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Weekly News Digest

November 1, 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.

LexisNexis TotalPatent Provides Direct Links to Elsevier Journal Abstracts

TotalPatent is a web-based patent research, retrieval, and analysis service, powered by the world’s largest collection of searchable full-text and bibliographic patent authorities. TotalPatent users now have direct links from search results to article abstracts from more than 18,000 titles worldwide through Elsevier’s SciVerse Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database containing both peer-reviewed research literature and quality web sources. LexisNexis and Elsevier are both part of Reed Elsevier.

Other enhancements to TotalPatent include:

• Links directly to Chisum on Patents, the world’s foremost authority on U.S. patent law
• Integration with Bizint—users can now export records from their TotalPatent work folders into Bizint Smart Charts for Patents
• Assignee name normalization—the names on millions of patent records from assignees in various countries are now normalized into searchable English text
• Enhanced interfaces for the semantic search option with drag and drop functionality for easier manipulation of the concepts returned

Source: LexisNexis

Third Periodical Series From American Antiquarian Society Joins EBSCOhost

American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 3 provides more than 1,800 titles dating from 1838-1852. The themes in this third series reveal a rapidly growing young nation where industrialization, the railroads, regional political differences, and life on the western frontier were daily realities. The holdings, consisting of more than 1.5 million pages, are expansive, and many titles, both prominent and unique, can be found. The broad range of geography as well as a diversity of languages (French, German, and Welsh) in the collection reflects the rapid westward expansion that characterizes the time period of this collection.

American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodical Collection: Series 3 is available through the EBSCOhost Content Viewer, specifically designed to meet the needs of scholars and researchers by enabling them to navigate historical content in new ways. The new interface was designed to allow researchers to navigate historical content in a manner that is fast, natural and preserves the serendipity involved in doing historical research. EBSCOhost Content Viewer replicates the experience of browsing and reading original archival material while also allowing users to explore, manipulate, collect, take notes, and export content.

EBSCO partnered with the American Antiquarian Society, one of the leading independent research libraries in the nation, in June 2008 to create the American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

ebrary Launches Ebook Ordering System

Furthermore, ebrary now provides features that help libraries promote content and increase usage, including the ability for end-users to save their searches and receive automatic notifications when new titles are acquired by the library that match their interests. The company also now provides Lists, which enable librarians to select titles of interest, create and manage individual collections of their choice, and collaborate with others to evaluate and create shared collections. Librarians with an Administrative Access account may use these Lists to create orders, add titles to their collection under ebrary’s new PDA model, or request quotes for subscription access to titles of their selection.

Key features and benefits of ebrary’s new ordering system include the following:

?      Growing selection of more than 274,000 e-books from the world’s leading publishers available under subscription, perpetual access, and patron driven acquisition models.

?      Ability to control collections in real time, from adding and receiving content to enabling and disabling services such as patron driven acquisition.

?      On-demand creation and management of profiles that automatically notify librarians when new content is available that meets their criteria.

?      Robust title selection tools including the ability to select by subject, publisher, price, publication date, and other key parameters.

?      De-duplication for electronic titles.

?      Fund code management.

?      Administrative privileges.

?      Saved searches with automatic alerts for end-users when new content that matches their interests is available.

?      Ability to use Lists to create customized, searchable collections.

?      Free MARC records.

?      COUNTER-compliant reporting.

?      ADA 508C compliant content.

?      Ability to upload and integrate library content (including from other vendors if copyrights permit) with DASH!

Source: ebrary

Gale Introduces New Mobile Apps for AccessMyLibrary

The AML Public Edition Android app allows researchers using an Android device to access Gale resources through public libraries within a 10-mile radius, similar to the Public Edition applications already created for Apple devices.

The AML College Edition is the first Gale app for college students and gives them anytime, anywhere access to the Gale resources available through their college library. Students can use the app to locate their school and then authenticate for the school year by providing their school-issued email address.

In addition, Quick Response (QR) codes, 2D barcodes that can be decoded at high speed, are now available for all AML apps. After downloading a QR code-scanning app, mobile phone users can scan the AML QR code with their barcode reader to be automatically taken to the Gale apps web site.

In December 2009, Gale launched its first AML Public Edition app, helping iPhone users access Gale resources through their local public libraries. In May, Gale announced the AML School Edition app for the iPhone, making it possible for students using an iPhone to access the Gale resources available in their school library from any location. Gale then followed up with the AML Public Edition app for iPad users in June. In addition, the following AML apps are currently in development:

• AccessMyLibrary School Edition for the iPad
• AccessMyLibrary School Edition for Android
• AccessMyLibrary College Edition for Android

All AML apps for iOS devices (iPhone, iTouch and iPad) can be downloaded at the iTunes store. The AML Public Edition Android app can be downloaded from the Android Marketplace. All AML apps are free and additional information, including QR codes, posters, bookmarks and other library marketing resources can be found at http://www.gale.cengage.com/apps/.

Source: Gale

Gilbane Group Report Reveals Publishers’ Digital Realities

The Gilbane Group’s latest research set-out to uncover the reality behind the theory that electronic, digital content offers publishers greater interoperability, improved efficiencies, expanded product lines and lower costs than print. Through interviewing and surveying executives from leading consumer, professional and education publishers, the report assesses to what extent a print-intensive industry has modified its operations to support a consumer-choice driven market heavily influenced by online and mobile content.

“Our Blueprint study is the first in-depth look into ebook-related issues from the publishers’ perspective,” says David R. Guenette, report lead for The Gilbane Group (a division of Outsell, Inc.). “Book publishers are embracing ebooks. But retrofitting decades old, and in some cases centuries old, print production processes for digital scalability requires wide-spread operational change, beyond merely technological. The goal of this report is to offer publishers guidance through input from their industry peers.”

From contracts, rights, royalties, production technologies and processes, distribution, channels, marketing, and vendor relationships, what is digital’s impact? The “Blueprint” study is a repository of the opportunities and challenges afforded by the digital revolution, with an inside look into book publishers’ practices and processes. Insights from Random House, McGraw-Hill, Hachette, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, and Oxford University Press, detail how publishers are practically solving the same business problems and what innovations are adding significant value.

Access the full industry report free of charge: http://www.aptaracorp.com/gilbane-2010-study/.

Source: Aptara Corp.

University of Pittsburgh Library System Joins HathiTrust

Launched in 2008, the HathiTrust has a growing membership currently comprising more than two dozen partners. Over the last 2 years, the partners have contributed nearly 7 million volumes to the digital library, digitized from their library collections through a number of means including Google and Internet Archive digitization, and in-house initiatives. Close to 1.5 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the web.

HathiTrust serves a dual role. First, as a trusted repository it guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds, providing the expert curation and consistent access long associated with research libraries. Second, as a service for partners and a public good, HathiTrust offers persistent access to the digital collections. This includes viewing, downloading, and searching access to public domain volumes, and searching access to in copyright volumes. Specialized features are also available which facilitate access by persons with print disabilities, and allow users to gather subsets of the digital library into “collections” that can be searched and browsed.

HathiTrust was named for the Hindi word for elephant, hathi, symbolic of the qualities of memory, wisdom, and strength evoked by elephants, as well as the huge undertaking of congregating the digital collections of libraries in the United States and beyond. HathiTrust is funded by the partner libraries and governed by members of the libraries through an Executive Committee and a Strategic Advisory Board. More information on HathiTrust is available at http://www.hathitrust.org/.

Source: University of Pittsburgh Library System