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Weekly News Digest

April 18, 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.

Elsevier Discontinuing 2collab Service

Elsevier will discontinue its 2collab research and collaboration service as of April 15. Users are being advised to export their bookmarks and are given specific instructions on how to do so.

In a letter to users posted on the site, the 2collab team states, “[W]e have determined that we should focus our resources on providing optimal integration with and support for the leading bibliographic management and social-bookmarking tools currently on the market…As a result, we are discontinuing the 2collab.com service on April 15. This means we can concentrate on developing the SciVerse suite of products and applications.”

2collab launched in 2007 as a collaboration platform designed specifically for researchers in the science, technical, and medical communities.

Source: Elsevier

AcademicPub Launches Custom Publishing Option for Higher Ed

AcademicPub, a unit of SharedBook, Inc., has launched the first custom publishing option for the real time delivery of copyright-cleared course materials to the higher education community. AcademicPub is targeted to faculty and administrators who desire to create custom course materials at a reasonable price for students, by combining authoritative materials from 21 academic publishers with web content, as well as material the educators create themselves.

The proprietary browser-based service enables a faculty member to review the searchable AcademicPub Content Library by discipline or sub-discipline and, when presented with a plethora of choices, to take advantage of the AcademicPub recommendation engine that makes content more discoverable by identifying materials in use by one’s peers as well as recommendations from publishers within the Content Library as to materials most widely adopted. Already, the AcademicPub Content Library contains more than 100,000 units of articles, textbook chapters, scholarly research, and cases.

The AcademicPub Content Library, which began to be populated in late January 2011 with six content providers, has more than tripled its partnership rolls in the 3 months since, adding respected partners such as EBSCO, Foreign Affairs, Harvard Business Publishing, and the latest, the American Institute of Physics. A just-completed partnership with Textbook Media makes a wealth of textbooks in core 101-level courses available by chapter. A complete and current list of content partners can be found here.

SharedBook’s technology platform assembles, composes, prices, and delivers custom books for educators, consumers, online publishers, and enterprises. AcademicPub, built specifically for educators, allows for immediate creation of custom course materials and features real-time copyright clearance, and the ability to include materials from anywhere—web articles, professor-authored material, or AcademicPub Library content. Headquartered in New York since 2004, SharedBook is privately held.

AIP Publishing, a division of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), announced that it has signed a distribution agreement with SharedBook, which makes AIP’s catalog of journals available through SharedBook’s AcademicPub platform. AIP Publishing is the first physical science publisher to make its content available on AcademicPub. Under the agreement, AcademicPub users will have copyright-cleared access to AIP’s 13 scholarly journals, including Journal of Applied Physics, Applied Physics Letters, and The Journal of Chemical Physics.

Sources: AcademicPub and AIP Publishing

Critical Mention to Monitor BBC TV and Radio Content

Critical Mention has expanded into the U.K. with the addition of monitoring of BBC News TV and radio content. The search platform already ingests content from more than 1,000 media sources around the world, including from all 210 U.S. television markets, Canada, and the Middle East. The addition of the BBC is designed to position the platform as the world’s most powerful and comprehensive capture network in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., digitizing and indexing in real-time more than 30 hours of TV and radio content from around the world every 60 seconds.

By delivering real time alerts from the world’s largest broadcaster to the desktops of business intelligence professionals, Critical Mention clients can now react and make business decisions in real-time with more information at their fingertips. BBC content will initially be offered to Critical Mention’s existing client base, and then the company will begin to offer its services in the U.K. directly.

Critical Media and its core products, Critical Mention, ClipSyndicate, and Syndicaster, enable the monitoring, identification, distribution and monetization of broadcast content via the web in real-time.

Source: Critical Mention

Boopsie Launches BookCheck—Mobile Check-Out for Libraries

Mobile technology provider, Boopsie, announced the availability of BookCheck, a new feature that allows library patrons to check out books and other materials using a mobile phone. Cuyahoga County Public Library is the first to offer Boopsie BookCheck. BookCheck is available for Android device users. Support for iPhone and select Blackberry devices will follow shortly.

Boopsie says it is currently the only mobile solution provider to offer mobile checkout capability. Leveraging barcode-scanning technology, the new feature allows library patrons to retrieve basic catalog information (real-time access from the library’s ILS system) and content from third-party sources such as book reviews, plot summaries, and author bios from anywhere in the library using their mobile phone. Library cardholders can then check out the book with one click of a button.

Built to take advantage of the most advanced device technology, Boopsie applications offer real-time ILS integration with popular systems such as Innovative Interfaces, SirsiDynix, ExLibris, among others and provide full support for non-catalog content and services such as GPS-aware library location finder and access to reading lists, event calendars, and social networking channels.

Additional information on Boopsie for Libraries can be found at http://www.boopsie.com/libraries.html.

Founded in 2006 and located in Silicon Valley, Calif., Boopsie is a provider of mobile solutions for universities and libraries worldwide. Boopsie’s solutions are fully hosted and downloadable to all mobile devices. Customers include Seattle Public, Los Angeles Public, University of Toronto, University of Notre Dame, Brown University, University of Gent in Belgium, and University of Auckland in New Zealand, among others. Boopsie is American Library Association’s mobile partner for a range of conferences including ALA 2011 and the preferred mobile solution for a number of consortia.

Source: Boopsie

New Reporting Features in EBSCONET ERM Essentials

EBSCONET ERM Essentials, EBSCO’s eresource management system (ERM), now includes a highly customizable reporting feature that allows librarians to build, save, and share a broad variety of eresource reports. With flexible report options, librarians can personalize reports to see the specific data they need. To help with day-to-day collection management, favorite reports can be saved and made available for other staff to run at any time.

Creating a new report is as easy as:

  • Choosing an existing report from any of the six report categories that cover details of the collection, orders and licenses
  • Selecting which fields to include and in what order
  • Setting the criteria to limit the report
  • Picking the preferred sort order
  • Naming the report and saving it to the reports menu to provide other staff members with instant access

Reports are generated in real-time with no limit on the number of reports that can be created and saved. Librarians can report on virtually any aspect of their collection, including holdings details, supply terms, license details, terms of use, status, and workflow information and more.

This enhanced reporting feature adds to the already available tools offered in ERM Essentials to manage order details, streamline workflows, and keep better track of trials, all with the help of automatic population of data from the EBSCO Integrated Knowledge Base for titles ordered through EBSCO.

ERM Essentials significantly lessens the time-consuming activities of data entry and maintenance, allowing librarians to focus valuable time on other tasks. ERM Essentials shares vital eresource data and integrates seamlessly with other EBSCO Complete Management and Discovery Solutions, including EBSCONET, EBSCO A-to-Z, LinkSource, EBSCOhost research databases, EBSCO Discovery Service and more.

Source: EBSCO

Export Your LibraryThing Library as MARC Records

Although not suited for even a “small” public or college library, LibraryThing sometimes serves as the system of choice for the very smallest institutions—schools, churches, non-profits and so forth. Some of these institutions want to preserve an “upward path” to a traditional, low-end Integrated Library System (ILS). LibraryThing does what they want for now, but may not forever. To meet this need, LibraryThing has just released a feature that will allow users to export their LibraryThing library as MARC (USMARC, UTF-8) records. Users will find the Export as MARC option now on the Import/Export page, accessible via the “More” tab when they are logged in.

Here are the details as posted on the Thing-ology Blog:

For books in your library that you added from library sources (such as the Library of Congress or Overcat), we have the original MARC record. In this case, the MARC export feature will give you back the record you searched for and added.

For books in your library that you added from non-library sources, or added manually, you have a choice: fuzzy records, or non-fuzzy records. If you choose the fuzzy option, where we have a MARC record that matches your book closely (on the basis of ISBN or other control number), we will give you the library MARC record. If you choose the non-fuzzy option, or you choose the fuzzy option but we don’t have a match to give you, we will instead create a MARC record from scratch. Such records aren’t completely “up to snuff” as cataloging records, but they may serve some libraries’ purposes.

In both cases, your LibraryThing tag, review, ratings, and collections data are added to the 9xx fields.

The technical details are available here.

Source: LibraryThing



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