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Weekly News Digest

December 8, 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.

Reprints Desk Announces Journal Article Web App ‘Bibliogo’

“Bibliogo is a mashup for everything you want to do with articles. It combines aspects from personalized RSS readers and alerting services, bibliographic reference management software, daily deal websites for clinical reprints, and document delivery management systems,” said Ian Palmer, head of marketing at Reprints Desk and Derycz Scientific. 

Sample article use cases and benefits made possible by Bibliogo include the following:

• Saving time for scientists, engineers, pharmacovigilance professionals, and others by enabling them to follow and access new articles in journals and saved database searches
• Simplifying processes for librarians and searchers to find, manage, and securely share citations with internal end users via alerts and newsletters
• Saving time for product brand managers and healthcare communications agencies by serving as a one-stop shop for requesting quotes and placing orders for clinical reprints from any publisher
• Enhancing compliance controls for regulatory affairs professionals by enabling them to set-up bibliographies of articles approved for reactive distribution by medical information teams and pro-active distribution by sales and marketing teams
• Saving money for organizations by enabling them to identify paid subscription content for research, placing document delivery orders without any rush fees, and leveraging group buying power for reprints used in marketing

Prior to its public availability, Bibliogo has had multiple deployments across the pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device industries.

Source: Reprints Desk, Inc.

IndieBound Mobile Reading App Launches

IndieBound is a community-oriented movement begun by the American Booksellers Association. It brings together booksellers, readers, indie retailers, local business alliances, and anyone else with a passionate belief that healthy local economies help communities thrive.

Independent bookstores partnered with Google in 2010 to sell Google eBooks because of its open and accessible platform, so indies can provide an easy way for their customers to discover, read, and buy ebooks at while supporting local business. The ebooks are sold directly through independent bookstore websites. For a complete list of indie bookstores selling Google eBooks, please click here.

Google eBooks are cloud-based, digital books that allow readers to access their libraries on almost any device from one single repository. You can purchase and read your Google eBooks on your Android device using the IndieBound Reader app, but you will also be able to read them later on your computer, and on a wide variety of eReaders.

Source: American Booksellers Association

Gale’s Online Ebook Platform Gets a Facelift

Based on market feedback, Gale redesigned the homepage of GVRL to display eye-catching book cover images that replicate a familiar in-library browsing experience. The interface is available in 34 languages ensuring the majority of library patrons will be able to navigate reference content in the language in which they are most comfortable. ReadSpeaker technology (text-to-speech functionality) is embedded in the resource and is available in 19 languages. In addition, GVRL features on-demand machine-aided content translation into 14 languages.

The new GVRL interface offers a multipage viewer that allows users to choose either a one or two-page view, providing for an interactive, book-like experience. The new page flipper feature allows readers to page through a section or an entire book, replicating a traditional library research experience, but one that can be done from anywhere, at any time and with an unlimited number of users.

GVRL titles can be downloaded as article-level PDFs that can then be uploaded to most readers, making it easy for patrons to download the articles they need. Users can also download books to their MP3 players.

GVRL hosts more than 7,000 full-text titles from Gale and more than 80 other publishers. GVRL contains full-text interdisciplinary content on virtually any subject area to tackle assignments, papers, projects, and presentations. GVRL offers titles for all audiences—children can enjoy full-color titles, students can learn about current topics with Gale’s Greenhaven Press titles and educators and administrators can access the best in professional development titles from ISTE and ASCD. Scholars will be able to access publications from university and academic presses and professionals can choose from a growing collection of business references. Libraries can also cross-search their GVRL eReference collection via Gale PowerSearch as well as other Gale holdings including InfoTrac and select InContext resources to build a customized resource.

Libraries can also customize their collections by subject, assignment, topic, or class and increase use with free search widgets on their library or course website. The Gale Admin features allows libraries to easily generate usage reports for their collection. For tips and information on how to boost usage, visit the Re:sources Blog at http://blog.gale.com/resources/.

For more information on Gale Virtual Reference Library or to request a trial, visit www.gale.cengage.com/gvrl.

Source: Gale

EBSCO Discovery Service Offers New Open Access Humanities and Social Science Content

OpenEdition is an initiative of the Centre for open electronic publishing—Centre pour lédition électronique ouverte (Cléo)—based in Marseille, Paris, and Lisbon, Portugal. Cléo is a laboratory involving the CNRS (the National Centre for Science Research), the University of Provence, the EHESS (the Graduate School of Social Sciences), and the University of Avignon. OpenEdition is the umbrella portal for Revues.org, Hypotheses.org, and Calenda.

• Revues.org is a web platform for more than 300 journals and book series in the humanities and social sciences that is open to publishers, research units, and organizations looking to publish quality full-text material online.
• Calenda is the largest European scientific calendar for the humanities and social sciences. Published since 2000, Calenda includes announcements of nearly 16,000 scientific events.
• Hypotheses.org is a platform hosting more than 200 scholarly blogs. The research blogs offer a quick and easy way to report research—a blog-like way to chronicle the work on a given topic.

OpenEdition joins a growing list of publishers and other content partners that are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content. The EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers (and growing) in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers. 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.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Deep Web Technologies Introduces Mobile Apps for Federated Search

Since these apps have been made available for iOS, researchers in more than 50 countries on 6 continents have downloaded them to their iPhones, iPads and iPods for use in their professional lives for locating critical information.

Working in partnership with Texas Medical Center (TMC), the world’s largest medical institution and a DWT customer, and 3E Enterprises, a Texas-based software consultancy, DWT designed, developed, and tested iOS native-mode versions of Biznar and Mednar. These applications now serve as prototypes for implementation of custom-built mobile applications for customers, such as TMC, for use by their mobile professionals.

iOS versions of Biznar and Mednar are immediately available for free download from the Apple App Store. Browser-based versions of these applications can be accessed online at http://www.biznar.com and http://www.mednar.com.

Source: Deep Web Technologies

DCL Debuts On Demand Ebook Conversion Services

“A recent industry survey commissioned by DCL points to a strong market developing from large and small publishers seeking an easy to use, self-service website delivering error free results from a company that truly understands their needs,” said Mark Gross, president and CEO of DCL. “DCL is the only company that can deliver the best looking electronic content, in any format, while meeting the highest industry standards,” said Gross.

Founded in 1981, DCL converts and organizes content to create electronic documents, populate databases, and publish on the web. DCL’s services help refine conversion strategy, identify redundant content, extract metadata, and transform legacy and future documents to meet clients’ needs as technology advances. DCL has processed more than a billion pages.

Source: Data Conversion Laboratory