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Weekly News Digest

November 18, 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.

Palgrave Macmillan Updates The Statesman’s Yearbook

An indispensable reference tool it has been published continuously since 1864, through two world wars, without missing an edition. It was ranked by Library Journal as one of the top 20 best reference resources of the millennium.

In this update Palgrave Macmillan has opened up the content by allowing free access to the beginning of each entry. This acts as a preview for users, who can sample the content before purchasing a subscription and also provides a far larger volume of information to be indexed by Google, making the site more visible in search results.

A complete redesign of the homepage includes recommended links into the content to demonstrate to new readers the wide scope of information provided. A streamlined login process allows users to access the information they are looking for more directly.

Source: Semantico

Urban Libraries Seek Local Governments as Partners in Sustainability

Both library directors and local government officials will benefit from the direction of this report, as it clearly examines the collaboration of agencies and provides examples of how public libraries and local governments are achieving the triple bottom line components: economic vitality, environmental quality, and social equity.

ULC’s research highlights the library’s solid community connection, its reputation as a highly-trusted institution, and distinguishes the library as an ideal partner when trying to build a sustainable society. The findings of this report were garnered from leading edge practices of local officials and ULC leading library directors across North America.

The purpose of ULC’s report is to qualify the public library as a vehicle for sustainability and to communicate the actions local governments and libraries are taking together to create sustainable communities. ULC identifies the public library as a major player in a community’s infrastructure and considers it an asset to local government as they can draw on the library for community outreach.

In order to generate sustainability awareness within a community, partnering of the public library and the local government is needed. Not only will the community members become more active and engaged in sustainable efforts, agency roles will be strengthened and elevated within the district. The report positions ULC member libraries as local anchors for economic, environmental, and equitable development in North America.

Source: Urban Libraries Council

U.S. GPO Content Available Through EBSCO Discovery Service

The U.S Government Printing Office provides publishing and dissemination services for the official and authentic government publications to Congress, federal agencies, federal depository libraries, and the American public. GPO resources that will be available through EDS include federal publications from the following catalogues:

• Congressional Serial Set Catalog
• Congressional Publications
• GPO Access Publications
• Internet Publications
• Periodicals
• Serials

The U.S Government Printing Office joins a long list of publishers and other content partners who are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content. 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

FT Press Launches 200 Titles on Apple’s iBookstore

FT Press provides need-to-know content in the areas of business, investing, personal finance, human resources, management & leadership, and marketing & social media. Among the available titles are the following:

• Doing Both, by Inder Sidhu
• The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by C.K. Prahalad
• Outsmart! by Jim Champy
• Seeds of Destruction by Glenn Hubbard and Peter Navarro
• Financial Shock by Mark Zandi
• Powerful Social Media, Branding, PR Practices (Collection) FT Press Delivers

These titles offer a convenient reading experience, allowing readers to resize fonts, make notes, and search the book easily to find the specific content they need. The iBookstore enables FT Press customers to better manage their businesses, careers, and finances, no matter where they are—at home, at work, or traveling.

Source: FT Press

Berkshire Publishing Collection on Credo Reference

Berkshire Publishing specializes in international relations, cross-cultural communication, global business and economic information, and environmental sustainability. Three key examples of the Berkshire titles that will be available for subscription or perpetual purchase on the Credo Reference platform:

• Berkshire Encyclopedia of China – Offering 800 authoritative articles from well-known scholars both in China as well as in the West, and extensively illustrated from museum and library archives, this is the first major Western reference work to cover China from such a Chinese point of view.
• Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability – In 10 volumes, experts around the world provide authoritative coverage of the growing body of knowledge about ways to restore the planet, providing a balanced, trustworthy perspective on the global environmental challenges in the 21st century together with current information on business innovation, public policy, and global cooperation.
• Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History 2e – Edited by the renowned historian William H. McNeill and other senior scholars and written by the world’s leading world historians, this new 6-volume set includes 1,200 color illustrations and offers the “big picture” perspective that is so valuable in teaching world history.

Also to be included are Berkshire’s global sports titles, its publications on global terrorism, and Global Perspectives on the United States.

Source: Credo Reference

National Library of Medicine Announces MedlinePlus Connect

MedlinePlus Connect accepts requests from EHRs based on diagnoses (problem codes) and medications. NLM has mapped MedlinePlus health topics to two standard diagnostic coding systems used in EHRs. When any EHR submits a request to MedlinePlus Connect, the service returns the closest matching health topic(s) as a response.

MedlinePlus Connect also links any EHR system to drug information written especially for patients. EHR systems can send MedlinePlus Connect a request for a medication code, and the service will return link(s) to the most appropriate drug information. MedlinePlus drug information is the AHFS Consumer Medication Information and is licensed for use on MedlinePlus from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, ASHP, Inc.

The API for using this service conforms to the HL7 Context-Aware Knowledge Retrieval (Infobutton) Knowledge Request URL-Based Implementation specification which you can download from this page, http://www.hl7.org/dstucomments/index_expired.cfm. NLM is working on adding laboratory test responses to MedlinePlus Connect. It will also support an XML-based web service at a future date.

Source: National Library of Medicine