protocols such as OpenURL and SWORD and automatically pulls in data from third-party sources such as Google Books and the Sherpa/Romeo publisher policy database. BibApp imports publication data in RIS, MEDLINE, and Refworks XML bibliography formats and exports data in several citation formats (APA, Chicago, IEEE, MLA, etc.) via CiteProc. BibApp also provides a web services API for delivering data as XML, YML, JSON, and RDF. BibApp is released under a University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License. Live installations of BibApp can be found at the following sites: Next steps for the project include a 1.1 release that will include internationalization and a richer authentication/authorization system. The team is also in the process of expanding the development community around BibApp. For software downloads, contact information, and more information about BibApp, visit http://www.bibapp.org/, or follow on Twitter at http://twitter.com/bibapp. Source: BibApp
Swets Enhances the Evaluation Scope in SwetsWise Selection Support
Swets announced that it has added functionality to enable libraries to assess the value of package deals in SwetsWise Selection Support, its evaluation and analysis tool. Customers can now evaluate titles at deal or package level as well as on individual title level. This new feature enables the customer to group titles together and gather reports on usage, cost, and the price-per-use of an entire package, simply and effectively. SwetsWise Selection Support combines usage statistics and subscription information into a single, easy-to-use environment. It provides a simple, efficient means for a customer to balance the key factors of cost, usage and relevance of a title or package deal against another in a clear and uniformed manner. With the wealth of information delivered directly to the customer through standard, scheduled, and customized reports, SwetsWise Selection Support allows customers to easily compare journals, packages, and databases from different publishers to find the inherent value of each publication and to make more informed collection decisions. Source: Swets
SAGE Research Methods Online Library Board Announced
Academic publisher SAGE has announced that 17 librarians have been selected as advisors in the development of SAGE Research Methods Online (SRMO), a new online research tool slated for launch in 2011. Representing institutions in Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Asia, the group will provide feedback throughout the development of SRMO from concept to design to beta testing. SRMO will contain more than 100,000 pages of SAGE's book and reference material on research methods across the social and behavioral sciences, enhanced with editorially selected material from top SAGE journals. It will provide advanced search and discovery tools to support researchers as they explore relevant content, including a visual ‘methods map' exploring connections between more than 2,000 methods, theories, and terms; and a ‘methods lists' function, which will enable users to store and share selected content. In total, more than 500 books will be available on SRMO, including the complete Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences (QASS) Little Green Books series. Approximately 9,000 pages of new content will be added each year. The group is to advise on the product concept, business model, and pricing, as well as providing feedback on the beta version of feature sets, content display, functionality, and usability of SRMO. Source: Sage
Life Sciences Publisher CABI Announces Enhancements to CAB Direct
Life sciences publisher CABI has announced enhancements to its flagship delivery platform, CAB Direct. These include search functionalities, improved facilities for record-marking and manipulation, one-click export compatibility for citations, an XML gateway for federated search connections, and compliance with Shibboleth 2.0.Working with technology partner Semantico, a provider of services for online publishing, CABI has issued this latest release to CAB Direct following its complete relaunch in June 2009. Containing more than 8.8 million bibliographic records and more than 85,000 full-text articles, CAB Direct aims to be the most thorough and extensive source of reference in the applied life sciences. Many of the enhancements have been developed in response to customer feedback. - Records now remain permanently marked throughout a user's entire search session, remaining visible as a user moves from one search and set of search results to a new search and set of search results
- Users can select up to 1,000 records from their search results for further manipulation, to print, export, or email, and can save up to 500 records permanently
- Titles can be located and linked to on Amazon for purchase by the user
- Users can now export citations or full abstracts from CAB Direct thanks to one-click direct export compatibility with the web-based citation management and collaboration tools, RefWorks and EndNote Web
- An XML gateway for federated search connections, CABDirect MXG, will support simple and complex Boolean queries for any search fields in CAB Direct, including author, title, subject, abstract, keyword, and publication year. This enables CAB Direct to be searched alongside other databases, sources, and platforms.
This release also includes an upgrade to the very latest version of SOLR (1.4.1)-the search engine that enables CAB Direct to return search results across 8.8 million records in a tenth of a second. CABI is a not-for-profit science-based development and information organization that just celebrated its 100th anniversary. CABI's mission is to improve people's lives worldwide by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment. Source: CABI
ProQuest’s Open Web Article Linking is Live
A new ProQuest initiative researches article-level links to popular periodicals published on the open web, simplifying existing access to full-text articles at no charge to library patrons. The company has just launched the feature by uncovering links to current and back files of TIME magazine with links to content from other magazines coming later this year. These links from ProQuest's abstracts and indexes will go directly to the publisher's articles on their own open websites while the A&I will be searched on the ProQuest platform along with other ProQuest content. The new ProQuest feature will capture fresh and archived content, with TIME articles available from as early as 1986. Open Web Article Linking search results will be integrated along with other ProQuest results, including a full record with a "link to full-text" icon. The link will take the user to subscribed content, if available on ProQuest or on e-journal, and to the article on the open web, if not. A new window will open to the specific article, providing the publisher's own full-text display while still keeping the original search results separately available. Further, the full bibliographic record will be available and downloadable into RefWorks and other citation tools. Leveraging its editorial expertise and authoritative indexing, ProQuest has built its own links and technology to align with and support publishers' open web strategies. Publishers will benefit from increased traffic to their websites and exposure to their content. Source: ProQuest
Plustek Announces EZ BookScan Center
Plustek Technology, Inc., a manufacturer of imaging devices (including portable scanners, sheet fed/flat bed scanners, wide format scanners) and network video recorders for IP cameras, announced the EZ BookScan Center, a standalone scanning system designed for public location uses that scan large books and documents for preservation, digitization of content, and sharing. In addition, the EZ BookScan Center facilitates a green environment by reducing paper, toner, and ink usage normally associated with copying books on a multifunction device or copier. The EZ BookScan Center is a USB 2.0 scanning device that can scan a large format A3-size page in just 2.5 seconds. Easy to use, the EZ BookScan Center's touch-screen display guide prompts the user through the scanning process enabling them to scan and save books, bound materials, and documents in a variety of formats. The fast scan speed and intuitive user interface enables users to efficiently scan their items in the shortest time possible. The EZ BookScan Center scans thick books without unbinding or dismantling them, making it a perfect solution for digitizing and preserving precious and valuable books. The EZ BookScan Center is priced at $4,999 and is offered as a solution for libraries, schools, publishing companies, hospitals, law firms, and financial institutions. EZ BookScan Center features include the following: - SEE Technology (Shadow Elimination Element) for scanning from the spine to the edge of the book without distortion
- Self-guided touch screen operation
- Large format scanning (A3 size, up to 12" x 17")
- Ultra high speed scanning-2.5 seconds at 300dpi A3 color scanning (up to 600dpi)
- Highly effective image processing
- Multiple output options including: email, network shared folders, portable USB drives, and printers
Source: Plustek Technology, Inc.
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Brandi Scardilli
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