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Weekly News Digest

January 31, 2011 — 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.

H.W. Wilson Expands Art Full Text

Geographic scope has also been expanded, with more European, Asian, and Latin American sources. Many of the additions also enhance the database’s retrospective coverage—some of them making decades of back content available in full text. (Art Full Text also indexes and abstracts more than 580 journals, including all the titles represented in full text.) Art Full Text has also added links to more than 8,500 full-text artist biographies (many including photos) from the Wilson biography database Biography Reference Bank.

Art Full Text recently grew by more than 13,000 searchable records of graduate student dissertations, including substantive abstracts. The dissertations date back as far as 1997, and cover subjects in art, art history, archaeology, film, and related studies. A new “dissertations/theses” option has been added to the Art Full Text “document type” menu, allowing users to narrow their search to those items.

Translate Art Full Text articles into any of 13 languages, with the recent addition of Swedish. (WilsonWeb full-text translation options also include Arabic, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.) The “My WilsonWeb” individual user accounts are now also more versatile, allowing users to create folders to organize their “My WilsonWeb” notes, as well as email notes from within “My WilsonWeb.” WilsonWeb’s ReadSpeaker text-to-speech converter (which lets users listen to articles as streaming audio, or download as MP3s) now allows users to highlight sections of text for listening and regulate the speed of narration—a boon for users who struggle with English.

Source: H.W. Wilson

Wolters Kluwer Enhances IntelliConnect Research Platform

New enhancements to the IntelliConnect home page make reading, browsing, and navigating even quicker and easier for users. New resizing commands allow for quick and easy adjustment of the panels. The redesigned divider tool allows for manual adjustment of panel widths. The toolbar automatically fits the width of the left panel so users never lose access to commands. In addition, up to 10 tabs are now available, stretching across the full width of the display, with each search resulting in a new tab.

In response to customer feedback, the Browse tree is now wider by default letting users explore their subscription content with less need to move the divider bar. Searching for specific information through the Browse tree has become easier with new functions to pinpoint specific content titles. One click of the new “Expand All” (+) or “Collapse All” (-) icons on the left side of the home page expands or contracts the content search list, saving users time and effort. Selected content is now also available under multiple browse topics providing quick access to materials.

By leveraging new technology, Wolters Kluwer Law & Business has elevated the accuracy of search results and increased the relevancy of search rankings, enabling IntelliConnect users to reach faster, more precise results. Users now have access to a new integrated citation search that allows them to enter a citation reference within search expressions and have their results include both the cited documents, as well as those documents which meet their search criteria. A new filter and a “View All” command allow users to quickly access the citation documents. New pre-search filters also allow users to drill further down in their search results.

To learn more about these IntelliConnect enhancements, view a product demonstration here (https://www.brainshark.com/brainshark/vu/view.asp?pi=681235585).

Wolters Kluwer Law & Business is a global provider of legal and business compliance information, software and services, with products under the names of Aspen Publishers, CCH, Kluwer Law International, and Loislaw (wolterskluwerlb.com).

Source: Wolters Kluwer Law & Business

arXiv Now Part of EBSCO Discovery Service

arXiv serves as an archive for more than 650,000 electronic preprints of scientific papers. The metadata from arXiv is a valuable resource for those with interests or research needs in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics.

arXiv joins a long list of publishers and other content partners who are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content, such as: the British Library, Baker & Taylor, NewsBank, Readex, LexisNexis, JSTOR, Alexander Street Press, Oxford University Press, American Psychological Association, ABC-CLIO, ingentaconnect, Mergent Inc., Government Printing Office, ECONIS and for mutual customers Web of Science & H.W. Wilson—a growing list of information sources available to EBSCO Discovery Service users.

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 a library’s collection.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Springer Books Now Available for Online Book Review

After filling out a simple registration form, reviewers receive access to their selected online book review copies for 6 months, and are allowed to review up to ten books simultaneously. Books that have not yet been published can be reserved and reviewers are notified by email when they are available. Reviewers can upload their published reviews and once the date of appearance has been confirmed, the reviewer can order a print copy of the book free of charge.

In addition to Springer books, review copies of titles from Humana Press, Current Medicine Group, and Birkhäuser Boston are also available online. The next step will be to make Springer’s German-language books available for online book reviews. This service is part of Springer’s epublishing strategy. 

Source: Springer

LexisNexis Introduces LexisNexis Litigation Profile Suite

According to a 2010 survey of corporate and law firm attorneys conducted by LexisNexis, 84% of lawyers consider it very important to conduct research on an expert that opposing counsel has retained in order to improve their litigation outcome. However, when it comes to learning more about an expert who has been hired by opposing counsel, only 23 percent rely on outside research in conducting their evaluations.

As the first product in a series of releases that will be part of the LexisNexis Litigation Profile Suite, LexisNexis Expert Witness Profiles is a web-based solution that addresses this issue by harnessing the largest and most comprehensive collection of information about expert witnesses in North America, which was developed for direct use by litigators. Built on the New Lexis technology platform, this rich set of content combined with easy to use analytical tools, enables users to more effectively evaluate and report on experts retained by opposing counsel or ones they may want to retain themselves.

Resources within LexisNexis Expert Witness Profiles include an authoritative, exclusive database of more than 1,000,000 records on 220,000-plus experts from IDEX, acquired by LexisNexis in 2008. The collection of information available to evaluate these experts includes transcripts from previous depositions and trials, resumes and CVs, verdicts and settlements in past cases, testimony challenges, news, publications, and Lexis Web searching.

Expert Witness Profiles also provides customers with the ability to manage the information they collect about experts by helping them aggregate volumes of data into single, easy to read reports. Interactive charts and graphs allow users to identify trends and meaningful information to assist them in shaping their case strategy. Users can also quickly illustrate how often an expert has been hired by plaintiff or defense counsel, the percentage of cases in which the expert has testified for the prevailing party, losing party, or in cases where there was a settlement, and the percentage breakdown of cases by area of law in which the expert was retained.

Users can add Expert Witness Profiles to their existing lexis.com subscription or order reports on a transactional basis for a flat fee by accessing www.lexis.com/profilesuite. More information about LexisNexis Expert Witness Profiles can be accessed at www.lexisnexis.com/expert-witness-profiles. Additional tools will be added to LexisNexis Litigation Profile Suite over time.

Source: LexisNexis

Aldiko Introduces Aldiko BookReader 2.0

Highlights of Aldiko 2.0 include the following features:

• Supports ePub and PDF ebook formats, as well as Adobe DRM
• A new ebook marketplace for you to access ebooks from different booksellers at one place
• Fully customizable reading experience: font type, font size, font and background colors, margin, alignment, line spacing, brightness, display orientation, and navigation control are all adjustable to fit your personal reading preference
• Rich features including bookmark, dictionary, full-text search, copy and paste, day/night themes, table of content, progress bar, hyphenation support, as well as sharing your favorite texts/quotes in a book
• An advanced library management system that enables you to sort books by different criteria as well as organize books by tags and collections
• A new import feature that makes it even easier for you to transfer all your ePub and PDF files to Aldiko and read them on the go.
• A “My Catalog” feature that allows you to add your own eBook catalogs
• Supporting ebooks from public libraries and enabling you to return your borrowed ebooks right within the app

Founded in 2009 in Hong Kong, Aldiko focuses on developing ebook reading software and solutions for mobile devices. Since its official launch in September 2009, the Aldiko Book Reader for Android has gained more than 2 million individual users from more than 200 countries. It’s also pre-installed in a number of Android Smartphones and tablets.

Source: Aldiko Ltd.