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Weekly News Digest

April 8, 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. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

Wolters Kluwer Health and Wiley Extend Partnership

Ovid’s aggregated medical research solution delivers exceptional value to researchers and practitioners in its mission to provide users with the most current content available from its publishing partners. In addition to the journals, Ovid also licenses more than 700 ebooks from Wiley.

The OvidSP platform is a single destination for conducting efficient and effective medical research whether managing large-scale document-intensive projects or making time-sensitive, evidence-based decisions. Users can search and discover current full-text ejournals and ebooks, as well as bibliographic information, plus manage their results and research documents—all within the OvidSP platform. OvidSP combines leading search technology with powerful productivity tools to help users save time in the research process, so they can focus on the output of their work to answer important patient questions, uncover new theories, and make groundbreaking contributions to their field.

Source: Wolters Kluwer Health

Bowker, ebrary, and Choice Enhance Access to Resources for College Libraries

Originally launched in 2006, RCL is a suite of works based on the American Library Association’s classic reference work, Books for College Libraries (BCL). As ebrary collections, universities, colleges, and other institutions can provide their users with anytime, anywhere access to RCL’s essential titles. RCL titles can be browsed by its broad range of subjects—traditional liberal arts and sciences curriculum, business, computer science, education, engineering and health sciences—or by publisher. The titles are supported with ebrary’s popular features, such as free mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android, along with InfoTools, granular usage statistics, and sophisticated searching and navigation. Through ebrary, RCL titles will also be surfaced through the ProQuest platform and the Summon service, significantly enhancing its discovery. RCL titles can be purchased as a perpetual archive and enabled for patron-driven acquisition.

Via Bowker, the RCL interface has been updated with a simpler browse function, faster search results, and improved mobile access through Bowker’s BookWire app, which enables subscribers to login to access book details and add titles to selected lists from any location. RCL also includes RSS feeds for new titles and dynamic facets to help refine a search. Content includes the full text of Choice reviews and easy identifiers for Choice Outstanding Academic Titles.

Three Bowker subscription options include the traditional RCL collection, which allows libraries to discover and collect more than 80,000 essential titles in 61 core subject areas; Resources for College Libraries: Career Resources (CR), an essential list of 4,500 titles in 56 subject areas covering vocational, technical, and career programs for two-year and four-year undergraduate institutions; and, RCL Plus, which includes both RCL and CR products.

Source: ProQuest

SAGE Launches Social Science Literature Review Tool

With more than 290 topics covered at launch, SAGE Navigator provides students with a single platform from which to discover high-quality literature in their chosen field, while the interactive research chronology provides researchers with a new perspective on their field. Guiding users through seminal pieces within their chosen subjects, the tool enables students, faculty, and researchers to access 20,000-plus recommended readings from more than 1,000 publishers. With each topic introduced by an internationally renowned academic within the field, SAGE Navigator enables students to bring an authoritative voice to their review. For readers, SAGE Navigator offers full-text HTML display, with print and PDF download options. Functionality to enable multiple citation options is also provided.

SAGE Navigator is available for purchase as a complete collection, or as part of the SAGE Knowledge Title Collections, including the following subjects:

• Business and Management
• Criminology
• Education
• Geography
• Health and Social Care
• Media and Communication
• Politics and International Relations
• Psychology
• Sociology

Source: SAGE

Wiley Selects TEMIS for Semantic Big Data Initiative

“In an age where online resources play a central role in new research, it is of paramount importance that users are able to quickly identify and access the content they need,” said Patrik Dyberg, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Wiley. “Wiley hosts one of the world’s broadest and deepest multidisciplinary collection of online resources covering STMS [Scientific, Technical, Medical, and Scholarly] research, and this partnership offers researchers new tools for using this knowledge.”

In addition to indexing Wiley's massive research archive, Luxid will be used to annotate current and future information sources, including reference works, databases, and Wiley’s collection of 1,500 journals.

Luxid automates the semantic enrichment of unstructured content, producing metadata that boosts the relevance of search engines and enables powerful content navigation features such as facets, similar document recommendations, and semantic links to structured knowledge that enhance the end-user experience on online portals and drive increased usage. Semantic metadata can also be used to efficiently develop new products such as specialized topical collections and knowledgebases for additional revenue streams.

Source: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Stanford and edX Collaborate on Development of Open Source Learning Platform

In support of that move, Stanford will integrate features of its existing Class2Go platform into the edX platform, use the integration as an internal platform for online coursework for on-campus and distance learners, and work collaboratively with edX and other institutions to further develop the edX platform.

edX and Stanford will collaborate along with others around the globe on the ongoing development and refinement of the edX online learning platform. As of June 1, developers everywhere will be able to freely access the source code of the edX learning platform, including code for its Learning Management System (LMS); Studio, a course authoring tool; xBlock, an application programming interface (API) for integrating third-party learning objects; and machine grading API’s. edX will support and nurture the community of developers contributing to the enhancement of the edX platform by providing a rich environment for developer collaboration as well as technical and process guidelines to facilitate developer contributions.

The edX learning platform source code, as well as platform developments from Stanford, edX, and other contributors, will be available on June 1, 2013 and can be accessed from the edX Platform Repository at https://github.com/edX.

Source: edX

New York Public Library Announces Digital Collections API

For more than a century, the NYPL has amassed an extraordinary trove of rare and unique material covering the full spectrum of recorded knowledge. Now, for the first time, significant portions of the library’s digitized collections are available as machine-readable data: more than 1 million objects and records for anyone to search, crawl, and compute.

In a blog post, Doug Reside, digital curator for the performing arts, commented on the importance of APIs in our age of digital information and noted:

This API, built by developers in our IT Group, allows computers to search our digital library and get back information about the objects along with links to the relevant Digital Gallery page. Of course, as a human, you can already do that using the Digital Gallery itself, but you can only perform one search at a time. If you wanted to make a chart of say, the most commonly occurring words in the titles of the Mid-Manhattan Picture Collection, it would take a while. Now that the API makes this data available to computer programs, though, it wouldn’t take a great deal of coding to generate such a chart (I’ll leave that as a challenge to you hackers out there. ... post your solutions in comments).

Source: New York Public Library