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Weekly News Digest

August 29, 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.

OCLC to Offer Atlas Systems’ Free Electronic Document Delivery Software

The stand-alone version of Odyssey allows sites to send and receive electronic documents to and from other Odyssey sites, OCLC ILLiad sites, and any other supplier’s software that supports the Odyssey protocol. “Odyssey 2.0 features the ability to send and receive PDF files and allows for users of the stand-alone module to be ‘trusted senders’ with ILLiad partners, resulting in even faster delivery times,” says Genie Powell, chief customer officer at Atlas Systems. “In addition, we’ve made it easier to set up and administer Odyssey, making the free software even more attractive.”

“The Odyssey stand-alone represents an outstanding opportunity for OCLC members to expand their resource sharing using a free application,” says Katie Birch, director, OCLC Delivery Services. “The partnership between OCLC and Atlas Systems continues to provide industry-leading software opportunities to the resource sharing community.”

Source: Atlas Systems and OCLC

LexisNexis Reaches Long-Term Content Agreement With The New York Times

Content from The New York Times will be available through LexisNexis products and solutions such as the Nexis service, the lexis.com service, Lexis Advance products, Nexis Direct, LexisNexis Due Diligence Dashboard, LexisNexis Dossier Suite, and LexisNexis Prospect Portfolio.

For LexisNexis, the arrangement with The New York Times is the latest in a series of recent commitments to secure and expand high-quality news content for its customers.

Source: LexisNexis

Thomson Reuters Adds New Patent Authorities to Derwent World Patents Index

This comprehensive collection of editorially enhanced patent documents from 47 global issuing authorities also includes English language abstracts and titles making it easier for researchers to quickly find the information they need to make informed decisions regarding protected technologies in these key global markets.

New coverage in DWPI includes the following:

• Polish patent applications, granted patents, and utility models published from January 2011
• Hong Kong patent applications, granted patents, and short-term patents published from January 2011
• GCC-granted patents published from 2004

Patent and literature citations are part of the Derwent Patents Citation Index, a companion file to DWPI. The inclusion of these authorities in DWPI is designed to improve the effectiveness of technology monitoring, prior art research, and freedom-to-operate searching through the English-language content and intellectually applied indexing for these new regions.

Source: Thomson Reuters

University of California Libraries Expand Access to Orphan Works

HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. The majority of HathiTrust holdings are in-copyright works, of which an unknown but likely large proportion are so-called “orphans”—works whose owners cannot be identified or located. The University of California will join the effort to identify orphan works and publicize information about them in order to give rights holders an opportunity to claim them and make informed decisions about their availability within HathiTrust. It is likely that many people with these rights wish to make the books fully viewable.

The majority of orphans probably are just that—lacking anyone to claim ownership. If rights holders do not claim the orphan works, the digital volumes will be made available in full view to HathiTrust partner library patrons if their libraries hold those works in their print collections.

“This effort promises to expand access to a great number of digitized scholarly works in the UC Libraries’ collections that have previously been hidden from view,” said Laine Farley, executive director of the California Digital Library. “In addition to the more than 2.5 million public domain volumes already available within HathiTrust, this important project will bring a larger percentage of our digitized works directly to our students and faculty in support of their work.” 

The text of all of the works contained within HathiTrust is fully searchable today, but currently only works in the public domain or works whose copyright holders have given explicit permission can be consulted online in their entirety. The bulk of public domain works are pre-1923 books from the U.S. and government publications.

Source: University of California Libraries

Pubget Announces PaperStream Beta for Local and Online Document Search and Management

Pubget.com changed the way individual researchers access content by delivering the PDF right away from PubMed and other online sources. Now, PaperStream lets labs and enterprises search for their own papers alongside published literature.

PaperStream claims to be the first cloud-based service to combine local and subscription content access for teams. For example, searching for "drug therapy" through PaperStream will return results from PubMed plus internal documents—including purchased papers, as well as protocols, lab presentations, and more—all in one place.

“Research teams told us that they need group access to research papers irrespective of their source,” said Ian Connor, chief technology officer at Pubget. “Meanwhile, companies have told us that they want an easier way to make purchased documents available in a copyright-compliant way. Based on this feedback, we built PaperStream to streamline frustrating processes for the researcher, while legally saving companies money.” Figures from Pubget show that PaperStream can deliver up to a 40x return on investment through cost, time, and content savings.

To celebrate the PaperStream Beta, Pubget is providing free trial accounts for labs. In the trial, the lab will get the ability to upload papers for easy search and access. For more information, go to http://pubget.com/paperstream.

Source: Pubget

CIOs Surveyed Say Workplace Communication Will Favor Real-Time Tools

CIOs were asked, “In the next 5 years, do you think real-time workplace communication tools—for example, Instant Messaging, SharePoint, Yammer, etc.—will be more or less popular than email among employees?”

Their responses were as follows:

Much more popular                 13%

Somewhat more popular         41%

The same                              38%

Somewhat less popular            5%

Much less popular                    2%

Don’t know/ no answer             1%

                                             100%

Robert Half Technology outlines three benefits a transition to real-time tools could have on the workplace:

• Speed: Instant messaging (IM) allows employees to have conversations at the click of a button, without opening emails or waiting for responses. IM also enables employees in different locations to have real-time conversations, thus resolving issues more quickly.
• Convenience: Many programs include a host of features like IM, microblogging, forums, and document collaboration and management. This eliminates the need to switch between separate programs to communicate. Not only does this have the potential to improve efficiency, but it can increase collaboration on projects and reduce the need for meetings.
• The social aspect: Enterprise social networking sites, such as Yammer or Chatter, are useful for collaboration and sharing ideas and best practices within the company. This technology also has the potential to foster teamwork and camaraderie among employees.

In order for the survey to be statistically representative, the sample was stratified by geographic region, industry, and number of employees. The results were then weighted to reflect the proper proportions of the number of employees within each region.

Source: Robert Half Technology