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Weekly News Digest

March 7, 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.

IEEE and Access Innovations to Re-Index Xplore Digital Library

Currently, Xplore’s electronic library includes 2,828,776 documents, of which about 2.1 million (74 %) are IEEE publications. IEEE Xplore’s additional articles come from IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology), the AIP/AVS Applied Physics Library, and the IBM Journal of Research and Development.

This is the seventh major collaboration between IEEE and Access Innovations. Beginning in 2006, Access completed a 6-year update of IEEE’s thesaurus.

To complete the latest project, Access Innovations used an implementation of Data Harmony Metadata Extractor to determine the article’s content type and then built an improved rules base to identify content types in order for each type to be indexed in a specific way using the IEEE Thesaurus.

Using M.A.I. (Machine Aided Indexer) provided highly accurate, rules-based indexing (text categorization) of the content types. M.A.I. is part of Access Innovations’ Data Harmony suite of knowledge management products. Access also reviewed term usage throughout the IEEE Thesaurus. Finally, Access suggested ways to continue to improve the IEEE Thesaurus going forward by providing gap analysis to identify areas not covered specifically and term overuse reporting.

Source: Access Innovations, Inc.

Oxford University Scientists Launch Free Collaborative Software

“At the moment researchers are using a dizzying array of different applications to communicate and collaborate,” said colwiz chief scientist professor David Gavaghan of Oxford University. “These might include Google Apps, Microsoft Live Services, LinkedIn, Yammer, and Social Text. But because these are separate applications they don’t do everything and don’t always talk to each other, and this slows researchers down. colwiz replaces this hotchpotch with an integrated suite of tools custom-built for fast and efficient management of the research process.”

At the heart of the colwiz platform is a publication library that enables users to manage publications using both a desktop application (for Windows, Linux and Mac) and a version ‘in the cloud’ that can be accessed from anywhere over the Internet. This is combined with communications and collaboration tools for brainstorming, research tasks, and schedule management.

Members of academic institutions from U.S. and U.K. universities can sign up for free and start using the colwiz platform. There are plans to extend the support to further academic institutions, government R&D organizations and commercial enterprises in the near future.

Source: University of Oxford Press Office

EBSCO Publishing to Release Chemical Hazard Information Library

Chemical Hazard Information Library comprises more than 130 collections providing continually updated hazard and reproductive risk data on tens of thousands of chemicals. This content is a critical resource for researchers studying the effects of hazardous substances on humans and the environment, and for professionals who are responsible for regulating and managing chemical hazards in occupational environments including laboratories, clinical settings, and industrial workplaces. The database also facilitates the instructional and learning process for faculty and students by providing data in a clear, informative format.

The collections include content from a wide range of international sources including:

•                     Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

•                     World Health Organization (WHO)

•                     National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health (NIOSH)

•                     European Chemicals Agency (ECHA)

•                     National Library of Medicine (NLM)

•                     Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA)

•                     International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS)

•                     European Commission

•                     Department of Energy (DOE)

•                     National Toxicology Program (NTP)

•                     Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR)

•                     Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

•                     European Chemicals Agency

•                     International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)

•                     National Toxicology Program (NTP)

•                     European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)

•                     European Commission Scientific Committees

•                     National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)

The extensive, up-to-date content, as well as the functionality in CHIL, saves users time and effort by providing them with a consolidated and comprehensive resource to quickly and easily find the toxicology and chemical hazard information they need. Notable features include the EXPERTIndex, which allows users to search and access content with precise relevance. Also included is the ChemID Enhanced feature, which enables users to easily access pertinent information on a myriad of chemical substances.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Grovo Launches Premium Online Training Service

For a monthly fee of $19, or $190 annually, organizations can gain unlimited access to advanced training and business content in the areas of productivity, online marketing, and social media. Grovo’s Premium content provides in-depth, ongoing training on the sites and applications organizations use most.

At launch, Grovo will feature premium lessons for more than a dozen sites, including Basecamp, Facebook Pages, Google Apps and Analytics, Retargeter, and Twitter for Business. New Premium content is released every week, and Premium users receive regular newsletters highlighting new sites and updates to existing sites.

With the site redesign, Grovo has opened much of its content to the public for free. Grovo users now have unlimited access to hundreds of lessons covering covering social media, online shopping, entertainment, productivity and web essentials. Users can also learn with quizzes, takeaways, and glossary terms, and utilize Grovo’s new activity feed, which allows users to track their progress and revisit content.

Grovo features a new, intelligent viewing experience that positions every Grovo video lesson on a dedicated page designed to help users retain knowledge, access related content, save key points, and learn related terms. Grovo content is now engineered to live anywhere on the web. Users can post or embed video lessons on a site or blog, and like, share or Tweet Grovo content to friends and colleagues.

Grovo currently features more than 400 lessons spanning dozens of sites. All content is produced in-house by Grovo’s expert team of writers, editors, and voiceover talent, and is constantly updated. Grovo expects its library to grow to at least 2,000 new and revised lessons by 2012.

Grovo users can easily request coverage for sites they use most or would like to know better. The most-requested sites on Grovo are surfaced publicly, and can be promoted by the Grovo community.

Source: Grovo

Northern Light Introduces Dashboard Tool for SinglePoint Portals

SinglePoint dashboards complement Northern Light’s SinglePoint strategic research portal, a turnkey enterprise search application that provides centralized search, analysis, and access for diverse sources of internal, external, and licensed market intelligence. SinglePoint portals are used by many of the world’s leading research-driven companies in IT, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, financial services and other industries for competitive intelligence and market research, strategic planning, product development, marketing, and sales.

A SinglePoint dashboard can be designed to instantly publish and highlight breaking news and research on key horizontal business concepts, such as markets, products, thought leaders, customers, competitors, and financial results. It also can be configured for industry-specific topics, such as therapeutic areas and diseases, which would be important to pharmaceutical companies. Each dashboard can present multiple headline feeds and publish strategic information, key links, charts, and images.

The SinglePoint dashboard tool offers a set of features that simplifies design and administration of one or more dashboards within an organization. For example, the dashboard tool lets administrators:

• Create and highlight saved searches and organize them in an expandable accordion menu
• Publish key research findings, links to important resources, important graphs and charts, or embed flash objects
• Include headlines covering multiple high-priority business topics and industry issues

One dashboard comes standard with each SinglePoint portal. A SinglePoint portal can optionally include multiple dashboards optimized for specific executives, business units, product lines, sales teams, or research areas. These individual dashboards can be shown or hidden based on user information like title, country, or employee code. Northern Light can create dashboards based on an organization’s business requirements and maintain the content and searches to make sure the information published is always complete and up to date. Administrators can still make changes on the fly as required.

Source: Northern Light

Mendeley Announces $10,001 Contest for App Developers

The contest officially opened to submissions on March 8 and closes August 31, 2011. Winners will be announced on October 31. The winning application receives the grand prize of $10,001, and the runner-up gets $1,000. You can find the full details on the Mendeley API Binary Battle page. The judges are Juan Enriquez, Tim O’Reilly, James Powell, Dr. Werner Vogels, and John Wilbanks.

Applications will be judged by the panel on the following criteria:

• How active is your application? We’ll look at your API key usage.
• How popular/useful is the app? We’ll look at the number of sign ups on Mendeley and your application, and we’ll also have an eye on Twitter.
• Does the application increase collaboration and/or transparency? We’ll look at how much your application contributes to making research more open.
• How cool is your app? Does it make our jaws drop?

Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.

Source: Mendeley