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Weekly News Digest

March 1, 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.

New Terrorism Research Center Debuts

Terrorism studies as a stand-alone subject has resulted in unprecedented levels of academic interest, and it is included as an integral topic in the fields of political science, international relations, sociology, criminal justice, philosophy, and history. TRAC provides researchers in these areas with the comprehensive, historical content required to develop intellectual clarity, as well the opportunity to study changing relevance as governments and nongovernment public policy groups mount new initiatives. It addresses the complexity and interconnectivity of terrorist groups including their history, goals, warfare tactics, influence on other groups, and the political climate that fostered its origins. And TRAC captures the threatening breadth of terrorism, from such hate/racist groups as the Ku Klux Klan, to individuals such as Timothy McVeigh and groups such as al-Qaeda to government counterterrorism campaigns. In addition to the historical perspective, TRAC serves as a current intelligence repository with a consortium of 2,800 specialists and a real-time newsfeed that tracks events as they occur.

Simple to navigate through its intuitive interface, TRAC features include the following:

• TRAC’s profiles of 3,800 groups that have been known to aid and abet political violence or terrorist organizations give researchers the tools to filter groups by multiple categories for specific queries and to link to sources worldwide for expanded resources
• Original, in-depth analyses of important terrorism issues, providing users with a 360-degree perspective of key topics
• Hot links that quickly navigate between concepts within articles, newsfeeds, and outside resources
• Profiles and risk analysis of vulnerable regions and cities most likely to attract terrorist activity including links to the Failed States Index
• Chatter Control to continuously monitor important news and analyses sources, posting feeds to the site as they occur, which are then cataloged and archived for future study
• Consortium Network with a global representation of 2,800 terrorism scholars and specialists reporting from a range of terrorism hotspots including Russia, Poland, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Pakistan, Croatia, Afghanistan, Serbia, Sweden, the U.K., Canada, the U.S., and more

Source: The Beacham Group, LLC

Bridgeman Education Metadata Comes to EBSCO Discovery Service

Bridgeman Education is the online education resource of the Bridgeman Art Library, the world’s leading source of fine art, cultural and historical images. The collection, which is available by subscription to individuals or institutions, includes more than 390,000 high-quality images for teaching and learning.

The resources found in Bridgeman Education provide the visual culture of every civilization and every period from prehistory to the present. Its extensive coverage of subject areas will appeal to a broad range of researchers. Subjects include art history, medicine, design, fashion, history, geography, politics, science, anthropology, architecture, sport, music, literature & drama, citizenship, archaeology, and ethnography.

Bridgeman Education is part of a growing list of about 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers

Source: EBSCO Publishing

New Mapping Capabilities Enhance BusinessDecision

Thematic maps in BusinessDecision are generated from data retrieved in response to user-initiated projects related to business challenges. The maps help BusinessDecision users visualize data geographically, leading to insights that tables and charts alone do not provide. Thematic maps are a powerful tool to help local business owners, entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and public agencies make fast, accurate, and sound business decisions.

For example, a small business owner or entrepreneur using BusinessDecision through her public library can pinpoint the best location to open a restaurant by generating ZIP code-level maps that show where people live who dine out frequently, have high disposable incomes, and the amount they spend on “food away from home” annually.

Thematic maps in BusinessDecision help users simplify a complex range of market segmentation, consumer spending, socioeconomic, housing, and census data. Users visualize data quickly and easily by first defining a customized area such as a street address or intersection or by selecting a preset area such as a ZIP code or census tract. Once they’ve made their selections, they can turn to the thematic map window that has tools and features to encourage discovery.

The BusinessDecision database is offered through public libraries to help small businesses succeed by increasing their market share and growing their clientele. BusinessDecision Academic is offered through academic institutions to help students, faculty, and staff with research projects such as strategic or business planning. BusinessDecision and Business Decision Academic provide professional level capabilities that combine state of the art GIS-mapping technology with the highest quality consumer market data such as the Tapestry Lifestyle Segmentation system, consumer spending data, demographic and housing data, population estimates and forecasts, and census data. Subscribers to BusinessDecision and BusinessDecision Academic will receive the thematic maps upgrade at no additional charge, as part of their annual subscription.

Thematic maps and BusinessDecision will be demonstrated in the CIVICTechnologies Booth #1139 at the PLA Conference in Philadelphia, March 13-17, 2012.

Source: CIVICTechnologies

Ex Libris Integrates LOCKSS Software With SFX OpenURL Link Resolver

Added as a target in SFX, the LOCKSS service retrieves licensed materials from the library’s own LOCKSS “Box” or archive. Libraries that activate this target can offer uninterrupted access, through SFX context-sensitive links, to scholarly content that is securely archived in their own LOCKSS Box.

SFX serves more than 2,300 institutions in more than 50 countries. Released in 2001 as the first of its kind, SFX offers a wealth of features that go far beyond basic OpenURL link-resolver functionality. In addition to features targeted at end users, SFX includes a variety of services for librarians, such as collection management and analysis tools; an A-Z e-journal list; a query form for Citation Linker; and an option to add the bX recommender service, which helps users discover relevant literature that they would not necessarily have found otherwise.

The LOCKSS Program, based at Stanford University Libraries, in partnership with EDINA at the University of Edinburgh, is an international community collaboration that provides libraries with archiving tools and support so that they can easily and inexpensively collect and archive their own copies of authorized e-content. Founded in 1998, LOCKSS provides libraries with the open-source software and support to preserve today’s web-published materials for tomorrow’s readers while building their own collections and acquiring a copy of the assets they pay for, instead of simply leasing them.

A white paper with more information is available from the LOCKSS Program website: http://www.lockss.org/locksswiki/files/SFX_Integration_White_Paper.pdf.

Source: Ex Libris Group 

Cengage Learning to Provide Discounted Etextbooks to California State University

The Affordable Learning Solutions campaign is part of a CSU initiative to help control the cost of education for students. Cengage Learning was selected as a partner by CSU following an extensive request for proposals process. Beyond just a select number of campuses and courses, Cengage Learning will be providing etextbooks for all academic disciplines and departments.

Cengage Learning etextbooks can be purchased by CSU students through their campus bookstore and CengageBrain.com. The etextbooks are device and Learning Management System (LMS) agnostic, can be accessed online or offline, and include interactive capabilities, such as note-taking and highlighting.

In other news, Cengage Learning terminated the license to sell its titles through digital textbook seller Kno, and Kno—which counts on Cengage material for about a quarter of its sales—is suing for breach of a license agreement. Cengage accused Kno of copyright infringement when it added new note-taking features to its ereader platform.

Source: Cengage Learning

EBSCO Publishing Makes Major Improvements to Business Source Complete

Company View offers a “homepage” for each company, including expanded information, as well as a more robust user experience. Users can quickly find information on more than 1.1 million public and private companies, including parents and subsidiaries, key contacts, annual sales revenue, net profit, number of employees, line of business(es), etc., as well as high-profile links to detailed company profiles, SWOT analyses, etc., and relational information such as industry and market reports.

Business Source Complete provides a collection of bibliographic and full-text content covering all disciplines of business. The company reports that Business Source Complete contains far more active, peer-reviewed, business-related journals than any other database currently available. As part of the comprehensive coverage offered by this database, indexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals, trade publications, and top management journals dating from 1886 are included. In addition, Business Source Complete contains searchable cited references for more than 1,300 journals, as well as detailed author profiles for the 40,000 most-cited authors in the database.

Source: EBSCO Publishing