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Weekly News Digest

September 19, 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.

IDC Raises Shipment Forecast for Media Tablets

Worldwide media tablet shipments in the second quarter were driven by continued robust demand for Apple's iPad 2, which saw shipments reach 9.3 million units, representing a 68.3% share of the worldwide market (up from 65.7% the previous quarter). Research in Motion entered the media tablet market in 2Q11 with its PlayBook product, grabbing a 4.9% share of the market. Apple’s strength and RIM’s entrance meant bad news for Android-based media tablets, which saw its collective share slip to 26.8%, down from 34.0% the previous quarter.

Looking forward to the second half of 2011, IDC expects Android to cede additional market share in 3Q11 (dropping to 23%) before it starts growing its share again in 4Q11 (increasing to 25.9%) and beyond. In addition to continued demand for Apple iPads, IDC expects many consumers who were on the fence about buying a media tablet to scoop up $99 TouchPads as a result of HP’s decision to end production of its tablet product. IDC expects close to 1 million TouchPads to ship into the channel before the end of the year. As a result, WebOS’s worldwide market share is forecast to reach 4.7% in 3Q11. However, with no clear plan to license or sell the OS to other vendors, IDC expects the WebOS market share to shrink back to zero by 1Q12.

Turning to e-readers, 2Q experienced a seasonal dip, down 9% sequentially to 5.4 million units, while year-over-year growth was 167%. Amazon led the market with a 51.7% share, followed by Barnes & Noble with 21.2%. With product refreshes and following strong 2Q11 sales, IDC expects ereader shipments to grow significantly through the holiday season, reaching a total of 27.0 million units for the year, up from a previous projection of 16.2 million units.

Source: IDC

De Gruyter Acquires bepress Journal Porfolio

Berkeley Electronic Press was founded in 1999 by scholars as an alternative to existing academic publishers, and in particular their pricing policies. Since then, the press has succeeded in creating high-quality content, primarily as a result of founding their own journals and by attracting top-notch scholars.

De Gruyter will take on the journals with immediate effect. They will be integrated into the existing editorial offices, and personnel will be added as needed. The subject area business/economics, which was previously not part of the De Gruyter portfolio, will be under the publishing supervision of the Law Department.

Source: De Gruyter

Gale Debuts Enhanced Career Transitions Resource

In addition to the new interface, the following features were added to Career Transitions:

• Interactive Interview Practice: A custom interview simulation to help users get over interview intimidation and prepare in a safe and nonjudgmental environment. In addition, users will find targeted tips and advice in the form of articles and videos on job searching and applying to networking and career strategies, among other topics.

• Match Experience to New Careers: This unique feature enables users to identify a job or military occupation they’ve held, and explore related new career opportunities based on their experiences. Match Experience helps users translate their experiences into new opportunities they may not have considered.

• Trends, Activities, Outcomes & Reporting: Provides detailed insight into the activities users are engaged in and what they are accomplishing. Helps librarians deliver measurable results to their institution, community and funding partners with:

-       Visual, easy-to-generate reports detailing what users are accomplishing

-       Optional user survey mechanism to identify transformative value (jobs, progress) and success

The new activities reporting feature added to Career Transitions will give librarians access to useful information and metrics that will demonstrate the success of their job and career resources in a visual, detailed report. Reports can be generated at any time, and cover every activity—including job searching and tracking, resumes, cover letters, assessments and more—that users can experience within Career Transitions. Librarians can also gather valuable user data on career search trends, such as ranked information on the top careers users are targeting and what specific advice they are seeking.

Other additions to Career Transitions include updates for more than 1,100 careers; 1,000 videos including “Day in the Life” interviews with people in different fields; spotlights on new and emerging careers, as well as green careers; a career ladder that positions similar opportunities according to education/training level; and an education/training finder to match careers with education and training programs from nearly 9,000 postsecondary institutions across the U.S. and more than 300 online continuing education courses. In addition, the guided resume and cover letter creator helps users who are often intimidated to start this process find a quick and efficient path to presenting their backgrounds and abilities in the best light. It guides users step-by-step through each section of creating a resume and cover letter.

Source: Gale

FirstRain Adds Executives and LinkedIn Access to Business Web Monitoring

With these new capabilities, users can do the following:

• Find executive information when you mouse-over the People section of the company brief page, on any company you wish to monitor. You'll see a summary of the Business Web intelligence about them, including quick access to their LinkedIn profile pages. It’s early days, so you'll find some executives have more web intelligence than others, but FirstRain be expanding this collection rapidly over the next few months.
• Instantly see your connections at any company from the new LinkedIn “In my network” link, found in the Company Profile section of a Company Brief. 
• Search for executives and add an executive to a monitor, so the latest news featuring that person is reported in your FirstRain email briefs.
• Plus, you can now bookmark items of interest and publish them into your company portals, your social enterprise tools, and Outlook using FirstRain’s RSS tools.

Source: FirstRain

USA.gov Hosting National Dialogue on Improving Federal Websites

The .gov reform effort is part of President Obama's Campaign to Cut Waste, identifying unnecessary websites that can be consolidated into other websites to reduce costs and improve the quality of service to the American public. The President signed Executive Order 13571, “Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service,” April 27, 2011, which requires federal agencies to take specific steps to strengthen customer service, including how they deliver services and information on federal ".gov" websites.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the General Services Administration (GSA), the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the Chief Information Officers Council, and the Federal Web Managers Council are working with agencies to manage this effort. The .gov Task Force is leading this effort.

The list of federal executive branch .gov domains was published July 12, 2011 on Data.gov. The list of domains will be updated weekly and published on Data.gov each Tuesday.

You can join the conversation at http://web-reform-dialogue.ideascale.com/.

To learn more about the overall .gov reform effort, go to www.usa.gov/WebReform.shtml.

Source: USA.gov

Elsevier Enhances SciVal Spotlight With Collaboration Analysis

This new enhancement allows users to identify and assess existing and potential partner institutions related to the current research competencies. Further, it enables the evaluation of existing partnerships by combined article output among contributing institutions and displays collaboration partners in particular research strengths. Ultimately, institutional decision makers can now find or evaluate existing and potential partners by uncovering with whom they are collaborating, with whom they are sharing and not sharing competencies, and who is active within competencies but is not yet a partner.

The visual presentation of the collaboration landscape based on user selected criteria can be displayed in three ways:

• Map: Geographical distribution of both existing and/or potential collaboration partners plotted on a world map, including an indication of the research intensity with the inquiring institution
• Table : Ranking of both existing and potential collaboration partners based on the research intensity with the inquiring institution
• Details: Provides an overview of publications, authors, and competencies of the partnering or candidate institution

Source: Elsevier