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Weekly News Digest

May 21, 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.

LibLime Announces the Public Release of LibLime Koha 4.10

Release Notes are available at each site. The source code is also available for public access in the LibLime unified git repository located at https://github.com/liblime/LibLime-Koha. The latest version of LibLime Koha continues to add deeper support for consortia and enhanced performance for larger and larger collections with increased circulation traffic. And as with earlier versions, all new functionality in all of LibLime Koha continues to run in the Plack environment for increased performance. LibLime Koha 4.10 continues to provide libraries with the most advanced functionality and performance available in the open development ILS arena.

Some of the new functionality in LibLime Koha 4.10 includes the following: 

• Expanded SIP2 messaging to support connectivity to third-party applications 
• Performance improvements to holds management using Ajax 
• Last borrower information linked to items regardless of patron reading-history retention 
• Expand creation of machine-generated authority records as a component of the batch bibliographic import process 
• Expansion of patron record ownership in a union catalog

Source: LibLime 

ProQuest and Elsevier Health Expand Medical Licensing Agreement

ProQuest has included The Lancet, widely considered to be among the most influential medical journals in the world, in its Health Sciences products since 1995. The Lancet’s long publishing history includes breakthrough research from Lister, Salk, Fleming, Epstein and Barr, and others who have helped hundreds of thousands of clinicians around the world to improve health and save lives. While its research routinely makes headlines around the world, The Lancet is also known for its independent, authoritative voice in global medicine. Now, that full-text content will be available along with articles from Elsevier’s spectrum of important medical journals, covering fields from Anesthesiology to Veterinary Medicine.

As part of information products such as ProQuest Medical Library and ProQuest Health and Medical Complete, all of the journals will be accessible to end users in a research environment that enables them to easily manage, share, and work with their discoveries. Backfiles will extend to 2002 and new articles will be available 60 days after their original publication date.

Source: ProQuest

Gale Digitizes Entire Run of Popular Liberty Magazine

Liberty Magazine, subtitled “A Weekly for Everybody,” was a general interest magazine founded in 1924 by Joseph Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, and Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. The magazine’s high-quality and originality of art, stories, and features led to an ongoing circulation of 3 million weekly. The magazine’s prominence attracted original contributions from the greatest artists, writers, celebrities, and statesmen of the age, including Walt Disney, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.G. Wells, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mahatma Ghandi, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Babe Ruth, and many more.

Gale licensed the magazine’s content from the Liberty Library Corporation, owned by Robert Whiteman, who has collected and organized the content over many years. “I’m excited to see this great piece of Americana find new life among Gale’s distinguished digital newspaper collections,” says Whiteman. “With articles like Joe DiMaggio’s ‘How much is a Ballplayer Worth?,’ Liberty Magazine content is just as relevant today as it was 60 years ago.”

The Liberty Magazine archive includes content from almost all genres—human interest stories, mysteries, Westerns, love stories, humor stories, biographies, and autobiographies of the rich and powerful—both famous and infamous, and some of the greatest World I & II stories. Liberty Magazine charted the moods, attitudes, lifestyles, fads, and fortunes of America through its three most significant decades. With about 100,000 pages, this easy-to-access collection offers primary source material for American studies, political studies, social and cultural studies, business history, global studies, and international relations.

The Liberty Magazine Historical Archive, 1924-1950 will join the family of illustrated weeklies that Gale has made available digitally, including The Picture Post Historical Archive, 1938-1957 and The Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991. It will be cross-searchable on the Gale NewsVault platform.

Source: Gale 

Unglue.it Officially Launches With Five Ebook Campaigns

As the popularity of ebooks skyrockets, readers have been discovering both their convenience and their disadvantages. Proprietary formats and digital rights management (DRM) technology lock ebooks to specific devices and make it hard for people to keep reading their books as technology changes. Many ebooks cannot even be lent by libraries. Unglued ebooks solve these problems. They have no DRM and can be copied and shared without infringing copyright due to the Creative Commons license. Instead of receiving royalties, rightsholders are paid one licensing fee of their choosing in advance. Book lovers pledge toward this fee using the Unglue.it platform.

The five initial authors and publishers are:

• Michael Laser, 6-321
• Joseph Nassise, Riverwatch
• Nancy Rawles, Love Like Gumbo
• Budding Reader, Cat and Rat
• Open Book Publishers, Oral Literature in Africa, by Ruth Finnegan.

Source: Unglue.it

Brill and Publishing Technology Celebrate Launch of Brill Online

Transitioning much of its content from Publishing Technology’s ingentaconnect solution, Brill has moved to a custom pub2web platform to consolidate content assets previously distributed across multiple resources. The publisher now commands an agile and adaptable site ensuring long-term cost efficiency and a solid and flexible base for future innovation and experimentation.

Brill Online Books and Journals now features the following:

• search and browse of content by title, type, subject, or imprint
• preservation of individual imprint catalogs and brand
• faceted search and browse functionality, facilitating greater discoverability
• usability enhancements such as the introduction of autosuggestions within search
• ability to create new categories of collections across both journals and ebooks
• promotional features for generating content recommendations to libraries
• integration with back-end enterprise systems for consolidated production workflow

Source: Publishing Technology and Brill

EBSCO Publishing Releases Nine New Audiobook Collections

These collections contain a variety of materials from best sellers such as the Hunger Games trilogy and Tina Fey’s Bossypants to recently digitized classics such as Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter. With these latest sets, particular attention was given to specific areas of interest to public library patrons.

These new audiobook collections are a prepackaged set of titles chosen specifically to fulfill niche areas of interest in a library’s readership. The nine new sets that are now available include:

• Romantic Fiction Audiobooks
• Mystery Fiction Audiobooks
• Humor Audiobooks
• Sci-Fi Audiobooks
• Fantasy Fiction Audiobooks
• Biography Audiobooks
• Psychological and Suspense Fiction Audiobooks
• Historical Fiction and Nonfiction Audiobooks
• Christian Fiction Audiobooks

Each collection was created by EBSCO’s collection development team of librarians based on popularity, positive recommendations, and reviews from trade publications, as well as usage statistics. These collections will be updated quarterly with the newest and best titles in each genre, and will be available on the website and for order via EBSCOhost Collection Manager.

Source: EBSCO Publishing