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Weekly News Digest

September 13, 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.

FirstRain Announces New Customer Intelligence Solution

Unlike other intelligence solutions for sales and marketing people, Performinator transforms major accounts sales and marketing teams into well-informed customer intelligence superstars. Performinator does this by delivering precise information that’s been fine tuned for the specific sales and marketing strategy of each customer. This means users only see intelligence at the intersection of a company’s top customers, the business lines and end-markets they sell into, and the important developments that signal money or danger. This is unique and unusually relevant information that transforms each user into a company's go-to expert on their most significant customers.

FirstRain Performinator comprises three drop-in customer intelligence modules that have been designed based on the best practices of top-performing B2B sales and marketing professionals. The standard collection includes the following modules:

• The Personal Intelligence Carousel sits on the homepage of Salesforce.com, SharePoint,or other social enterprise platforms and allows individuals in sales or marketing to easily select, view, and share the intelligence on their top customers and markets that they want to see every day
• The Market Landscape component provides an amazingly deep and detailed view of the companies, markets, and competitors that are influencing your business
• The Account Snapshot delivers a useful dynamically generated brief on any company in your CRM system

Source: FirstRain

Bowker Syndetics Solutions Adds Reviews VOYA and Quill and Quire

The addition of VOYA and Quill and Quire provide fresh perspectives on literature, enabling patrons to make informed decisions on what they check out of the library. For example, VOYA focuses on the needs of young adult literature and reading, adding more than 17,000 book reviews for young adults. Quill and Quire is the premiere magazine of the Canadian book trade and contributes more than 8,000 Canadian book reviews to Syndetics Solutions’ growing online archives.

Book reviews comprise a portion of the 40 million unique descriptive data elements relating to books, audio books, and multimedia available to libraries through Syndetic Solutions’ three platforms: Syndetics Classic, Syndetics Plus, and Syndetics ICE. Libraries use the data elements to strengthen the quality of information available to their patrons through their OPAC or discovery layer. Review sources already available include influential and widely read publications such as The New York Times, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Choice, Library Journal and School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, The Guardian, and others.

Syndetic Solutions is a service of Bowker, an affiliate of global information company ProQuest.

Source: Bowker

New Anthropology Databases Now Available via EBSCOhost

Published by the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropological Index contains information from a broad geographical range, emphasizing the Commonwealth and Africa, and extending to Eastern Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and the Pacific. The database indexes periodicals covering the fields of physical anthropology, archaeology, cultural ethnography, and linguistics.

Anthropological Literature is published by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University and indexes articles, reports, commentaries, and obituaries found in nearly 700 journals and monographic series. More than 600,000 citations are included in this resource covering articles published from the early 19th century to the present, in more than 50 languages.

Anthropology Plus is a compilation of Anthropological Index and Anthropological Literature. This broad and rich resource provides extensive indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, interdisciplinary studies, etc.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

Europeana’s Huge Cultural Dataset Opens for Free Re-Use

This release, which is by far the largest one-time dedication of cultural data to the public domain using CC0, offers a new boost to the digital economy, providing electronic entrepreneurs with opportunities to create innovative apps and games for tablets and smartphones and to create new web services and portals.

Europeana’s move to CC0 is a step change in open data access. Releasing data from across the memory organizations of every EU country sets an important new international precedent, a decisive move away from the world of closed and controlled data.

Importantly, the change represents a valuable contribution to the European Commission’s agenda to drive growth through digital innovation. Online open data is a core resource that can fuel enterprise and create opportunities for millions of Europeans working in Europe's cultural and creative industries. The sector represents 3.3% of EU GDP and is worth more than €150 billion in exports.

Source: Europeana

Summon Discovery Service Expands Coverage of Open Access Scholarly Content

Libertas Academica, based in New Zealand, publishes 87 peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals, containing more than 2,800 articles. Of the journals, 81 are OA while six are pay-per-view or subscription-only. Medical titles are prominent in the collection, including a set of journals devoted to clinical practice in the major medical specialties. There are also journals related to biotechnology topics as well as other sciences.

eScholarship@McGill, the McGill University OA collection, showcases the publications and theses of McGill University faculty and students. The collection includes more than 30,000 full-text documents of electronic theses, research articles and reports, working papers, conference papers, and books. 

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), provided by Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN), is a discovery service for peer-reviewed monographs published under an OA license. The DOAB’s searchable index will be added to the Summon service, including links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository. More than 1100 academic peer-reviewed books from 28 publishers will be indexed and discoverable.

Source: Serials Solutions

OCLC’s WebJunction Receives Operating Grant From The Gates Foundation

WebJunction.org provides a wealth of training resources—including online courses, webinar presentations, downloadable curricula, and real-world examples collected from libraries—to share the knowledge, skills, and support that power relevant, vibrant libraries. WebJunction programs support library staff working daily to connect their local communities with the content, space, and services they need to enrich and transform lives.

The new grant will support OCLC’s continued development of the programs, content, and systems of WebJunction.org, and provide long-term sustainability of services that will help libraries thrive in changing and challenging technological environments today and into the future.

WebJunction’s training resources, programs and content have been used by staff in 69% of U.S. public libraries. From July 2011 through June 2012, staff enrolled in more than 19,000 courses via WebJunction and more than 17,000 staff members registered for 26 free webinar programs offered on hot topics in the library profession.

Source: OCLC