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Weekly News Digest
October 11, 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. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

OCLC Integrates WorldCat Knowledgebase With WorldCat to Expand Library Content Connections

Unlike a traditional knowledgebase, WorldCat knowledgebase data is not tied to a particular application. The data is added and maintained in a single place for use with a growing number of OCLC services. WorldCat Resource Sharing and ILLiad subscribers are the first to benefit from the knowledgebase integration, providing an enhanced resource sharing experience for libraries and users.

The integration of knowledgebase functionality into WorldCat services follows a pilot project with 14 leading academic institutions that began as a test to determine how the knowledgebase could facilitate direct requests for articles. As the pilot progressed, it became clear that the knowledgebase could benefit all WorldCat Resource Sharing libraries, even those that did not offer direct requests for articles.

WorldCat knowledgebase functionality makes it possible for more efficient requests for articles, identifying lending libraries and passing the URL of an item directly to the lending library in the request. In many cases, staff can complete a loan transaction within minutes, without having to leave the desk.

When a user submits a request to borrow an article a library already holds, library staff receive a loan request that contains the URL for the item. This not only reduces the number of requests a library makes for things it already owns but also eliminates the need for staff to consult multiple sources to find the requested item.

WorldCat knowledgebase data will soon be available for use with other services. The knowledgebase will support a new “view now” link in WorldCat Local search results, providing users with one-click access to electronic resources such as full-text articles and ebooks. An e-link will be added to brief records in WorldCat Local search results so users will not have to scroll through detailed records to find a link to electronic resources.

Later, integration of OpenURL resolution functionality will further consolidate the discovery and delivery of electronic items into a single interface.

As of Sept. 15, the WorldCat knowledgebase provides access to 5.8 million records for electronic materials from 124 providers in nine countries. Libraries can complete a request form to begin the process to add data about their electronic collections to the knowledgebase.

Source: OCLC

Routledge’s Library and Information Science Journals Now on Facebook

For a complete list of librarianship journals offered by Routledge, click here.

Source: Routledge

Wiley-Blackwell Launches Pilot Program for Biotechnology Journals With DeepDyve

“Wiley is exploring new channels and business models for delivering our content, to the widest possible audience,” said Reed Elfenbein, vice president and director of sales and marketing. “DeepDyve’s innovative content rental model enables us to reach researchers who are working outside of academic institutions and who do not have the resources of institutional libraries to access the latest scientific publications in their fields. Partnering with DeepDyve will help us to serve their information needs with flexibility and immediacy, while learning more about them and the opportunities and challenges presented by this innovative enabling technology.”

DeepDyve targets unaffiliated knowledge workers who do not have access to content via an institutional library. Users can sign up for different levels of membership: Basic (pay as you go for a 24-hour rental period); Silver (a monthly subscription for up to 10 articles, each for a 1-week rental period); and Gold (a monthly subscription for up to 25 articles per month with no expiration date). DeepDyve’s “KeyPhrase” search technology supports queries of up to 5,000 words. The company’s proprietary document viewer allows users read-only access to the articles but prevents them from printing or copying and pasting the contents of the document. The DeepDyve viewer is also designed to work on iPads and other mobile devices.

The Wiley-Blackwell journals in this program can be found by visiting both the Wiley Online Library and DeepDyve.

Source: Wiley-Blackwell

EBSCO Discovery Service Adding Oxford University Press Metadata

As the largest university press in the world, OUP publishes more than 6,000 new publications per year including scholarly works in all academic disciplines, bibles, music, school and college textbooks, children’s books, materials for teaching English as a foreign language, business books, dictionaries and reference books, and journals.

Resources made available through EDS will include the Oxford Journals Collection (more than 220 journals covering medicine, life sciences, mathematics and physical sciences, humanities, law and social sciences) and the Oxford Journals Archive (more than 150 journals dating from 1849 to 1995 including content back to Vol. 1, Issue 1. Oxford Scholarship Online and Oxford Handbooks Online will also be available. Oxford Scholarship Online includes more than 4,000 books in 18 subject areas. Oxford Handbooks Online provides access to more than 2,600 essays by the world’s leading scholars in business and management, philosophy, political science, and religion.

Oxford University Press joins Baker & Taylor, the British Library’s Electronic Table of Contents File (ETOC), NewsBank, Readex, LexisNexis, Alexander Street Press, Web of Science (for mutual customers), and many others—a growing list of information sources to EBSCO Discovery Service users.

EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized index of an institution’s information resources and an easy yet powerful means of accessing all that content from a single search box—searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage. The Base Index for EBSCO Discovery Service forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalog, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes. It is this combination that allows a single, comprehensive, custom solution for discovering the value of any library’s collection.

The EDS Base Index comprises metadata from the world’s foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers. Although it is constantly growing, the EDS Base Index currently provides metadata for nearly 50,000 magazines and journals, approximately 825,000 CDs & DVDs, nearly 6 million books, more than 100 million newspaper articles, more than 20,000 conference proceedings and hundreds of thousands of additional information sources from various source types.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Springer and Ex Libris Partner to Offer Content via Primo Central

The world-class Primo Central Index is a mega-aggregate of scholarly content. Hosted by Ex Libris in a cloud computing environment, Primo Central is vendor-neutral and encompasses scholarly resources from leading information providers. Coupled with the Primo discovery and delivery solution, library users simultaneously explore the library’s local collections and Primo Central’s extensive global electronic collections and instantly retrieve accurate, relevance-ranked search results.

“Primo Central will be greatly enriched by this collaboration with Springer,” remarked Michal Gindi, publisher relations and research manager at Ex Libris. “SpringerLink is one of the most important research destinations for the academic community, and having its content indexed within Primo Central will provide a major boost for subscribing libraries around the world.”

Source: Ex Libris Group

Nursing Reference Titles Joining Ovid

“We are thrilled to offer our global customer base easy access to electronic content from such a highly regarded organization,” said Andrew L. Popper, vice president of publishing & eproducts at Wolters Kluwer Health, Medical Research. “With the addition of these new ANA titles, Ovid delivers the most comprehensive aggregated offering of electronic nursing content for practice, education, and research. This partnership demonstrates our commitment to continually seek out new relationships with leading publishers focused on publishing titles relevant to the professional interests of our customers.”

“Partnering with Ovid gives us a valuable opportunity to reach nurses all over the world, so they can have access to best practices in the profession,” said ANA chief executive officer Marla J. Weston, Ph.D., R.N. “Nurses will now be able to easily access ANA’s foundational documents from anywhere and at anytime in order to help them make critical decisions in their practice.”

For a list of the ANA titles currently available, visit Ovid or the ANA site.

OvidSP’s nursing portal, Nursing@Ovid, offers unique tools and features designed to maximize search precision and efficiency and to simplify and speed analysis and the nurse’s workflow. Ovid offers tremendous depth and breadth of content via Nursing@Ovid, including resources from the world’s leading publishers:

• More than 500 ebooks for the nurse and allied health professional in clinical, administrative, educational, and research contexts
• More than 230 premium journals, as well as journal collections and journal archives
• Key bibliographic databases

Source: Ovid Technologies