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Weekly News Digest

October 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.

TLC’s Lists & Actions for Librarians on the Go

The LS2 Staff interface is a touchscreen-optimized, tablet-friendly design that allows a librarian to leave his or her desk and perform circulation tasks anywhere in the library.

The new Lists & Actions tab leverages this mobility to provide lists of items and associated transaction data wherever it’s needed using an array of filters associated with MARC record data and circulation statistics. Each selected filter opens a range of options to help narrow down the search. Librarians can view saved pick lists, create weeding lists on the fly, or limit collections from within the stacks, in the workroom, or anywhere in the library by any number of filters and variables.

Data from lists and saved searches can be exported to a spreadsheet, added to an existing list, or used to create new lists. Each filter has options available for further narrowing a search, and each column in the results table can be rearranged, resized, sorted, or deleted to customize a user’s list or saved search.

Source: The Library Corporation

Oxford English Dictionary Appeals to the Public for Help

Appeals will be posted to the website on a frequent basis. Some of the entries the OED team is initially asking the public’s help with include the following:

bellini
Can you provide evidence of "bellini" before 1965? The famous cocktail of peach juice mixed with Prosecco or champagne is said to have been invented in Venice at Harry’s Bar in the 1930s, and named (in Italian) in 1948 (in honour of the painter Giovanni Bellini, c1430-1516). Earlier evidence in English may be available in travelogues or guidebooks.

come in from the cold
Did John le Carré coin the phrase? Meaning ‘(esp. of a spy) to return from isolation, concealment, or exile,’ it is famous from le Carré’s 1963 novel The Spy who Came in from the Cold but was it ever used by actual intelligence officers?

FAQ
Do you have proof of the earliest FAQ? The term is currently attributed to Eugene N. Miya, a researcher at NASA, who is said to have coined it c1983 in documents circulated to Usenet groups on the history of the space programme. Our earliest verifiable evidence is from 1989 but we’d like to go back further to prove the coinage of the word.

Other entries now open on the OED Appeals site at launch include in your dreams!, cooties, and Kwanzaa. The OED Appeals site will be updated regularly; other words scheduled for research in the coming weeks include baked Alaska, bimble, carbo-loading, easy-peasy, email, heads-up, and party animal. Followers of the OED on Twitter and Facebook will be alerted to new Appeals and can keep abreast of new word evidence as it comes to light.

The OED’s expansive record of the history of English has relied on input from the public since its earliest days, from the original Appeal for contributions from "a thousand readers" in 1859, to the popular BBC TV program Balderdash & Piffle in 2005. The online OED Appeals brings the public into conversation with the dictionary’s professional lexicographers more directly than ever before.

Follow on Twitter: @OEDonline.

Watch this video: Senior Editor Fiona McPherson introduces OED Appeals

Source: Oxford University Press

EBSCO Publishing Introduces Education Source

Designed to meet the needs of education students, professionals, and policymakers, Education Source claims to be the largest and most complete collection of full-text journals in education research. The extensive collection includes full text for more than 1,700 journals, 550 books and monographs, education-related conference papers, citations for more than 4 million articles including book reviews and more than 100,000 controlled and cross-referenced names of educational tests.

Coverage in Education Source spans all levels of education from early childhood to higher education and includes educational specialties such as multilingual education, health education, and testing. Subject matter includes Adult Education, Continuing Education, Distance Learning, Government Funding, Multicultural/Ethic Education, Social Issues, Student Counseling, Vocational Education, as well as many others.

EBSCO and H.W. Wilson merged in 2011 in what was viewed by the companies as an ideal match. The acquisition led directly to heightening the value and quality of EBSCO and Wilson resources as well as the creation of a line of source products, including Education Source. EBSCO plans to release additional source products focusing on specific subject matter over the next few months.

Source: EBSCO Publishing 

Pearson Launches New Early Edition Ebook Service

These Early Edition titles share a focus on hot emerging technologies. The first set includes: The Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook by Erica Sadun, Learning Objective-C 2.0 by Robert Clair, and Programming in Objective-C, 5th Edition by Stephen Kochan. An Early Edition title typically becomes available 60 to 90 days prior to a book’s publication. For more information about the Early Edition iOS 6 titles, visit informit.com/ios6.

“Developers can’t wait for the right answers, especially from amazing teachers and trainers like Erica Sadun, Stephen Kochan, and Robert Clair,” said Paul Boger, publisher of Pearson Technology Group. “We want our customers to gain expertise as soon as the experts do. With Early Editions, they can.”

Pearson is home to such respected brands as Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, Exam Cram, IBM Press, Prentice Hall Professional, Que, Sams Publishing, and VMware Press, which have as its online publishing arm, InformIT-The Trusted Technology Learning Source. In addition, Berkeley-based Peachpit, the publishing partner for Adobe Press, Apple Certified, and others, publishes best-selling books for creative design professionals. Pearson is also co-founder, with O’Reilly Media Inc., of Safari Books Online.

Source: Pearson

Capita Partners With EBSCO Publishing to Enhance Library Resource Discovery

The agreement will provide users with a powerful article search experience. Providing libraries with access to EBSCO’s unified index and discovery service expands the quality and quantity of content available to current Prism users, with the addition of enhanced features and functionality.

Users will continue to enjoy the benefits of using a single interface to review their library account, reserve and renew books while also accessing EBSCO’s content, including magazines and journal articles, ebooks and other econtent. Additionally, Prism can be customized to match the university branding to deliver a better, more consistent student experience. Institutions will be able to enjoy the benefits of surfacing their resources through a single search interface, enhancing and simplifying the discovery process for their students.

Source: Capita and EBSCO Publishing

California Digital Library and Partners Launch DataUp

Scientific datasets have immeasurable value, but they are useless without proper documentation and long-term storage. Data sharing also is strongly encouraged in the scientific community but is not the norm in many disciplines, including Earth, ecological, and environmental sciences. DataUp addresses these issues.

CDL partnered with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Microsoft Research Connections, and DataONE to create the DataUp tool, which is free to use and creates a direct link between researchers and data repositories. CDL also announced that the DataUp project has been contributed to the Outercurve Foundation’s Research Accelerator Gallery.

The DataUp add-in operates within a program many researchers already use: Microsoft Excel. The web application allows users to upload tabular data in either Excel format or comma-separated value (CSV) format. Both the add-in and the web application allow users to do the following:

• Perform a “best practices check” to ensure data are well-formatted and organized
• Create standardized metadata, or a description of the data, using a wizard-style template
• Retrieve a unique identifier for their dataset from their data repository
• Post their datasets and associated metadata to the repository.

Although hundreds of data repositories are available for archiving, many scientific researchers either are unaware of their existence or do not know how to access them. One of the major outcomes of the DataUp project is the ONEShare repository, created specifically for DataUp, where users can deposit tabular data and metadata directly from the tool.

An added advantage of ONEShare is its connection to the DataONE network of repositories. DataONE links existing data centers and enables users to search for data across participating repositories by using a single search interface. Data deposited into ONEShare will be indexed and made available by any DataONE user, facilitating collaboration, and enabling data re-use.

Source: California Digital Library