News & Events > NewsBreaks Back Index Forward

Weekly News Digest

September 16, 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.

McGraw-Hill Professional Launches AccessEngineering 2.0

AccessEngineering 2.0 features a number of customer-requested enhancements:

• A new user interface offering a streamlined, easy-to-navigate design and superior functionality.
• The addition of a new subject category: Software Engineering.
• Multimedia resources are being added to include color images, instructor ancillaries, PowerPoint presentations, podcasts, and more on selected new books.
• Articles from McGraw-Hill’s Engineering News-Record (ENR) covering environment, water, power, and infrastructure. New articles will be posted weekly, and approximately 500 articles will be archived and available immediately.
• Full author biographies
• The complete contents of the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Science and Technology, offering more than 50,000 terms.

Annual subscriptions to AccessEngineering are available for both institutional and individual customers. Individual users may also purchase Pay-Per-View access to individual titles. The ability to view search results and access tables of contents, abstracts, and sample content is available to view free of charge.

Source: McGraw-Hill Professional

New Web Accessibility Tool Free to Developers

Developers face real problems trying to make dynamic websites and applications, like Facebook, accessible to everyone. The current generation of tools on the market doesn’t work with JavaScript or dynamic, event-based page content. FireEyes enables developers of rich, interactive sites and applications to ensure their creations are accessible to everyone.

FireEyes works well with static sites plus includes features specifically designed to address the needs of dynamically updating content. The company claims it is the only tool on the market that is fully JavaScript aware. It enables developers to instantly retest static content, dynamic content, and dynamic page updates, within seconds, while they are working, eliminating the long delays inherent in testing with legacy tools.

FireEyes solves the problem of error reproducibility by allowing developers to record scripts that show the exact sequence of steps required to trigger a problem and share it with others so they can see exactly how the problem happened.

It is also the only tool that automatically builds a single report that covers multiple pages or entire use cases. This automatic analysis feature provides developers a comprehensive list of issues to fix by providing a transcript of the entire session viewed in a single, drillable report. FireEyes can be used for general debugging, as well. It does all of this, in real time, during development activities, functional testing, and even active deployment.

For more information, or to download Worldspace FireEyes, visit http://www.deque.com/products/worldspace-fireeyes/download-worldspace-fireeyes.

Source: Deque Systems

Ebook Collections Coming to Project MUSE Platform

MUSE, a collaborative project which currently publishes online over 450 journals from more than 100 not-for-profit scholarly presses, will partner with many of the same publishers to offer high quality, peer-reviewed academic books electronically. Project MUSE is managed by the Johns Hopkins University Press, which also operates Hopkins Fulfillment Services (HFS) as a distribution arm for many distinguished university presses. HFS client presses are also among the first group of publishers committed to participating in the new book initiative.

The e-books program, called Project MUSE Editions, has to date signed contracts with the following publishers to include in the new offering books from their upcoming scholarly monograph frontlists: Baylor University Press, Brookings Institution Press, ELT Press, Indiana University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, Kent State University Press, Penn State University Press, Purdue University Press, and University of Illinois Press. Talks are ongoing with several other MUSE and HFS client publishers, with more participants expected to be announced before the end of this year.

Publishers participating in the program will select and set prices for the frontlist books they offer through MUSE e-book collections. The initiative is focused on scholarly monographs, and is not expected to include textbooks, reference books, trade titles, or other books outside the project scope. Project MUSE will reserve the right to reject books that do fit within its collection parameters.

Book content on MUSE will be offered via a purchase model, on a twice-yearly seasonal (Spring/Fall) basis. Libraries will “pre-purchase” access to a collection of the frontlist monograph titles included in the upcoming season’s publishing schedule from the participating publishers. Details on the books included in the collection will be available prior to the purchase. Books will be released electronically simultaneous with the print publication, and libraries that have purchased a collection including the title will have immediate access on the MUSE platform.

MUSE expects to offer its first e-book collection for the fall 2011 season, with between 250-500 frontlist monograph titles anticipated for inclusion in the collection. If there is a critical mass of titles in one or more academic disciplines, subject-based book collections may also be made available for the fall 2011 season. Beginning with spring 2012, MUSE expects to consistently offer both comprehensive and subject-based e-book collections for purchase.

Pricing for book collections on MUSE will be based upon the sum of the list prices of the included titles, as set by the books' publishers, with tiered discounting of the collection price modeled upon MUSE's Carnegie Classification-based tiered pricing for its journal collections. Consortium purchase programs will also be available.

Books on MUSE will be in PDF format, and will be searchable and retrievable to the chapter level. COUNTER-compliant usage statistics will be available to libraries purchasing book collections on MUSE. MARC records for the e-books will be provided to purchasing libraries at no charge. Users will be able to search across combined book and journal content in MUSE, or limit searches by content type.

Source: Project MUSE

H.W. Wilson Enhances WilsonWeb; Partners With OCLC’s WorldCat Local

With enhancements to the ReadSpeaker text-to-speech converter, users can now highlight specific sections of text for listening—the most relevant parts of long articles. Listeners can regulate the speed of narration—a boon for users who struggle with English.

Some of the improvements include the following:

• Users can now translate WilsonWeb full-text articles into Swedish—new to the electronic translation options—as well as Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
• Librarians can post a new Embedded Widget on the WilsonWeb search results screen that allows users to discuss subjects related to their search topic.
• A hotlinked e-journal icon now appears in citations to e-journals, highlighting the availability of these journals online.
• New journals have been added to full-text coverage—114 since the start of the year—in OmniFile and other Wilson full-text databases.

In related news, popular databases from H.W. Wilson are now accessible through the OCLC WorldCat Local service. Twenty-one databases have been added to the WorldCat Local central index; eight more are accessible remotely via a Z39.50 search of WilsonWeb.

Source: H.W. Wilson

SYSTRAN Mobile Translator for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad Devices

Using the same recognized machine translation technology employed by internet portals, multinational corporations, and government agencies, SYSTRAN Mobile Translator provides iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad customers with high quality translations in real-time.

Mobile translation products have historically relied on internet connections to provide translation services. SYSTRAN Mobile Translator is unique because the application is independent, installed directly on the device, and doesn’t require internet connectivity so users are able to instantly translate full sentences, emails, web pages and all texts between English and French. Additional features for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users include the ability to perform reverse translations (back and forth) in just a click, save, view previous translations, align source and translated texts for easy review, and detect and correct typos in the source language prior to translating to prevent mistranslations.

SYSTRAN is headquartered in Paris, France with a North American office located in San Diego, Calif.

Source: SYSTRAN