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Weekly News Digest

November 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. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

Elsevier Announces SciVal Spotlight Country Maps

SciVal Spotlight institutional maps launched in June of 2009 offering detailed views of the unique research competencies of research institutions, recognizing an emerging need to visualize research performance at a national level. The addition of country maps enables research decision makers to broaden their analytical scope of global research output.

Moving beyond the traditional method of measuring research output by publication and citation counts, the underlying model of SciVal Spotlight relies on the co-citation analysis of more than 16,000 peer-reviewed journals to more accurately reflect the current structure of science. Leveraging this new model of science, SciVal Spotlight country maps allow institutions to understand how their work contributes to their nation’s research strengths as well as their relative national standing within each of these research competencies. The country maps can also be used to identify potential areas for specialization, diversification, or collaboration. In addition, by measuring the regional size and growth of each national competency, the sustainability of leadership positions can be analyzed.

Source: Elsevier

OCLC and EBSCO Announce Expanded Data Exchange

WorldCat Local libraries that subscribe to EBSCOhost full-text databases will continue to be able to discover EBSCO records and access associated full-text content through the WorldCat Local interface. The new agreement will improve access to these databases by removing the requirement for users of WorldCat Local to authenticate before searching the metadata for EBSCO databases to which their library subscribes (users will continue to be required to authenticate before accessing full text).

OCLC member libraries with a cataloging and WorldCat discovery subscription using EBSCO Discovery Service will now have the option to access WorldCat data through EDS and access holdings information for their library, their resource sharing partners as profiled in WorldCat, and all libraries with holdings in WorldCat. Among other benefits that this partnership brings, libraries will be able to use EBSCO Discovery Service to facilitate interlibrary loan (ILL) via OCLC.

OCLC will make records from OAIster, a union catalog of some 25 million records representing open access resources, available to all EBSCO Discovery Service users. OCLC will also make records from ArchiveGrid, an online service that provides access to detailed archival collection descriptions, available to ArchiveGrid subscribers through the EBSCO Discovery Service.

This agreement continues OCLC’s efforts, on behalf of its member libraries, to make WorldCat data available where it is needed in order to facilitate broad access to library collections and services. EBSCO and OCLC will work together over the next few months on an implementation plan and timeline for enabling access.

Source: OCLC

EBSCO Discovery Service Expands With Content from ingentaconnect

Resources from ingentaconnect to be added to the EDS Base Index include more than 5,200 scholarly academic journals from more than 200 publishers. The addition of these resources marks a trend of rapidly growing content available to EDS users. ingentaconnect joins a long list of publishers and other content partners who are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content.

Because the service builds on the foundation provided by the EBSCOhost platform, libraries gain a full user experience for discovering their collections/OPAC—which is not typical in the discovery space. Further still, in the many universities and other libraries where EBSCOhost is the most-used platform for premium research, users are not asked to change their pathways or habits for searching.

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.

The EDS Base Index 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 and 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.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

SirsiDynix Announces SirsiDynix Portfolio Digital Asset Management

With the Portfolio solution, libraries are empowered to do the following:

• Gain relevance beyond the library community by exposing digital content to web crawlers through OAI-PMH compliance
• Provide full-spectrum search results and enable access to previously unsearchable items through in-text (OCR) search and optional harvesting of library-selected websites or external resources
• Localize record-keeping with customizable metadata fields, and ability to cross-link an unlimited number of records for easy reference
• Organize and share multimedia collections including PDFs, video, audio, web pages and more, and preserve historical collections with support for major standards for the archivist
• Restrict or limit access to protected assets, item-by-item or batch, through the Portfolio platform’s accountability control settings. Optional access control and authentication management features can also accommodate different viewing privileges by individual user, group, or location.

In a tight budget year for libraries everywhere, digital collections enable libraries to tap existing resources to bring more to users—providing value and new venues for connecting with patrons. For more information on the Portfolio system, visit www.sirsidynix.com/products/portfolio.

Source: SirsiDynix

JSTOR and Serials Solutions Partner to Enhance Discoverability of Resources

With more than 1,300 scholarly journals and more than 1 million images, letters, and other primary sources, JSTOR is one of the world’s most trusted sources for academic content, serving nearly 7,000 institutions in 159 countries. With this pilot, JSTOR users from institutions subscribing to the Summon service will be recognized through IP authentication, prompting the appearance of their institutions’ Summon search box on JSTOR. That will allow them to run a search across the other resources available at their institution’s library, providing an uninterrupted and accelerated research process.

The pilot will involve a small number of institutions and will run through June 2011. The goal is to make the service available to all Summon subscribing libraries thereafter.

Source: Serials Solutions

Continuum Titles Join Oxford University Press Digital Reference Shelf

Rob Tebb, online marketing manager, Continuum, said, “The Digital Reference Shelf is an exciting resource for libraries, and we’re delighted to have the opportunity to publish online editions of our reference titles through this innovative platform.” Continuum is an independent academic publisher, focusing on the humanities, education, and religion. Its output includes textbooks, supplementary course books, research monographs, reference works and professional books, as well as related general non-fiction.

The Continuum titles available in the Digital Reference Shelf include the following:

• The Biographical Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy
• The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers
• The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature
• The Encyclopedia of the History of American Management
• The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre
• The Biographical Dictionary of British Economists
• The Biographical Dictionary of American Economists

Source: Semantico