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Weekly News Digest

May 5, 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.

ebrary Launches Usage-Triggered Model for Short-Term Loans

ebrary’s new Short-Term Loans can be a library’s standalone cost-saving service, or used in conjunction with ebrary’s Patron Driven Acquisition program to offer an additional layer of mediation before titles are triggered for purchase. As YBP’s preferred ebook vendor, ebrary also makes Short-Term Loans available through YBP’s Demand Driven Acquisition service.

“Libraries that take advantage of this new model will receive a guaranteed return on their investment,” said Kevin Sayar, president of ebrary. “Not only can libraries provide researchers with on-demand access to authoritative e-books from leading publishers, they are only charged ten to thirty percent of list price determined by publishers if titles are actually triggered. We are pleased to be the first in the industry to offer usage-triggered Short-Term Loans.”

ebrary’s new Short-Term Loans are available for one or seven day periods. When the loan is triggered, libraries receive a notification and are given a number of flexible options including purchasing the title, making it available for purchase through Patron Driven Acquisition, or offering another Short-Term Loan. Libraries may offer up to three loans per title.

Source: ebrary

Innovative Announces Sierra Services Platform Development

Sierra has been designed with a modern Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) optimized to facilitate the following:

• Increased opportunities for open development with Innovative’s partners and customer libraries; flexibility in determining their priorities and development options; integration of web-based and web-scale services; and multiple device support (browser, mobile, tablet)
• Flexibility in deployment of resources from a single local Sierra instance to cloud-based hosting
• A platform for rapid application development, device adoption, and resource independence

Sierra’s SOA-based design has four layers, each of which exposes applicable services and provides an independent, distinct set of functionality. The services architected within each layer are loosely coupled with well-defined, highly functional interfaces.

Careful consideration has been given to planning the migration of existing Millennium libraries—they will see no loss of functionality when they migrate. The initial release—scheduled for late 2011—will be a major foundational release that includes exposure of the industry-compliant PostgreSQL database and Lucene index structures, as well as a new integrated staff application that simplifies the routine functions and provides a single interface from which critical library functions can be managed. The new application has an easy to use, attractive user interface optimized for library staff. Subsequent releases will include enhanced e-workflow functionality, continued API development, and the release of a thin web application.

For detailed coverage, see the blog post by Marshall Breeding, “Innovative Interfaces to Launch Sierra: A New-Generation Automation Platform.” He says, “The launch of Sierra comes at a critical time when the library automation industry is entering a new phase. Many new products that embrace new approaches to library automation are brewing…. Through its development of Sierra, Innovative has claimed a position among the ranks of these new systems and seems ready to take a new turn in the way that it creates software and interacts with its customer libraries.”

Source: Innovative Interfaces

Primary Sources From Accessible Archives Coming to EBSCO Discovery Service

Accessible Archives, Inc. is an electronic publisher of primary source full-text historical databases encompassing rich, comprehensive material found in leading historical periodicals, books, and newspapers. Accessible Archives content also provides unique historical elements reflecting broad views of American history and culture. Information includes eyewitness accounts of historical events, vivid descriptions of daily life, editorial observations, commerce as seen through advertisements, and genealogical records.

EBSCO Discovery Service users will have the ability to search the full text of Accessible Archives resources bringing an extended list of results alongside additional library resources. EDS 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.

Accessible Archives, Inc. joins a long list of publishers and other content partners who are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content. Unlimited Priorities Corp. is the exclusive sales and marketing agent for Accessible Archives and facilitated the negotiations for this agreement.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Gale Launches Gale World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean

With the new Gale World Scholar resources, Gale aims to provide a captivating and comprehensive picture of a particular region of the world, including insight into daily life, culture, traditions, its inhabitants, and a detailed chronicle of past and present from a historical and contemporary perspective—in a searchable, digital format.

Gale World Scholar includes primary source content from a network of U.S. and foreign libraries and institutions. Geared to the academic researcher, it will be used by undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty in a multitude of disciplines, including programs in area studies, history, political science, international relations, anthropology, sociology, economics, environmental studies, cultural studies, literature, music, the arts, and religion.

Highlights of Gale World Scholar include the following:

• Hundreds of major topics, issues and people, covered in great depth and from multiple viewpoints
• Relevant archival material (monographs, manuscripts, maps, pamphlets and newspapers), including never-before-digitized documents
• Scholarly journals, newspapers and periodicals, dynamically updated
• Documents in multiple languages, including Spanish and Portuguese, as well as translation tools
• Excellent introductions to topics written by scholars
• An interactive statistical modeling tool using figures from more than 25 international organizations, giving users the ability to visualize data and analyze trends on economics, health, demographics, and other topics. Users can select specific variables, such as growth rate of GDP per person, unemployment rates, or other indicators, to create customized charts and graphs, which they can download and use in presentations or assignments
• Dynamic multimedia end-user experience through interactive maps, audio/video, images, think-tank and policy studies, and more
• Fast-flip feature for browsing historical documents
• Customizable purchase and subscription options to meet each unique institutional need and budget

Gale World Scholar resources are planned for other regions as well, including the Middle East, China, South East Asia, India, and Africa.

Source: Gale

Knovel Adds Four Publishing Partners in 1Q 2011

Knovel partners with more than 75 societies and publishers worldwide to ensure engineers have access to trusted sources of technical content across 25 engineering subject areas. Last year, Knovel added 10 partners and expanded its content offering nearly 20 percent.

“Knovel continues to build and expand partnerships that strengthen our content in a way that is impactful to the engineering workflow,” says Delores Meglio, vice president, publisher relations for Knovel. “This curation process involves more than adding the latest titles. We also bring together hard to find data, improve discoverability of actionable answers in the database, identify new sources of information and retire out-of-date content.”

For more information about Knovel and partnership opportunities, please visit: http://why.knovel.com/solution/content.html.

Source: Knovel

IEEE Xplore Digital Library Expands Options and Features

New IEEE Standards Dictionary Online: a single, complete source of 39,000 IEEE standards terms and definitions presented in HTML format. IEEE Standards Dictionary Online is included with online subscriptions to IEEE/IET Electronic Library (IEL), All Inclusive Standards, All Power & Energy Standards, All Information Technology Standards, and All Telecommunications Standards. It is also available as a stand-alone subscription.

“Cited-by” links now appear in all journal article abstracts, including articles from other publishers: IEEE Xplore journal article abstracts have been enhanced to show a listing of all articles that have cited the subject document. This enhancement is the result of IEEE's participation in the CrossRef Cited-by Linking program.

References for IEEE conference papers: To provide more complete abstract records for conference content, IEEE has partnered with third parties to add reference information to conference paper abstracts in IEEE Xplore.

IEEE Index Terms: IEEE has developed a comprehensive thesaurus that includes index terms that map to individual documents in IEEE Xplore. The new IEEE Index Terms appear on all abstract pages for journals and conference papers.

Source: IEEE