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Weekly News Digest
November 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. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

DuraSpace Launches Open Source Research Cloud Service

“DuraCloud is the breakthrough many of us have been waiting for,” said Bryan Beecher of The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. “The ability to store and update material on three different cloud providers—using just one web-based dashboard to manage it all—saves hours of work and makes the entire process much less expensive to manage.”

Archiving digital libraries and research output for academic institutions, museums, and other knowledge stewards, DuraCloud offers the following:

• Replication and synchronization of content across multiple cloud providers through one unified interface
• Access to a suite of applications embedded in the DuraCloud platform to do more with your data
• Data distribution and streaming to any internet-linked device
• Secure storage of digital archives and periodic content “health checks” assuring information is being preserved as it should be
• A simple-to-use yet powerful dashboard to manage all content across the cloud
• An open source community dedicated to ongoing technological development, along with support assistance to ease the transition into the cloud

Funded in part by the Library of Congress through its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, DuraSpace is committed to the open source community and the technological advancement of the cloud. Current open source projects include DSpace and Fedora.

DuraCloud is a free open source project and fee-based subscription service, available to any organization wishing to archive and preserve their content using the cloud, without locking into one single cloud provider.

Source: DuraSpace

Safari Books Online to Use Ingram’s CoreSource for Digital Asset Management

“Safari Books Online faces many challenges in aggregating content from numerous book and video publishers across the globe,” says Mark Brokering, vice president of content strategy, Safari Books Online. “Fortunately, many of our content suppliers are now taking advantage of the sophisticated digital-asset management tools offered by Ingram’s CoreSource. This allows publishers to easily include our library as one of their key distribution channels—which, in turn, helps us provide more content to our subscribers in a timely manner and serve them more effectively.”

Ingram’s CoreSource is an easy to use, online solution for the storage, management, and distribution of digital content. CoreSource delivers a secure, searchable content repository and a high-capacity data distribution network, allowing publishers to move digital content easily and swiftly from their organization to any channel partner globally.

Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library that delivers vetted content in both book and video form from the world’s leading authors in technology and business. Subscribers have access to thousands of books, training videos, and prepublication manuscripts in one fully searchable database from publishers such as Cisco Press, Prentice Hall Professional, O’Reilly Media, Addison-Wesley Professional, Microsoft Press, Sams, Que, Peachpit Press, John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier, IBM Press, Adobe Press, FT Press, Apress, Manning, New Riders, Apple Certified, Course Technology, Splash Media, and dozens more.

Ingram Content Group, Inc. provides a range of physical and digital services to the book industry. Ingram’s operating units are Ingram Book Co.; Lightning Source, Inc.; Ingram Digital; Vital Source Technologies, Inc.; Ingram Periodicals, Inc.; Ingram International, Inc.; Ingram Library Services, Inc.; Spring Arbor Distributors, Inc.; Ingram Publisher Services, Inc.; Tennessee Book Co., LLC; and Coutts Information Services.

Source: Safari Books

Research Data Management Tool From UC Libraries and Partners

“Many funding agencies require a data sharing plan be included in their applications.  How to accomplish this is a challenge for our principal investigators, given that retention of research data is now much more than retaining all original notebooks, but includes storing of massive amounts of electronic data. … The availability of the new Data Management Planning Tool will prove invaluable in assisting them in the management of their data and complying with these agency requirements,” states Charles Louis, vice chancellor for research, UC Riverside. 

The DMPTool is open source, freely available, and easily configurable to reflect an institution’s local policies and information.  Users of the DMPTool can view sample plans, preview funder requirements, and view the latest changes to their plans.  It permits the user to create an editable document for submission to a funding agency. It can also accommodate different versions as funding requirements change.  Not only can researchers use the tool to generate plans compliant to funder requirements, but institutions can also use the tool to present information and policies relevant to data management and to foster collaboration among faculty, the institutional libraries, contracts and grants offices, and academic computing. 

Project partners include the University of California Curation Center at the California Digital Library, the UCLA Library, the UC San Diego Libraries, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Virginia Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, DataONE, and the U.K.’s Digital Curation Centre.  Working collaboratively, these institutions have consolidated their expertise and reduced their costs. 

Source: University of California Libraries

Funding App Appears With Elsevier’s SciVerse Applications

The SciVal Funding App can be subscribed to or added for free in SciVerse Applications. It will retrieve up to five relevant funding opportunities to an abstract in SciVerse Scopus or SciVerse ScienceDirect. The app uses the Elsevier Fingerprint Engine to match active funding opportunities to the abstracts, delivering targeted funding recommendations directly into the researchers’ workflow.

In addition to the launch of the app, SciVal Funding expanded its geographic scope to Australia and Ireland. SciVal Funding now covers the U.S., Canada, U.K., European Union, Australia, and Ireland. This year more than 1,400 funding bodies have already been added to the initial 3,000 U.S.-based sources available on the platform. By the end of the year, Elsevier intends to include funding bodies from Singapore, South Africa, and New Zealand.

Elsevier’s SciVal suite of services supports academic and government leadership in evaluating, establishing, and executing research strategies that optimize the performance of existing assets and maximize investments to enhance near and long-term productivity. SciVal tools leverage Scopus data, Elsevier’s trusted source of bibliometric data, to offer innovative yet authoritative solutions. Current suite offerings include SciVal Spotlight, a strategic tool that generates institutional and country maps of existing and emerging research strengths based on an interdisciplinary perspective of current performance; SciVal Funding, an online solution that provides targeted recommendations on grants to pursue based on prepopulated research profiles and historical awards; SciVal Strata, a web-based research performance tool that offers users the flexibility to construct relevant contextual data to evaluate research teams or individual researchers, using a range of indicators based on Scopus data; and SciVal Experts, a semantic technology-based application that enables researchers to identify and locate sources of expertise at an individual or departmental level within and across institutions.

Source: Elsevier

ProQuest to Digitize NAACP Archives

“The individuals who represented the NAACP over the past 100 years—the national board members and branch presidents and secretaries, the men, women and young activists—have played an integral role in shaping our understanding of American democracy,” says NAACP Chairman Roslyn M. Brock. “It is important that their stories are told and their names are remembered.”

“This organization has changed the very fabric of American society since its inception in 1909, and it has served as a model for how advocacy should work,” according to NAACP president and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. “As we carry our message of equality and social justice deeper into the twenty-first century, we must look back and draw lessons from our rich history. This archive will provide a valuable service to historians and activists alike.”

The documents range from 1909 to 1972. National office records provide insight into NAACP’s leaders and their relationships with the U.S. Congress, with presidents from Taft to Nixon, and with other civil rights organizations. They also include the full range of “direct action” tactics taken in the 1960s, revealing a firsthand look at the important roles grass-roots leaders and women played in the civil rights movement. Documents from local NAACP branches give additional depth and insight into personalities active at the neighborhood level and provide an intimate look at social conditions in communities from all regions of the U.S.

As part of the ProQuest History Vault, the NAACP archives will be available for remote study and supported by rich, intuitive search technology. Their original archival arrangement schemes will be preserved and PDFs of the original documents will replicate the user experience of browsing through archive boxes. The ProQuest History Vault also includes collections that chronicle The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century, which contain digitized documents 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 1990s. ProQuest’s rich research resources also include Historical Black Newspapers, an archive of digitized African-American newspapers, and Black Studies Center, a digital core collection of primary and secondary sources that record and illuminate the Black experience, from ancient Africa through modern times.

Digitization of the records is part of a larger partnership to preserve NAACP’s historical archives. ProQuest will be working with individual NAACP offices throughout America to implement best practices for selecting cataloging, storing, and handling of original documents.

Source: ProQuest

ELD Mobile App From Wolters Kluwer Facilitates Labor and Employment Litigation

“The litigation of employment-related issues necessitates immediacy of access to critical content,” explains Lisa-Milam Perez, J.D., CCH Employment Law Daily managing editor. “The ability to gain up-to-date information, including same-day news coverage of breaking court decisions and legislative developments is a powerful tool for labor and employment litigators, and can help them build the strongest possible case.”

The ELD Mobile app provides access to timely labor and employment updates, including the following:

• Breaking court decisions
• Quick access to federal and state legislative developments
• Customization and filtering capabilities
• Copyright permissions to email critical information to colleagues or clients with your commentary

CCH Employment Law Daily subscribers can download the ELD Mobile app free from the iTunes App Store.

Source: Wolters Kluwer