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Weekly News Digest

February 16, 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.

Wolters Kluwer Health Expands Distribution Agreement With NEJM

Ovid customers will have sitewide access to current issues of NEJM through 1990 in PDF format, plus links to Online First articles. Ovid previously offered NEJM content through 1993, as HTML-only.

“After an extensive review of the current and future positioning of NEJM, we are pleased to be partnering with Wolters Kluwer Health,” said Thomas Easley, publisher of NEJM. “The OvidSP research solution offers NEJM added global reach, allowing us to bring important medical research and clinical content to even more healthcare professionals and researchers than ever before.”

Source: Wolters Kluwer Health

Factiva Adds More Global Sources, Blogs, and Images

Content highlights include the following:

• Americas: More than 600 titles were added from the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, and Canada including CNN Wire, American City Business Journals, Wall Street Journal video clips, AP Photostream images, Carta Capital, and Finsat News Feed, as well as 100 regional newspapers from Sun Media Corp., including The Ottawa Sun.
• Asia-Pacific: Nearly 500 sources were added across nine countries with a focus on Australia, China, India, and Japan. One hundred eighty-five sources were added from Australia, 153 from India, 70 from Greater China, and 53 from Japan. Titles from this region include Time Weekly from China, Reuters Hong Kong, nine local print editions of The Times of India, and The Wall Street Journal Online, Japan Edition.
• Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA): Nearly 480 new sources were added for the EMEA region. Among those, 100 were from Russia, 40 from Germany, 90 from the U.K., 100 from France, and 70 from the Middle East. Content from Italy, including Adn-Kronos, was added, as well as sources from Spain, Benelux, Poland, Portugal, and Africa.

“This is business search at its best,” said David Chivers, vice president of product, Dow Jones & Company. “Factiva’s traditional and social content collection offers the right mix of credible regional, national, and global business news and information, and 60% of its key sources are not accessible via common search engines. We find clients are increasingly mapping Factiva derived market intelligence to their own knowledge and data to gain new insights and connect the dots in their business.”

Source: Factiva

ALA Reaches Out to Ebook Publishers; Penguin Terminates OverDrive Contract

She said the discussions with publishers who already sell ebooks to libraries focused on how to maintain and strengthen those relationships. Meeting with publishers who do not sell ebooks revealed some misconceptions about how libraries operate. Once those issues were clarified, she said, some of the publishers’ concerns were mitigated.

She said ALA agreed to provide feedback on any ideas they may have. Raphael said that the biggest lesson to be drawn from the meetings was the importance of direct communication.

“We didn’t leave New York with complete and perfect solutions; that wouldn’t have been a realistic expectation. But I am happy with the progress that we made on multiple fronts—establishing ongoing direct lines of communication and correcting misconceptions about libraries, to mention only two. Much work remains to fully grasp the rapidly changing context of digital content and libraries and to converge on solutions that all key stakeholders can live with. We must find these solutions so that libraries can continue to provide the best possible service to their communities.”

She also said that publishers agreed to consider proposals from ALA. She said there will be further communication with these five publishers, as well as contact with other publishers and intermediaries and additional activities within the framework of ALA’s Digital Content and Libraries Working Group.

However, this encouraging press release from ALA was followed within a day by a disappointing OverDrive email to its partners. According to the email posted at INFOdocket, “Penguin will no longer offer additional copies of eBooks and download audiobooks for library purchase. Additionally, Penguin eBooks loaned for reading on Kindle devices will need to be downloaded to a computer then transferred to the device over USB. For library patrons, this means Penguin eBooks will no longer be available for over-the-air delivery to Kindle devices or to Kindle apps.”

PaidContent then posted this statement from Penguin:

In these ever changing times, it is vital that we forge relationships with libraries and build a future together. We care about preserving the value of our authors’ work as well as helping libraries continue to serve their communities. Our ongoing partnership with the [American Library Association] is more important than ever, and our recent talks with ALA leadership helped bring everything into focus.

Looking ahead, we are continuing to talk about our future plans for eBook and digital audiobook availability for library lending with a number of partners providing these services.

Sources: ALA, INFOdocket, PaidContent

Ingram’s Vital Source Now Working With Blackboard

The new Blackboard Building Block for the VitalSource platform developed collaboratively with educators and publishers, gives higher education institutions and their students an efficient and cost-effective way to acquire content from the world’s leading publishers through the Blackboard Learn platform. Through the Building Block, students and educators have immediate, one-click access to VitalSource’s comprehensive content library with more than 80,000 titles, as well as the functionality of the platform including integrated notes, highlights, annotations, and sharing capability through a single sign-on environment.

Using the Building Block, educators can preview and customize content used in courses. Through the functionality of the application, they can also link to required assignments and relevant activities within digital course materials and easily share that information with students. The Building Block supports the Bookshelf platform for viewing content in any modern browser, as well as downloading to clients on the Macintosh and Windows operating systems, Apple’s iPad, iPhone, iPod touch devices, and Android smartphones and tablets.

Ingram’s Vital Source continues to grow its set of tools to give educational institutions, publishers, and other places of learning, options to connect their infrastructure to commercial, as well as custom electronic and printed content in the platform. The Building Block is available to all institutions on Blackboard Learn 9.1. A member of Blackboard Partnerships Program, Vital Source also participates in the Blackboard Developers Network, an innovative community of educational and technical experts with a passion for using technology to enhance teaching and learning.

Source: Ingram Content Group, Inc.

China/Asia on Demand Metadata Accessible via EBSCO Discovery Service

China/Asia On Demand features a vast collection of reliable, authoritative information spanning arts and humanities, STM (Science, Technology, Medicine) research, social and business information. The collection includes more than 10,000 journals and more than 40 million research articles. The addition of this content to the EDS Base Index will benefit EDS users looking for unique research literature from China, Japan, and Korea.

China/Asia On Demand 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. Partners include the world’s largest scholarly journal and book publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley Blackwell, Springer Science+Business Media, Taylor & Francis Informa, SAGE Publications, and thousands of others. Partners also include content providers, such as LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters (Web of Science), JSTOR, ARTstor, Credo Reference, World Book, ABC-CLIO, and many others.

Oriprobe Information Services, Inc., headquartered in Ontario, Canada, is a leading supplier of information solutions and China/Asia electronic resources. Oriprobe offers copyright permission acquiring and granting, content licensing, translation, and information retrieval services from China, as well as other parts of Asia. Oriprobe’s electronic collections include journals, dissertations/theses, conference proceedings, patents, standards, newspapers, companies and products, institutions, policies, and laws.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Elsevier Launches TargetInsights for Early Drug Discovery

TargetInsights was specifically designed to overcome information challenges during the discovery process of target identification and validation, where scientists need to support ideation and findings with extensive reviews of the scientific literature. The tool enables full-text entity and relationship searching of more than 5,000 international biomedical journals covering more than 800,000 journal articles and conference abstracts per year. Publications covered by TargetInsights are indexed with about 9 million controlled terms within nine taxonomies (genes, proteins and RNA; chemicals and drugs; diseases; biological functions; organ systems; tissue types; cell components; organisms; and cell lines).

TargetInsights supports the workflows of molecular biologists, preclinical pharmacologists, discovery chemists, and bioinformaticians, among other user groups. Recognizing the need for information immediacy among these users, it takes just 10 days from an article being published to it being indexed and appearing in TargetInsights. To support search accuracy, tools are provided to hone and visualize index term relationship searching.

Source: Elsevier