News & Events > NewsBreaks Back Index Forward

Weekly News Digest

August 9, 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.

Access Innovations, Inc. Launches “TaxoDiary” Blog

Access Innovations, Inc. has launched TaxoDiary, a blog that covers news and information about indexing, ontologies, taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, metatagging, and related subjects.

"We decided to launch the blog after much discussion with clients, colleagues and staff. There are many exciting issues and options which come across my desk every day, and this is a great way to share them as well as our thoughts about their impact with a broader group of people. We can add some ‘color and shading' to the disciplines involved in making web content findable," explained Marjorie M.K. Hlava, president and chair of Access Innovations, Inc.

Hlava continued, "TaxoDiary will feature information from articles, other blogs, presentations, standards developments, and academic papers that we find interesting. It will also communicate our view that there is a careful, thoroughly-considered balance of software and human indexing that is the best way to index text, rich media, and binary objects. That balance makes content findable to help organizations realize improved productivity, enhance web visitor and/or member satisfaction, and make the most of all of their content and web-based resources."

TaxoDiary has several standard sections, including news, features, and recent posts. Anyone interested in updates can subscribe to the blog through feedburner.com, and comments are welcome.

Incorporated in 1978, Access Innovations, Inc. is now in its 32nd year of providing information management services. Based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the organization provides services to a broad range of public and private organizations.

Source: Access Innovations, Inc.

LibraryThing Announces New Feature For Publishers

LibraryThing for Publishers gives publishers three key things:

• A box on the work page of all their titles
• Publisher pages
• Hundreds of links from LibraryThing (LibraryThing has a high PageRank)

Members get:

• A new way to connect with the publishers they love
• A way to browse publishers' titles
• As we move this forward, publishers can help on the data end, with better, less restricted book data from the people who actually create the books.

LibraryThing for Publishers includes the following features:

• LibraryThing's first "shelves" interface, which was just introduced. Shelves are doing a lot more on publisher pages than on tag pages.
• Faceted tagging, where one set of books (a publishers') is sliced and diced by a tag. For example, here are Orbit Books' Urban Fantasy books.
• Reviews by publisher (e.g., Zondervan)
• An enhanced members' page, with mini-shelves for top members.

Here's a video about how to join: http://www.librarything.com/blogs/thingology/2010/08/publishers-how-to-join-librarything-for-publishers/

Source: LibraryThing

ARL Promotes Member Use of Large-Scale Digitization Principles

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Board of Directors unanimously voted on July 26, 2010, to endorse a set of nine principles to guide vendor/publisher relations in large-scale digitization projects of special collections materials, recommended by its Transforming Special Collections in the Digital Age Working Group. The Board's vote strongly encourages ARL member libraries to refrain from signing future agreements with publishers or vendors, either individually or through consortia, which do not adhere to the principles.

The ARL Board recognizes that research libraries are increasingly finding that large-scale digitization of special collections materials involves partnerships with commercial vendors and publishers, and that those partnerships should be governed by principles that protect special collections materials and promote the broadest possible access to digital versions of them.

Special collections often include valuable and unique materials, but also incur special responsibilities for their stewards. Digital access to special collections materials has become important in revealing hidden materials and promoting humanities research, and ARL member libraries often require appropriate collaborations and partnerships to implement large-scale digitization activities.

The nine principles address issues including implications of the distinctive character of special collections, the need for libraries to retain their own copies of the products of digitization projects, the importance of promoting broad access to digitized collections, and concerns regarding the collection of data about users of digitized collections.

"I am thrilled that the ARL Board has endorsed these principles, which encourage research libraries and archives to provide digital access to special collections while safeguarding institutional interests and promoting broad public access," said Anne R. Kenney, chair of the Working Group. "At Cornell, we plan to draw on the framework to improve many terms in our negotiations with vendors, including to shorten embargo periods on all our digitized collections to five years or less."

To view these principles, visit: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/principles_large_scale_digitization.pdf.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve.

Source: ARL

OCLC Issues Statement on SkyRiver Lawsuit

OCLC has issued a formal statement in response to the lawsuit filed by SkyRiver Technology Solutions and Innovative Interfaces, Inc., alleging antitrust violations and anticompetitive practices. Calling it a "regrettable action," the company warns that the process will likely drag on for "months or even years." For our NewsBreak coverage of the lawsuit, see: http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/SkyRiver-and-Innovative-Interfaces-File-Antitrust-Suit-Against-OCLC-68677.asp.

The following statement, posted on the OCLC site on Aug. 5, 2010, is from Larry Alford, chair, OCLC Board of Trustees, and Jay Jordan, OCLC president and CEO:

On July 29, SkyRiver Technology Solutions and Innovative Interfaces, Inc. filed suit against OCLC, alleging anticompetitive practices. We at OCLC believe the lawsuit is without merit, and we will vigorously defend the policies and practices of the cooperative.

OCLC's General Counsel, working with trial counsel, will respond to this regrettable action by SkyRiver and Innovative Interfaces following procedures and timetables dictated by the court. This process will likely take months or even years, not days.

In the meantime, we want to assure the OCLC membership and all 72,000 libraries that use one or more OCLC services that these spurious allegations will not divert us from our current plans and activities. These include maintaining and enhancing existing services, pursuing an ambitious agenda in library research and advocacy, and introducing new Web-scale (cloud) services. Indeed, OCLC has been a global leader in providing cloud-based services for libraries since 1971, and the next generation of these services holds great promise for reducing member library costs.

It is worth noting that our current strategy represents a collective effort by librarians around the world, developed through ongoing dialogue and consultation with the Board of Trustees, Global Council, and Regional Councils in the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We will continue our active engagement with OCLC members and governance participants as, together, we move our cooperative forward.

Inclusion, reciprocity, trust, and the highest standard of ethical conduct have guided the OCLC cooperative in the past and will guide us in the future. As always, OCLC's public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing the rate of rise of library costs remain paramount.

Source: OCLC

Ex Libris Announces Econtent Collaboration with Thomson Reuters

Ex Libris Group announced that Thomson Reuters is to make its important collections directly accessible to Web of Knowledge subscribers via the Primo Central mega-aggregate of scholarly econtent. With Primo Central, users simultaneously search locally managed collections and global econtent and receive search results that are blended into a single relevance-ranked list. Web of Science, part of the Web of Knowledge platform, claims to be the largest and most comprehensive database of research citations available. Authoritative, multidisciplinary content in Web of Science covers more than 11,000 journals worldwide, including open access journals and more than 110,000 conference proceedings spanning the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Thomson Reuters is the latest of the rapidly expanding group of content providers who have chosen to make their content accessible to library users via Primo Central. Records from Web of Science, together with the citation counts, will appear in search results for institutions subscribing to both Primo Central and Web of Science.

Hosted by Ex Libris in a cloud computing environment, Primo Central covers hundreds of millions of global and regional e-resources, such as journal articles and ebooks obtained from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators, as well as items obtained from open access repositories.

Source: Ex Libris Group

EBSCO Publishing and NoveList Debut a New Interface

EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) along with the creators of readers' advisory database NoveList have released a new interface for all NoveList and NoveList Plus products. The new interface will include all the characteristics librarians enjoy along with changes that make recommendations easier to obtain, searching more intuitive, and allows quick access to more content than ever. The updated interface is designed to help librarians and their patrons find their next great read. The redesign incorporated a variety of suggestions from readers' advisory experts and librarians.

One of the major new features is the use of "Appeal" words such as "fast-paced" or "character-driven" which will better allow the user to find different types of books. The new interface also has a strong focus on recommendations. Reading recommendations are available directly from the homepage-which allows for easier access and fewer clicks and they also include a hover-able pop-up window that can be used to narrow down genre choices.

Browsable lists of recommendations for similar books and authors will be shown on the search result pages allowing users to find numerous titles of interest. Finally, each recommendation will feature transparent reasoning from NoveList experts as to why the title is being recommended. With the new interface, enhancements to the popular print functionality make it even easier for librarians to print out reading suggestions for patrons whether they are looking for series, title, or author suggestions.

The new interface also features improved searching capabilities. The search box now takes a more prominent spot on the homepage. Search results are also storable and have three display options-list, text, and grid. The list display offers a jacket image, summary and additional book information. The text form omits the book jacket and the summary allowing the user to view more results at once. The grid format offers ten search results at a time and presents as a grid with images of each book jacket plus a hover-able pop-up window can be used to find out more information about each book.

A "Teaching with Books" section has been added along with the new interface. This section will be especially helpful to school librarians and public librarians working with homeschoolers and students as it includes content based on grade and common curriculum topics.

Source: EBSCO Publishing