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Weekly News Digest
October 25, 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.

ABC-CLIO eBook Collection to be Searchable Within EBSCO Discovery Service

ABC-CLIO’s eBook Collection offers more than 6,000 high-quality, authoritative, scholarly titles from imprints including ABC-CLIO, Greenwood, Praeger, Libraries Unlimited, and Linworth designed to support a library’s collection. Titles cover an array of subjects such as American History, Current Events & Issues, Education, Health & Medicine, Multicultural & Gender Studies, Politics & Government, Science Technology & Environment and much more. New titles are uploaded monthly. Additional data elements from ABC-CLIO are expected to become accessible within EDS in the near future.

ABC-CLIO joins the British Library, Baker & Taylor, NewsBank, Readex, LexisNexis, Alexander Street Press, Web of Science (for mutual customers), H.W. Wilson, Oxford University Press, American Psychological Association, and many others in making EBSCO Discovery Service a comprehensive discovery solution.

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 is comprised of 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 constantly growing, today the EDS Base Index provides metadata for nearly 50,000 magazines & journals, approximately 825,000 CDs and 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.

EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box—searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Springer’s Major Reference Works Now Linked Via Paratext’s Reference Universe

Paratext’s Reference Universe is a cross-searchable database that supports article and index-level discovery of major reference works from more than 750 imprints. The service focuses exclusively on subject encyclopedias and scholarly compendia—the authoritative introductory material that research librarians consistently identify as the key starting point for better quality research. All Reference Universe searches are dynamically matched to each library’s existing electronic and print holdings.

“Through this association with Paratext, we know our major reference titles will be discovered even more quickly, allowing library patrons to access SpringerLink and take advantage of the full range of our scholarly resources,” added Thomas Mager, executive vice president publishing product development at Springe

Source: Paratext

Elsevier Introduces Protein Viewer—A New Interactive Feature

“Protein Viewer will allow all readers to readily visualize and manipulate molecular structures from within the article without the need for specialized stand-alone graphics software,” said Peter Wright, editor-in-chief of JMB. “Authors, too, will benefit from having this feature front and center in their articles.”

This interactive feature allows the reader to be more active in the article, by allowing them to go more in-depth and be more focused on their area of specific research. Protein Viewer allows the reader to choose the display scheme, size, angle, colors, surface view, and more. Each individual reader might be looking for a specific portion and presentation of the molecule. Now, this individualization is at the fingertips of the reader.

Protein Viewer is one of many innovative features from Elsevier and SciVerse ScienceDirect, all designed to make the readers’ experience to be the most customized, useful, and relevant. Protein Viewer will be available for more Elsevier journals, such as BBA Proteins and Proteomics and the Journal of Structural Biology. More online innovations are planned for both JMB and other Elsevier journals.

Visit these links to explore this new feature:

External link doi:10.1016/j.jmb.2010.05.054

External link doi:10.1016/j.jmb.2010.06.019

Source: Elsevier

Moreover Technologies Releases All-New Newsdesk 4

Newsdesk 4 meets five major media aggregation aims:

• Provides multiple ways to find relevant content—including faceted search; category filters; source filters; relevance and rank filters, on the fly (e.g., mentions of companies, people, products, events and stock ticker), and pre-canned searches with cross-referencing to enable targeting relevant information without frustrating trial-and-error
• Unifies the search for both real-time news and social media through a single conduit
• Captures the depth and breadth of the best read, most highly regarded coverage demanded by the world’s largest companies (2.5 million results daily from more than 1.7 million-plus sources spanning 800 searchable industry categories, 100-plus countries and 50-plus languages)
• Returns clean, spam-free results that have been editorially vetted
• Offers easy-to-use sharing tools that empower rapid and reliable distribution, including automated newsletters, email alerts, and ability to maintain editorial control of feeds shared

Source: Moreover Technologies

Cengage Learning Releases CourseReader

The product offers instructors thousands of articles and historical documents, including both primary and secondary sources, specific to their discipline, all in one location. Instructors select a series of materials from these databases for their courses, which are then compiled into an online collection for their students to access, replacing traditional printed readers.

Instructors create their customized CourseReader collection by searching the database by author, title or keyword. While CourseReader databases are created for specific disciplines and course areas, instructors can choose to add selections from different disciplines to take advantage of the vast collection of materials in the larger database. Many selections begin with an introduction and finish with critical thinking or multiple choice questions to help students understand and analyze what they’ve read. Instructors can also highlight or make notations on the readings online to help guide their students as they read.

Cengage says CourseReader is a great value for students, whether purchased in conjunction with other Cengage Learning course materials or as a stand-alone product. Students log into a website where they can view the assigned material. In addition, to meet the needs of students who prefer to learn in various formats, many readings can be listened to immediately online, downloaded as MP3 files, or printed.

Source: Cengage Learning

OCLC Research Survey of Special Collections and Archives

The top three “most challenging issues” in managing special collections were space (105 respondents), born-digital materials, and digitization. The rate of response was 61% (169 responses). Executed as a follow up to the 1998 Association of Research Libraries survey, some of the findings from the survey that are detailed in the report include the following:

• Far too many rare and unique materials remain “hidden”
• The size of collections is growing rapidly
• Most institutions report increased numbers of onsite users
• Staffing generally remains stable

The extent to which materials appear in online catalogs varies widely by format: 85% of printed volumes, 50% of archival materials, 42% of maps, and 25% of visual materials are accessible online. Relative to ARL’s 1998 data, 12% more printed volumes have an online record, as do 15% more archival materials and 6% more maps. This limited progress may be attributable in part to lack of sustainable, widely replicable methodologies to improve efficiencies.

On the other hand, great strides have been made with archival finding aids: 52% of ARL collection guides are now accessible online, up from 16% in 1998. Across the entire population the figure is 44%, which would increase to 74% if all extant finding aids available locally were converted. The other 26% reveals the archival processing backlogs that remain.

The 153-page report is available at http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-11.pdf.

Source: OCLC Research