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Weekly News Digest

August 2, 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.

SwetsWise 5.5 Goes Live

Swets, a subscription services company announced the successful launch and implementation of SwetsWise Release 5.5, the latest technical update to its pioneering portfolio of products and services. This latest update introduces a host of updates and additional functionalities into the platform that will help to simplify the selection and acquisition procedures for both journals and ebooks within SwetsWise and provide additional renewal support features to all customers.

The main features included in SwetsWise 5.5 are:

• Credit card payment functionality enabled for all fixed price customers
• VAT now reflected in total ebook prices
• Addition of a privacy policy to SwetsWise
• Additional package reports added to SwetsWise Selection Support
• Upgrades and additional publisher support for SwetsWise's eDeal Renewal Service
• Electronic renewal reminders enabled for all customers. Paper reminders are still available on request.

A complete list of all the features, functionalities, and technical updates included in SwetsWise Release 5.5 has been made available for customers inside the SwetsWise platform.

Source: Swets

Free Open-Source Tool to Publish Blog Content

After one week of intense collaboration, participants in the One Week | One Tool workshop, organized by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, announced the launch of Anthologize, a free, open source tool to publish weblog content in a variety of book formats.

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including-in this release-PDF, ePUB, and TEI, an open XML format for storage and exchange. Microsoft Word DocX output support will be included in future versions, as well as ODT for OpenOffice users.

Anthologize harvests and organizes that digitally created content and enables new types of collaborative and process oriented authored publications. Anthologize is flexible, making it attractive to many users. Educators can generate collections of student work; curators can publish new types of exhibition catalogs with behind-the-scenes perspectives; genealogists can publish family histories; and bloggers can generate selections of their best work for print or distribution via Kindle, Nook, or iPad.

Anthologize is a product of One Week | One Tool, a project of NHNM at George Mason University. Funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project's team of 12 included professors, graduate students, recent undergraduates, museum professionals, librarians, and digital humanities staff.

Source: George Mason University CHNM

New Content Added to Publish2 News Exchange

Publish2 announced that Demotix, the open photo agency for independent journalists, will begin offering content via Publish2 News Exchange when it launches photo support later this summer. With the addition of Demotix to News Exchange, newspapers will also be able to buy photos a la carte for coverage of major news events around the U.S. and around the world.

Launched in January 2009, Demotix now has more than 3,200 active reporters in 190 countries around the world, a 250,000-strong picture archive, and a monthly growth of more than 20,000 editorial images and video.

Publish2 also recently announced that ProPublica, GlobalPost, Texas Tribune, and Texas Watchdog have recently created their newswires in Publish2's platform for sharing and distributing journalism in print and across the web.

• ProPublica stories are available for free, for print or online publication.
• GlobalPost is an international news service that employs a core team of more than 50 correspondents around the world and works with more than 125 freelance journalists to produce top-shelf news and features. The GlobalPost newswire is available now in News Exchange for their existing syndication customers
• The Texas Tribune covers every major issue in the state of Texas as a nonprofit news organization. Subscribers to its newswire may publish their stories in full-in print and online-for free, in exchange for proper attribution and links.
• Texas Watchdog is another Lone Star state nonprofit digging into politics and local issues with original investigative reporting. Its newswire is also free.

Publish2 News Exchange enables newspapers to create a comprehensive, customized newswire for print, combining content sharing networks with the highest quality free and paid news sources. Publish2 News Exchange, which launched in May 2010, was established to disrupt the "Associated Press monopoly over content distribution to newspapers."

Source: Publish2

WebWorks Publishing Solution Supports iPad and ePUB Standard

WebWorks, a brand of Quadralay Corp., announced its enterprise level content conversion tool with built-in support for the Apple iPad and ePUB standard. The company says that its ePublisher 2010 Mobile Plus release is the first enterprise solution to support the emerging ePUB standard to create ebooks readable on the newest generation of mobile content devices.

WebWorks' ePublisher 2010 Mobile Plus release allows companies, technical communication authors, and software development teams to automatically convert and publish high volumes of content from Microsoft Word, Adobe FrameMaker, and DITA-XML files to common formats such as PDF, Online Help, Wiki, and ebooks.

ePublisher Mobile Plus enables teams to efficiently deliver high volumes of content to multiple formats while keeping original content and branding standards intact. ePublishing is now the fastest growing sector of the content delivery market. A recent Gartner study predicts that by 2013 more people will be accessing online information through mobile devices than through traditional desktop or laptop computers.

ePublisher 2010 Mobile Plus is available now. Eligible ePublisher customers with active support agreements will receive access to ePublisher Mobile Plus for no additional cost. Companies seeking assistance with deploying content to mobile devices can find further information at http://www.webworks.com/Products/ePublisher/Latest_Release.

Source: WebWorks

DuraSpace Introduces DuraCloud Open Source

The DuraSpace organization unveiled the open source code for the new DuraCloud platform, a hosted service and open technology that makes it easy for organizations and end users to use cloud services. DuraCloud is an open source platform that is built upon commercial cloud infrastructure. The platform itself deploys into a cloud server environment and is integrated with multiple cloud storage providers, including Amazon AWS and RackSpace. DuraSpace is making the open source code available to enable the community to create new software and services that integrate with the core platform.

Developers who are looking into building applications in the cloud are encouraged to experiment with the DuraCloud code and provide feedback about what they see as development synergies and potential additional features. See the DuraCloud wiki for technical documentation and links to download the code: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/duracloud/DuraCloud.

The DuraCloud open source platform enables cloud storage across multiple commercial and non-commercial providers and offers a cloud-based services framework focused on preservation support and data access for reuse and sharing. Features include replication, image transformation, bit integrity checking, image viewing, media streaming, and general compute processing.

DuraCloud has been in a pilot program phase funded by the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), to utilize and give feedback on the DuraCloud platform since fall 2009. The first three pilot partners identified were New York Public Library, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and WGBH Educational Foundation. These three partners were chosen because they were already managing and preserving large amounts of content in a repository and were facing several challenges where cloud infrastructure could provide a possible solution. The DuraSpace not-for-profit organization will release the DuraCloud service in early 2011.

Source: DuraSpace

Elsevier Enriches Articles With Research Data Sets

Elsevier and PANGAEA (Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data) announced their next step in interconnecting the diverse elements of scientific research. Elsevier articles at ScienceDirect are now enriched with graphical information linking to associated research data sets that are deposited at PANGAEA. This enrichment functionality offers a blueprint of how Elsevier would like to work with data set repositories all over the world (emphasis added).

This next step follows the introduction, last February, of ‘reciprocal linking'-automatically linking research data sets deposited at PANGAEA to corresponding articles in Elsevier journals on its electronic platform ScienceDirect and vice versa. The new feature adds a map to every ScienceDirect article that has associated research data at PANGAEA; it displays all geographical locations for which such data is available. A single click then brings the user from the ScienceDirect article to the research data set at PANGAEA. The information system PANGAEA is operated as an open access library aimed at archiving, publishing, and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research.

The linking of data and content has the potential to streamline the research process, bringing relevant information to researchers with fewer clicks and through quicker searches. Judson Dunham, senior product manager at ScienceDirect, says, "This highlights the value that ScienceDirect can deliver on its platform by giving researchers the papers they need and helping them to put those papers in context, delivering unique value to the user. ScienceDirect has built the capability to quickly plug in specialized applications like this as they are developed, so that external data or relevant analysis tools can be integrated directly in the online article as opportunities emerge. More such integrations are planned for the near future."

Source: Elsevier