Back Index Forward
Weekly News Digest
March 11, 2013 — 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. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

EBSCO Introduces eBook Clinical Collection

The collection includes titles from the following publishers:

• Springer Publishing
• De Gruyter
• Wiley
• SAGE Publications
• American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons 
• Emerald
• Clinical Publishing Oxford
• World Scientific Publishing Company
• Landes Bioscience
• Elsevier Science

eBook Clinical Collection is offered on an annual subscription basis with unlimited access to the content and optional downloading. Each title is offered with unlimited users, allowing more users access to each title in the collection. As with all ebooks available from EBSCO, eBook Clinical Collection is integrated and works seamlessly with all EBSCOhost content. Users will be able to search the collection on its own or side-by-side with other EBSCOhost databases bringing together ebooks, periodicals, and other content for a seamless search experience. 

Source: EBSCO Publishing

LexisNexis Announces Major Release of Concordance Evolution

Developed in collaboration with various litigation professionals during extensive testing, Concordance Evolution helps law firms, government agencies, litigation service bureaus, and application service providers reduce their overall e-discovery costs and boost their litigation workflow productivity, while managing the largest and most complex cases.

This next generation of Concordance Evolution delivers the following:

• Speed—Concordance Evolution combines professional insight on relevant language, keywords and terms of art, with the speed of advanced search technology to deliver fast searching, review, and more. In real-world testing, the software imported load files of 350 GB (about 7n million documents) within 24 hours, enabled document-to-document browsing within 1 to 2 seconds, tagged 3,000 documents per minute, returned results on complex searches within 4 seconds and produced 5 million pages of discoverable documents per 24-hour time periods.
• Capacity—With the flexible administrative tools in Concordance Evolution, users can adapt the capacity of the software to their needs, whether it’s to manage a small case or a large, complex litigation matter. This is made possible by a scalable Microsoft SQL backend database that keeps data in one place, improves data integrity, and supports large-scale, multiparty document review. The new version of the platform also allows users to run multiple imports, exports, and production actions at once, automate and schedule jobs, and distribute processing across multiple servers, providing tremendous scalability.
• Ease of Use—Concordance Evolution features optimized workflows that save hours of time, enabling review of more data sooner than with processes required by competitive products. Specifically, users can easily conduct queries, browse and tag documents, view production sets, and conduct bulk reviews. A unique “Dual View” design allows users to obtain two different types of views simultaneously on a split screen in a single browser. Other user-friendly features include sortable fields, email threading, near-native highlighting, and shortcut keys. Intuitive workflows such as these also reduce the need for extensive user training and retraining.

Initially launched in 2011, Concordance Evolution is built on an Open API architecture, which enables different websites to interact with each other for greater interoperability or closer integration. The software is also scalable to the user’s needs and features centralized user administration, native file review, integrated processing and production, concept searching, and clustering. It is available with a base cost for the software application and then a per-seat licensing fee. In addition to the fully installed version, Concordance Evolution is also available from LexisNexis in a fully-hosted environment.

Source: LexisNexis Legal & Professional

EDUCAUSE and Internet2 to Launch Etextbook Pilot

The fall 2013 pilot is the latest in a series of efforts. Like its predecessors, the pilots have two principal goals:

• To continue to advance the higher education community’s understanding of online materials and what is necessary for them to attain and surpass the effectiveness, accessibility, economy, and other relevant outcomes associated with traditional textbooks
• To explore innovative business models, terms, and conditions that make access to digital educational materials more flexible, economical, efficient, and simple for institutions and publishers alike

“As we move into the next evaluation opportunity for campuses, we are seeing not only increased interest from publishers and platforms to experiment with new offerings, but also requests from new players to work with Internet2 and EDUCAUSE communities to participate in service design discussions,” said Shelton Waggener, Internet2 senior vice president. “Questions we are asking include, What will the evolving landscape look like in the e-content space? How can designs that previously focused on working with the publishing author or faculty member add institutional and student needs into the e-content design? How can cloud based services interoperate with campus systems and students unique device needs?”

“The fall 2013 offering includes all new experimental platforms direct from McGraw Hill, a new version of software from Courseload that has new features and reflects continued progress on Courseload’s public commitment to accessibility, and a CourseSmart pilot that tests new business models,” said Rodney Petersen, managing director, EDUCAUSE Washington office.

Source: Internet2

LexisNexis and Rosen Announce Technology Collaboration

Solutions in the LexisNexis E-Discovery Software Suite—LexisNexis Early Data Analyzer, LAW PreDiscovery, and Concordance Evolution—will soon feature Rosen’s Polaris and ALCoder software tools, which will significantly streamline the e-discovery process.

Enhancements to the LexisNexis E-Discovery Suite will include the following:

• “Near-duplicate” technology—recognizes and eliminates repeated or similar documents, significantly reducing the number of files to be reviewed
• “Email threading” functionality—groups original emails and responses in one thread, preventing users from having to review each email separately
• “Autocoding—codes scanned documents automatically, eliminating the timely process of manual coding

The enhanced versions of Early Data Analyzer and LAW PreDiscovery are expected to be available in April 2013 and Concordance Evolution later in 2013.

Source: LexisNexis Legal & Professional

Thomson Reuters Launches Practitioner Insights

Practitioner Insights draws from exclusive content including:

• Westlaw Daily Briefings: Exclusive expert analysis from Westlaw attorney editors
• Wolters Kluwer Law & Business Daily news summaries: Original, attorney-authored analysis that puts context around breaking legal developments, including offerings in antitrust, employment, health, and intellectual property
• CQ Roll Call Washington Briefings: Exclusive coverage of securities, banking, and energy policy developments from federal regulatory agencies and Congress
• Legal news from Reuters
• The most comprehensive collection of primary law, exclusive analytical materials, and the largest collection of litigation materials
• Featured legal filings: The relevant, recently filed legal documents that provide insights and context around the headlines

Thomson Reuters also is introducing Alerts on WestlawNext, which allows customers to manage all their alerts from one platform to help ensure they are always up to date on emerging legal developments. The new service brings together monitoring from Westlaw’s news-clipping tools, as well as tracking and alerts relating to dockets, citations, and court filings, to centrally provide breaking legal developments and information about clients, competitors, regulators, the courts, and the legal marketplace.

Customers now have more options for frequency of reporting, and alerts can be delivered via email, HTML, XML, RSS, or portal. An Alert History feature allows WestlawNext customers to view results as far back as 90 days, and users can easily create and customize newsletters for colleagues and customers.

Source: Thomson Reuters

De Gruyter Signs 10,000 Title Ebook Agreement with YBP Library Services

“We are delighted to be taking this key step with YBP in making De Gruyter content and that of our partner publishers easily accessible to the library market in America and internationally. As the market for electronic content continues to grow, this capability will become even more important. We are pleased to partner with YBP for the benefit of our customers,” said Ben Ashcroft, director of global sales at De Gruyter.

Through its partnerships with publishers (Böhlau Verlag, Otto Schmidt Verlag, Detail) and university presses (Harvard University Press), De Gruyter offers a backlist of more than 60,000 titles, spanning 260 years of publishing history to academic institutions worldwide.

YBP Library Services, a Baker & Taylor company, provides print and digital content and supporting collection management and technical services to academic, research and special libraries in the Americas, Asia, Middle East, Australia, and the Pacific Rim. GOBI³, YBP's acquisition and collection development interface, provides access to more than 10 million titles. YBP is located in Contoocook, N.H.

Source: De Gruyter and YBP Library Services