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Weekly News Digest
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December 12, 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.
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Scientific American Introduces Free Mobile Offerings
Scientific American is working with Google to feature content in Google Currents, its just launched new Reader App for smartphones and tablets. It will include Scientific American’s Science Agenda and top news sections and a sampling of posts from the Scientific American blog network. In the coming weeks, it will release standalone Scientific American apps, featuring similar content, which will service Android devices, iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry devices.Scientific American has been featured on Yahoo’s Livestand since its Nov. 2 launch. Through Livestand, Scientific American provides science news, blog items, 60-second Science podcasts, and Twitter feeds. These are syndicated in Livestand’s science channel and news and politics channel. Both Google Currents and Yahoo’s Livestand are ad-supported. The new free mobile apps are the latest in a number of digital offerings from Scientific American. The magazine launched a mobile-optimized version of scientificamerican.com in November 2011 to improve the mobile browsing experience for users. The mobile optimized version of the site supports the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry phones, and all other smartphones. Scientific American is at the heart of Nature Publishing Group's consumer media division, meeting the needs of the general public. Founded in 1845, Scientific American is the oldest continuously published magazine in the U.S. Source: Nature Publishing Group
Thomson Reuters Launches Interactive Tool Covering U.S. Supreme Court
Thomson Reuters announced that it has launched a dynamic interactive online tool offering comprehensive coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2011-12 term. Case by Case: The U.S. Supreme Court combines original reporting from Thomson Reuters News & Insights with links to an extensive collection of analysis and legal materials, including motions, briefs and opinions, all sourced from Westlaw.The interactive graphic, which will be updated throughout the Court’s 9-month term, delivers context needed to make sense of each case. Brief profiles of lead attorneys are included with each case summary, along with helpful background information on the lead attorney’s firm or agency. Additional features include the following: - Multiple ways to dig into the court’s full calendar, including an interactive timeline, sortable lists, and case name searches
- A color-coded index that organizes the cases by practice area, making it easier to search and sort
- An at-a-glance display of when cases are being argued and if they’ve been decided
- A “How They Decided” button that highlights how the justices voted
Source: Thomson Reuters
Marquis Who’s Who Content Coming to EBSCO Discovery Service
Marquis Who’s Who content will soon be available via EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing for mutual customers. The new agreement will add metadata from the Marquis Who’s Who database into the Base Index of EDS and provide seamless access and full-text searching for mutual customers, enabling them to search Marquis Who’s Who collection of more than 1.4 million biographies alongside their own library’s collection.Marquis Who’s Who content includes up-to-the-minute biographies of leaders and achievers from around the world in the areas such as business, law, science, medicine, the arts, government, and entertainment. Mutual customers are able to access all the biographies that have appeared in 24 Marquis Who’s Who print titles since 1985 as well as historical biographies Who Was Who American Volumes 1607-1985. Updates to existing biographies and new biographies are added daily. The addition of Marquis Who Who’s extensive biography collection to EDS will greatly enhance the discovery experience for mutual customers. The collection of biographies will serve the needs of researchers for academic libraries, public and school libraries, alumni offices, media professionals, corporate libraries, recruiters, and law firms. Marquis Who’s Who is part of 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 about 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
CAS and InfoChem to Collaborate in ChemInformatics
Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) announced a longterm collaboration with InfoChem, GmbH (InfoChem), a provider of chemical structure and reaction technology as well as datamining in chemical science documents. Under the new collaboration, research teams at CAS and InfoChem will work together to explore the technology frontiers in the field of cheminformatics. For example, the joint team is now researching and developing technology to identify chemical information in text and to semantically enrich chemical information documents. The partners will also continue to focus on chemical substance information and the ways to extract, derive, store, communicate, and interpret that information. With the project “ChemProspector,” InfoChem was one of the participants in the prestigious “THESEUS” research program, an initiative of the German Ministry of Economics and Technology. The subject of this project was “Advanced mining and searching of chemical content in patent documents.” “We are excited to collaborate with the leader in chemical information, CAS,” said Peter Loew, PhD, managing director of InfoChem. “This project will enable InfoChem to enhance our successful research and development from the THESEUS initiative and create significant value for chemists and the chemical enterprise.” Source: CAS
Springer API Challenge 2.0 Now Open
Springer announced the Springer API (Application Programming Interface) Challenge 2.0, its second competition for original, noncommercial applications using its freely available metadata and content APIs. The Springer API Challenge 1.0 asked participants to develop applications that offer users new ways to find, visualize, and manipulate relevant data drawn from Springer’s large and growing content database.The Springer API Challenge 2.0 is a goal-directed competition to develop more specific solutions using the following APIs: - Springer Metadata API: Provides metadata for more than 5 million online documents (e.g., journal articles, book chapters, and protocols). The Challenge 2.0 goal: develop an application that provides a novel search solution based on an analysis of trends in the metadata.
- SpringerImages API: Provides images and related text for more than 300,000 free images available on www.SpringerImages.com. The Challenge 2.0 goal: develop an application that uses image recognition to analyze, compare, or search images.
- SpringerOpen Access API: Provides metadata, full-text content, and images for more than 80,000 open access articles from BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journals. The Challenge 2.0 goal: develop an application that uses semantic modeling to interpret characteristics of individual full-text documents and/or to analyze relationships among full-text documents.
Mashups of Springer APIs with open sourced (and noncopyrighted) data are encouraged. Participants may be individuals or teams of up to three members. They must register for a user account with Mashery, a provider of API management services, and apply to Springer for an API key. They are bound by the provisions of the official rules and the Springer API Terms of Use (available at http://dev.springer.com). The completed application must be submitted via email, including a brief description, an indication as to which goal is being addressed, and contact information to SpringerAPIChallenge@springer.com. Entries must be submitted by May 31, 2012 and will be evaluated by an interdisciplinary panel of judges who will rank them on relevance to the stated goal, creativity and originality, user experience and design, and value and benefit. First, second, and third place winners will be awarded cash prizes of $8,000, $4,000, and $2,000, respectively. The winners will be announced in June 2012. Source: Springer
Reed Technology Launches Web Preserver
Reed Technology and Information Services Inc. (ReedTech.com), part of LexisNexis, announced the launch of Web Preserver, a SaaS-based webpage capture and archiving service for corporations and government. The Web Preserver service provides researchers the ability to quickly capture and preserve a fully functioning webpage, including all of the links and associated metadata, with one simple keystroke.Reed Tech’s Web Preserver service is designed to quickly and efficiently capture web pages of interest, preserving them in a private and highly secure data center. The forensically preserved web records are easily retrieved in their fully functional original layout and format for review, for use in court cases, audits, to support records management retention guidance, and more. Recent studies show that almost 30 % of today’s URLs disappear within 3 years of creation, with the average web page lasting just 44 days. * “Reed Tech’s latest technology innovation is specifically designed to help our clients preserve their web research as it existed on the day it was captured, giving them a significant strategic retrieval advantage as web pages age over time,” said Dave Ballai, CIO and vice president Commercial Solutions for Reed Tech. *Source: Digital Preservation Group Study: www.llrx.com/features/linkrot2011analysis.htm To learn more about Web Archiving, please go to http://www.ReedTechWebArchiving.com Source: Reed Technology and Information Services, Inc.
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Brandi Scardilli
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