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Weekly News Digest

September 30, 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.

ProQuest Digitizes Formerly Secret Korean Documents for Researchers

The 34th collection in DNSA, The United States and the Two Koreas contains more than 1,500 records released by the State Department, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other agencies, as well as historical material compiled through research at the National Archives and the presidential libraries. The many newly-declassified documents in the database reveal a wide range of significant themes and events, including contingency military plans, growing concern over North Korea’s economic instability, various leadership transitions, and political liberalization in South Korea. Researchers can also explore U.S.-South Korea economic relations, a historic summit meeting between the leaders of South and North Korea in 2000, and secret discussions with other powers, including Japan, China, and Russia, aimed at coordinating an international diplomatic response to North Korea’s threat to regional security.

DNSA is the online version of National Security Archive collections, derived from documents on file at the Archive’s office in Washington, D.C. An independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University, the Archive collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. It also serves as a repository for government records on a wide range of topics pertaining to the national security, foreign, intelligence, and economic policies of the U.S.

The Archive obtains its materials through a variety of methods, including use of the Freedom of Information Act and Mandatory Declassification Review processes, and through research in presidential paper collections and congressional and court records. Archive staff members systematically track U.S. government agency and other federal records repositories for documents that have never been released, or that otherwise shed light on the decision-making processes of the U.S. government, and the historical context underlying official decisions. DNSA, its online outlet, is considered by researchers to be the most powerful primary research and teaching tool available for issues related to U.S. foreign policy, intelligence, and security affairs.

Source: ProQuest

Text-Analytics Provider TEMIS Announces Free LuxidBar Download

LuxidBar is a lightweight component for Internet Explorer and Firefox that delivers four key features:

• Identifies and highlights key information within any webpage or document, enabling the user quickly to spot, read, and navigate within the most relevant content.
• Inserts smart links on the fly within the text, enabling the user further to navigate and gather additional information in context.
• Displays information analytics dynamically to provide the user with interactive graphical views of the document content.
• Summarizes any webpage or document by displaying only key sentences explicitly referring to the user’s topic of interest.

Source: TEMIS

Infotrieve Releases Mobile Library iPad App

Launched in 2008, the Content SCM platform has more than 250,000 users from the corporate, public, and academic sectors in 80 countries, representing 4,500 organizations from nearly every industry.

To facilitate fast and intuitive access to content, users of the Mobile Library can organize personal collections containing virtually any type of content including PDFs, videos, images, and audio. The Mobile Library automatically organizes and cross references files based on user defined tags, and allows users to search against these personalized tags to quickly locate content of interest.

To ensure up-to-the-minute awareness of newly published research, the Mobile Library offers a variety of automatic alerts using Infotrieve’s collection of more than 50 million citations, along with unlimited RSS feeds for monitoring other key content sources. Users can also capture, tag, and organize citations, abstracts, and other items of interest for future research, review, or purchase.

Source: Infotrieve, Inc.

DynamicBooks to Offer College Open Textbooks

Twenty-seven open textbooks from varied disciplines, including history, science, business, and mathematics, will be available beginning in January 2011 with more titles planned throughout 2011. Students will pay a $20 per term fee that enables them to highlight, annotate, search, print page-by-page, and easily navigate through their customized DynamicBooks.

Using the DynamicBooks editing tool, instructors can revise content, add or delete chapters or sections, and include audio, video, and course notes to make the textbooks more current and more relevant for their students. Students can access DynamicBooks online, download the books to their computers, and print up to ten pages at a time. Printed, bound versions are also available for student purchase. Instead of copyright, all rights reserved, these textbooks are copyrighted with Creative Commons, GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License), and customized open licenses that mean the textbooks can be freely shared and modified.

The Community College Open Textbooks Collaborative (College Open Textbooks) is funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This collection of 15 educational nonprofit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2,000 community and other 2-year colleges.

Students can access DynamicBooks using BookShelf from Vital Source Technologies, an Ingram Content Group company. DynamicBooks, which was announced in February 2010, is a subsidiary of Macmillan.

Source: DynamicBooks and College Open Textbooks

ebrary Announces New Ebook Program for Pharmaceutical Companies

Available now, ebrary’s new program includes:

• A choice of models for acquiring ebooks and other authoritative materials from trusted publishers such as CRC Press, Elsevier Health Sciences, Informa Healthcare, Springer, and Wiley. Choose to subscribe with unlimited access, purchase individual titles, and buy based on employee usage. ebrary also offers many Doody’s Core Titles.
• DASH! (Data Sharing, Fast), ebrary’s do-it-yourself e-publishing tool.
• InfoTools and other advanced research technologies.
• 24/7 web-based training with a real person, complimentary marketing services, and more.

To enable companies to stretch their budget dollars, ebrary recommends that pharmaceutical organizations subscribe to its affordable new Pharmaceuticals Subscription E-book Database, which provides simultaneous, multi-user access to a growing collection of more than 100 ebooks on topics such as drug delivery, toxicology, clinical trials, drug safety, quality control, pricing, and pharmaceutical marketing. Preview the selection at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/pharma/home.action.

Companies may subsidize the subscription by purchasing individual titles in all key areas of the product lifecycle, and by subscribing to additional databases such as Engineering & Industrial Management, Medical Technology, and Sales & Marketing. Preview all content for the pharmaceutical industry at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/pharmaceuticals.

Additionally, pharmaceutical companies may use DASH! to upload and enhance their collections with their own digital materials such as e-prints, product information, research reports, patents, proposals, government documents, competitive intelligence, and more.

Source: ebrary

Lexalytics Unveils Sentiment Analysis of Emoticons, Acronyms for Twitter

With the use of emoticons, abbreviations, and confusing “social speak” grammar, micro-blog services such as Twitter present a difficult task for natural language processing systems. These improvements come as part of the yearly software license for Salience, Lexalytics’ core text analytics engine.

For acronyms, the Lexalytics team parsed thousands of tweets to get to hundreds of common acronyms and emoticons. The team then made decisions on whether each acronym was sentiment-bearing, needed to be expanded, or should be treated as simply an interjection.

For the @ sign, Salience part-of-speech tags the @ tagged string as a “MENTION” which can be used for further reporting. In particular, @ tagged strings will return as people entities, with the associated sentiment, themes, etc. Additionally, # sign (hashtags) are part-of-speech tagged as @hashtag. These do not report back as any sort of entity type. Hashtags are typically used as a lightweight “tag” for the content of the tweet. This information can be used by Salience for further processing as a tag.

Check out the new capabilities at www.lexalytics.com/demo. Select the “Twitter” radio button. Paste a tweet in and test out what Lexalytics returns.

Lexalytics’ out-of-the-box, business critical text analytics and sentiment solutions allows companies to monitor and react in real-time by making sense of the vast repositories of information from sources as diverse as Twitter, blogs, RSS feeds, websites, and in-house content. Lexalytics solutions include entity extraction, theme discovery, and sentiment analysis at the entity-level.

Source: Lexalytics, Inc.