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Weekly News Digest

October 22, 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 MuseGlobal Version Empowers Partners

 “The Partner Source Build Environment comprises tools to write and test new Connectors and Source Package Configuration files,” says Jed Gilmore, MuseGlobal’s senior vice president for operations. “The Partner Source Build Environment also includes technology that allows customers to upload Source Packages they build for distribution through their local instance of the Distributed Source Factory.” All of the existing Source Factory utilities, including the Automated Source Update tool, run against the local Source Factory. The Source Build Environment tools, substantially updated for ease of use, have been in use by MuseGlobal programmers for years.

Other important features in this release from MuseGlobal include full functionality testing under Java 1.7 and substantial functional and management enhancements alerts, used in Content Harvesting and User Alerts functionality.

Source: MuseGlobal, Inc.

FindLaw’s Mobile Essential Uses Responsive Design Technology

Jim Schonrock, senior director of product management, FindLaw, stated, “Our law firms and attorney customers will be able to provide an optimal experience to the more than 160 million and growing number of smartphone users who increasingly rely on mobile devices as their primary Internet connection.”

FindLaw’s mobile layouts integrate with the designs of FindLaw’s law firm websites and are search engine-friendly. In addition, the mobile designs include tap-to-call and tap-to-email buttons to provide site visitors the ability to easily contact the firm from anywhere, at any time. 

FindLaw, part of Thomson Reuters, is a leading provider of free, intelligent legal information and online marketing and client development services, serving the legal industry and consumers. Home to the largest online directory of lawyers that assists consumers in finding an attorney by practice area, FindLaw.com is the most popular legal website with 5 million people visiting each month for free information about a legal topic to either solve a legal problem or find a lawyer.

Source: Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters Adds Web of Science Content to Patent Prior Art Research Tools

Access to patent content, scientific journals, conference proceedings, business data, and news information are critical in the quest to determine if an idea is unique and has potential for further development. The latest Thomson Innovation enhancements make this quest much easier and more complete, integrating a deeper scientific literature backfile and access to the full text of journal articles within one, unified platform.

Users can now opt to access the entire Web of Science backfile from within Thomson Innovation, with coverage dating from 1898, or select entitlements grouped by date range; links are available to order the full text of the records or to connect to internal holdings and open access publications. Also available are funding acknowledgement data to track funding sources or to monitor a competitor’s R&D, the ability to track literature citations to see who cited key scientific research and how the research was used, and a tenfold increase in the number of journal articles that can be analyzed in landscape maps, charts, and text clusters.

Visit Thomson Innovation’s website to view the latest enhancements and content additions.

Source: Thomson Reuters

Treasury Department Data Heading Toward GPO’s FDsys Portal

Over the next year, additional historical documents within the Treasury’s library collection will be made available on FDsys, including the Official Register of the United States: 1829–1861; 1879–1959, a publication with information about the federal workforce, including the names of every employee, their job titles, state or country of birth, the location of their posts, and their annual salaries.

GPO authenticates all documents on FDsys, guaranteeing the public that the content is official government information and has not been altered since it was signed and disseminated by GPO. GPO also works with other federal agencies including the National Archives and Records Administration, the Office of Management and Budget, and the U.S. Courts to make their content available on FDsys.

Source: U.S. Government Printing Office

dtSearch Rolls Out More Document Filters

dtSearch’s proprietary document filters support a broad range of data types:

•  “Office” documents: Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF, etc.
• Emails: Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc., all with nested attachments
• Compression formats: ZIP, RAR, GZIP/TAR, etc.
• Web-ready data (including image and text support): HTML, XML/XSL, and PDF—all including integrated image and text support
• Dynamic data (including image and text support): PHP, ASP.NET, SharePoint, etc.
• Databases: SQL including BLOB data (through the dtSearch Engine APIs), Microsoft Access, XBASE, XML, CSV, etc.

The document filters support parsing of all of these data types as well as text extraction and/or conversion to HTML as required for browser display with highlighted hits.

Embedded image and other enhancements: The new version also extends the document filters to add image support to Word (.doc/.docx), PowerPoint (.ppt/.pptx), Excel, (.xls/.xlsx), Access (.mdb/accdb), RTF, and email files including Thunderbird (mbox/.eml) and Outlook (.pst/.msg) files. The release displays these formats showing highlighted hits in context with both text and now images. The release also adds support for Japanese Ichitaro documents.

Multilevel nested file enhancements: The release also increases support for documents and images in multilevel nested configurations. For example, the new version supports not only viewing images in an email file but also images in a PowerPoint presentation embedded in a Word document attached as a zipped file to an email message. A new “object extraction” API lets developers navigate through the structure of each embedded object as a hierarchy and optionally extract each object.

The new release also covers dtSearch Web with Spider for quickly publishing instantly searchable data to an internet or intranet site, dtSearch Network with Spider for instantly searching across a network, dtSearch Publish for publishing searchable data to portable media, and dtSearch Desktop with Spider for desktop search.

Source: dtSearch Corp.

Serials Solutions’ E-Resource Manager Adds JISC Collections License Data

JISC Collections is a membership organization, established by the U.K. Higher and Further Education funding councils, to support the procurement of digital content for education and research in the U.K. It actively engages and consults with librarians and members of advisory groups to identify content that will add value to their collections. It selects and endorses only those publishers that agree to licensing and pricing terms.

It conducts a large program of projects and research and works collaboratively across U.K. institutions to gather, validate, and share knowledge. As well as working with academic libraries, it has recently extended its services to other sectors, including schools, museums, public libraries, national consortia, and pharmaceutical companies.

JISC Collections and Serials Solutions are employing the ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL) format to facilitate the exchange of data between their respective systems. ONIX-PL provides a standardized machine-readable format for the expression of license terms in a consistent manner and was specifically designed for use with library and electronic resource management systems. JISC Collections is creating ONIX-PL expressions for all of its agreements and is making them available as part of its Electronic License Comparison and Analysis Tool (elcat).

Serials Solutions designed a specific license template in 360 Resource Manager to make this data accessible and easy to use for tracking and populating license terms of use in 360 Resource Manager. As the growth in the number of licenses governing the use of e-resources continues to rise at a rapid pace, the value of this new service becomes increasingly important. As a result, a significant amount of time spent on data entry tasks will be eliminated and librarians can spend more time on valuable activities—and fully leverage the capabilities of their chosen technologies and respective workflows.

Future enhancements to the service will help the more than 300 libraries using 360 Resource Manager to effectively track and control their resources to streamline their workflows and optimize collections. The company is also developing Intota, a web-scale collection management solution that provides unified, intelligent workflows, as well as integrated assessment and built-in interoperability.

Source: Serials Solutions