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Weekly News Digest
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April 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.
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GSA and GPO Partner With Google to Offer Free Government Publications
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is working with the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and GPO’s relationship with the Google Book Partner Program to make popular government publications available for free electronic download through Google. The program is making available 100 consumer-related Federal Government publications distributed through GSA’s Federal Citizen Information Center (FCIC) on Google Books.The public can view and download PDF copies of these publications on desktops, laptops, and various ereaders. The FCIC plans to add more consumer publications to the program. The public can also order hard copies of the publications on Google Books and through the GPO’s Online Bookstore. The FCIC will coordinate delivery through GPO’s Public Documents Distribution Center in Pueblo, Colo. “Our market research confirms that 74% of the public wants government information both online and in printed form. We want to embrace the changing environment and provide important consumer-related information where people want to consume it—on their computers, on their mobile devices, or on paper,” said Dave McClure, GSA associate administrator of the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies. Since 1970, GSA’s Federal Citizen Information Center has been distributing Government consumer publications from GPO’s Public Documents Distribution Center in Pueblo on topics like staying healthy, understanding government benefits, managing finances, and saving money, avoiding scams, and identity theft. The center is responsible for processing and distributing orders for consumer publications. In the last 40 years, more than 800 million publications have been distributed worldwide. Source: U.S. Government Printing Office
ProQuest History Vault Debuts
ProQuest is unlocking the rich, primary source material it acquired with University Publications of America (UPA) through a new digital archive called ProQuest History Vault. Its first three modules are being released this year and will provide researchers with an unfiltered view into the Black Freedom Struggle and U.S. foreign policy during the Vietnam War era. Modules are planned to complement course curricula and these modules match two of the most widely-studied topics in 20th-century history.ProQuest History Vault marks the first time primary source materials from University Publications of America (UPA) have been available in a digital format. Digitization allows not only remote access, but also enables single source access and simplified searching of this extraordinarily varied historical content. Original archival arrangement schemes are preserved, and metadata records and PDFs of the original documents are packaged together at the archival folder level, replicating the user experience of browsing through archival boxes to find research treasures. Records from federal agencies, letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, and diaries are among the unique resources. Further, ProQuest History Vault is being developed with controlled vocabulary indexing and full-text, faceted searching that enables researchers to drill to targeted results. Users can also opt to page through an entire collection to explore at a more relaxed pace. Major events in history are indexed and those records are accessible through a timeline of events to help put individual documents into historical context. The first two modules of ProQuest History Vault cover the breadth of The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century from the perspective of the men, women, and sometimes even children, who waged one of the most inspiring social movements in American history. Spanning from the founding of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs at the close of the 19th century to the riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King police brutality case in the last decade of the 20th century, the first Black Freedom Struggle module consists of 37 collections of records from federal government agencies. The second Black Freedom Struggle module is comprised of 36 collections of personal papers and organizational records, including those of Claude A. Barnett, the founder of the Associated Negro Press, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The third module in ProQuest History Vault consists of collections on the Vietnam War and American Foreign Policy from 1960–1975. It covers U.S. involvement in the region from the early days of the Kennedy administration, through the escalation of the war during the Johnson administration, to the final resolution of the war at the Paris Peace Talks and the evacuation of U.S. troops in 1973. ProQuest History Vault will eventually house 23 million pages of digitized archival content that supports African American Studies, Women’s Studies, American History, and Political Science, among other areas. Institutions can build their collections over time to provide an unparalleled research experience for their students and faculty who would otherwise be unable to access materials held at geographically-dispersed archives. Source: ProQuest
Thomson Reuters Introduces the New Web of Knowledge
Thomson Reuters announced the launch of the new Web of Knowledge. This latest release of the scholarly research and citation data resource delivers better functionality and new features. Introduced more than a decade ago, Web of Knowledge has steadily evolved into an integrated and powerful search and discovery platform that delivers access to scholarly publications in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. It also provides metrics and analytical tools for assessing research influence and impact.The new Web of Knowledge builds upon this legacy and introduces more highly requested features for a new generation of librarians and researchers, including enhanced search capabilities for more accurate results and improved data management and analysis tools. Key features of the new Web of Knowledge include the following: - Full integration of ResearcherID with Web of Science
- Greater depth of citation resources with the fully integrated BIOSIS Citation Index and Chinese Science Citation Database
- New citation summary report allows users to intuitively navigate multiple resources
- Faster search and improved recall as a result of automated query expansion
- The improved Analyze tool, making sense of your entire search—whether you retrieve hundreds or thousands of results
Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge provides access to the world’s largest citation databases, including Web of Science, which covers more than 100 years of research in more than 12,000 of the highest impact journals, and more than 110,000 conference proceedings records from around the world. Source: Thomson Reuters
Alexander Street Press Announces Video Publishing Plan for 2011
Electronic publisher Alexander Street Press announced plans to launch an integrated online repository of academic video titles. Already the publisher of 10 distinct, discipline-specific streaming video collections containing more than 8,000 films, Alexander Street intends to expand its offerings rapidly—to more than 10,000 titles in 2011 and to 20,000 by 2013.The new platform, Academic Video Online Complete, will also make it possible for subscribers to cross-search all of their Alexander Street videos from a single interface. New collections will include Art and Architecture, Religion and Philosophy, Law and Criminal Justice, Politics and Current Affairs, World Language and Literature, Psychology, Health, General Science, Business and Economics, and Diversity Studies. Later this year the publisher will offer individual streaming title options as well. As part of its rapid expansion, Alexander Street also announced the launch of three new video collections, each available to libraries and educational institutions via annual subscription or one-time purchase: Filmakers Library Online; Education in Video; and Counseling and Therapy in Video, Volume II. The result of Alexander Street’s acquisition in January of the academic video distributor Filmakers Library, Filmakers Library Online is a continually growing online collection of issue-based documentaries and independent films. Multidisciplinary in scope, the collection includes a wide range of subjects. It presents points of view and historical and current experiences from diverse cultures and traditions worldwide. The collection currently includes more than 900 films, and additional titles will be added regularly. An online collection of videos for the training and professional development of K-12 educators, Education in Video will quickly grow to contain more than 1,000 video titles totaling 750 hours of teaching demonstrations, lectures, documentaries, and primary-source footage of students and teachers in actual classrooms. The third collection just launched, Counseling and Therapy in Video: Volume II, is a supplement to one of Alexander Street’s best-selling resources. Together, the two volumes of Counseling and Therapy in Video provide a large and rich online collection of video for the study of social work, psychotherapy, psychology, and psychiatric counseling. The second volume of Counseling and Therapy in Video includes more than 140 videos, growing soon to more than 300; the first volume includes more than 350 titles. Soon, the two volumes will be fully cross-searchable for institutions that subscribe to both. Currently the publisher is offering a one-month Sneak Peek access to all three new video collections. Libraries and educators who register at http://alexanderstreet.com/newvideo2011.htm will receive a username and password good through April 30, 2011. Source: Alexander Street Press
Copyright Clearance Center Launches Get It Now for Academic Institutions
Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a not-for-profit organization and provider of licensing solutions, announced the launch of Get It Now. The service complements academic institutions’ interlibrary loan (ILL) borrowing services by providing immediate fulfillment of full-text articles from unsubscribed journals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through a single, cost-effective, and easy-to-use application, integrated directly into a user’s workflow.Get It Now was developed with the participation of The California State University system and the Information Delivery Services (IDS) Project at The State University of New York at Geneseo. It includes content from leading journal publishers, including Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Wolters Kluwer, Nature Publishing Group, and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). Additional publishers are being added on an ongoing basis. If patrons wish to read articles from a journal not currently subscribed to by their institution’s library, they can either choose to borrow the articles via traditional ILL or click the Get It Now link within their search results and have the content emailed to them. Average turnaround time for Get It Now articles is less than five minutes. According to a recent study in the journal College and Research Libraries, the average time for a traditional ILL delivery is between five and seven days. Get It Now delivers high-quality, accessible, full-color PDFs of journal content in minutes. It eliminates the need for credit card transactions by offering monthly institutional invoicing and has several safeguards in place to prevent misuse. Get It Now can also be accessed by librarians via an “Addon” in OCLC’s ILLiad application. Get It Now supplements CCC’s Annual Copyright License for Academic Institutions, allowing institutions that hold the license to obtain content through the Get It Now service and share it internally in many ways, including email, postings to e-reserves and course management systems, inclusion in coursepacks or for classroom handouts and scholarly research. Source: Copyright Clearance Center
LexisNexis Announces New IP Research Technology With Semantic Search “Brain”
LexisNexis announced the debut of a new semantic search “brain” for its full complement of intellectual property (IP) research products. The next-generation semantic search technology identifies the meaning of multiple concepts within a single search query to help users zero in on core concepts faster and make fewer revisions to their search queries. The technology will power the patent research and retrieval service LexisNexis TotalPatent, the automated patent application and analysis product LexisNexis PatentOptimizer, and IP research across patent and non-patent literature conducted on the flagship lexis.com online legal research service.Semantic search uses the science of meaning in language (“semantics”) to produce highly relevant search results. LexisNexis launched its semantic search technology 18 months ago, significantly enhancing the search process for patent researchers through technology that delivers results based on an analysis of the meaning of the language used in search queries—not just the words themselves. The new semantic search technology takes this science to the next level by enhancing its ability to identify multiple concepts contained within a single search query. Thus, if a patent researcher asks the LexisNexis search engine to find information about a complex subject, the new semantic brain will actually identify various possible ideas contained in that request and return related concepts for each idea in their query. The researcher can then review the concepts suggested, assign relative importance by weighting them, eliminate concepts that aren’t related, and even add more concepts they think might be useful to the search project. LexisNexis also introduced a series of enhancements to its TotalPatent service. The most notable addition is a new “Visualize & Compare” tool that allows users to compare and analyze any two or three result sets or lists of patents, regardless of the underlying search mechanism, for example a comparison between a Boolean search result and a semantic search result. The new comparison capability not only highlights documents that were uniquely surfaced in one query or list versus another, but also serves as an important tool to assist researchers in analyzing and improving their overall search strategy and queries to find the most precise documents. The comparison tool will also give patent researchers greater confidence that they have executed the most comprehensive search possible, thereby lowering the risk of missing crucial documents. Source: LexisNexis
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Brandi Scardilli
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