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Weekly News Digest

January 30, 2012 — 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.

Credo Reference Introduces Literati by Credo

The announcement of general availability marks the end of Literati’s beta period in which a select number of institutions utilized and tested the new solution. The beta group included institutions such as Columbia University, Marshall University, South University, Lancashire Libraries, and the American University of Paris.

Developed in partnership with the library and teaching faculty, the information literacy tools and services offered as part of Literati by Credo enable the building of appropriate information-seeking challenges into assignments and course learning objectives. For more information, click here.

Source: Credo Reference

WorldCat Local Users to Search SciVerse ScienceDirect Journals and Ebooks

With this collaboration, Elsevier is strengthening its commitment to the library community, simplifying research for library patrons and enhancing usage of its scientific publications. “We recognize that our users are accessing information in many different ways,” says Yukun Harsono, senior vice president, Search & Discovery, Academic and Government Markets at Elsevier. “The addition of full-text articles and ebook chapters from SciVerse ScienceDirect to OCLC WorldCat stems from our continuous commitment to ensure that the content we provide is available and easily found through the discovery platforms our customers use.”

WorldCat Local is available as a stand-alone discovery and delivery service, and as part of OCLC WorldShare Management Services.

As part of this expanded partnership, Elsevier also added access to ebook data through WorldCat.org, the web destination for broad, webscale discovery of library resources. This agreement continues OCLC’s efforts, on behalf of its member libraries, to enable access to all library collections and services through WorldCat.

Source: OCLC

NAACP Archives Go Digital

The collection—nearly 2 million pages of internal memos, legal briefings, and direct action summaries from national, legal, and branch offices throughout the country—charts NAACP’s work and delivers a first-hand view into crucial issues: lynching, school desegregation, and discrimination in the military, the criminal justice system, employment, and housing, among others.

Preserved on microfilm, it holds the distinction of being the most heavily used collection in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Now, it will be fully searchable and accessible electronically and available through academic, research, and public library websites as part of ProQuest History Vault, an initiative to digitize historically rich primary sources, opening their discovery to broader audiences. Their original archival arrangement schemes will be preserved and PDFs of the original documents will replicate the user experience of browsing through archive boxes. These archives complement other ProQuest resources: Historical Black Newspapers, Black Studies Center, and another History Vault module, Black Freedom Struggle.

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

CCC and MPLC Partner for New Corporate Movie License

The Motion Picture License is a solution that enables businesses to legally show movies and TV shows from more than 400 producers from around the world and all major Hollywood studios within their organizations for sales meetings, company functions, employee training and development programs, conferences, and more while respecting the rights of content creators. The license also saves time and money by reducing the need to pursue individual permissions and minimizes the risk of unintended copyright infringement.

The Motion Picture License is a companion to CCC’s Annual Copyright License, which gives knowledge workers the freedom to legally share content with each other while respecting the rights of copyright holders. The deal marks a new industry sector for CCC.

Source: Copyright Clearance Center 

Infotrieve Launches New Features for Mobile Library

Mobile Library’s new features include: an enhanced search interface with additional flexibility for ranking results, and the addition of an auto-complete feature; new functionality in the Personal & Shared Library Suite including a dashboard showing recent changes to the library, discussion pages in each library for general comments, user creation and management of shared libraries, and enhanced administrative controls; and updates to the Browsed Holdings feature including improved filtering, copyright permissions ordering, and compact citation display.

Infotrieve’s Mobile Library offers fully secure, cloud-based anywhere, anytime access to enterprise econtent, along with instant access to a world of knowledge on a pay-per-view basis. Leveraging Infotrieve’s “borderless office” technology, users can seamlessly switch among their PC, Mac, or iPad without skipping a beat, as their workspace is automatically synchronized across devices. As a flexible econtent software solution, the Mobile Library can serve a variety of customer needs, from easy searching and ordering of pay-per-view content, to a comprehensive rights management solution integrated with shared libraries and social features.

Mobile Library has more than 325,000 users from 6,500 organizations in more than 80 countries. The Mobile Library platform was initially launched as Content SCM in November 2008. The Mobile Library iPad app was first released in September 2010 and the entire platform was renamed Mobile Library as part of a branding update in October 2011.

Source: Infotrieve, Inc.

McGraw-Hill Announces Enhancements to AccessEngineering Platform

AccessEngineering launched 6 years ago, when it first made available the digital editions of such classic references as Perry's Handbook for Chemical Engineers, Marks' Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, and Roark's Formulas for Stress and Strain. AccessEngineering’s content includes thousands of interactive tables and graphs; more than 100 instructional videos and animations depicting core engineering concepts; and curricula maps expressly designed to help faculty more effectively integrate use of engineering content in the classroom and accelerate learning outcomes for students.

In April 2012, McGraw-Hill will roll out new usage reporting features and personalization tools that allow students, faculty, and engineers to further integrate AccessEngineering content into their workflows.

In the second half of 2012, AccessEngineering will offer a new subject category—Operations Management—featuring some of McGraw-Hill's best-known reference works. This category expansion will prove especially valuable to every engineer—across the broad range of engineering disciplines—tasked with innovation through continuous improvement of production processes. AccessEngineering is available in the U.S. and globally through McGraw-Hill and its subsidiaries.

The new AccessEngineering platform was developed by Semantico, a digital publishing company based in the U.K.

Source: McGraw Hill Professional