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Weekly News Digest

April 25, 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.

Silobreaker Releases Mobile App for Silobreaker Premium

In addition, an app user can do the following:

• Monitor "who" or "what" is trending by Heat indicators
• Share findings with colleagues directly from the app
• Receive and read documents uploaded by colleagues
• Quickly skim search results and navigate to source publications
• Swipe to read the next article in a search result without leaving browser view

For a short introductory demo, visit silobreaker.com/demos/app.

“The Silobreaker App is our latest feature to support the workflow of our customers,” said Silobreaker CEO Kristofer Mansson. “While collecting and analyzing content remain the core tasks for our users, being able to push findings quickly to management or colleagues in the field is often equally important. The app is an effective and rapid distribution channel between analysts and decision makers, as well as an exceptional tool outright for our mobile users.”

Initially, the Silobreaker App will be available for iOS and Windows Phone devices, followed shortly by the release of a version for Android-based phones and tablets. The app will be available free in the Apple App Store and Windows Marketplace from early May 2013.

Silobreaker is an internet and technology company that offers products and services that aggregate, analyze, contextualize, and bring meaning to the ever-increasing amount of digital information. Silobreaker’s products help many users from the corporate, government, military, and financial services sectors around the world.

Silobreaker also offers a free news search service at news.silobreaker.com. It lacks many of the advanced features of the subscription versions, but it “provides a window to Silobreaker’s unique model for effective media-monitoring, by combining content aggregation with text-mining and graphical representations.”

Source: Silobreaker

Ingram Expands OASIS Library Platform Through EBL Collaboration

Through the alliance with EBL, Ingram will add more than 325,000 EBL ebook titles to the OASIS platform, substantially growing the selection of econtent available to libraries. Users of the OASIS platform can view and select from an expanded selection of ebooks alongside print books, with no changes to existing and preferred workflows. Billing will be consolidated, offering libraries integrated acquisition services and invoicing for all EBL content.

Ingram continues to boost its offerings to provide a total solution for academic libraries through Coutts Information Services Inc. and Ingram Library Services Inc. Through the company’s comprehensive services, libraries can find all the materials they need whether print, digital, print-on-demand, or hard to find content from one company, easing the burden of collection development, acquisition, and payment for libraries around the globe.

The Ingram OASIS platform is an online library interface for bibliographic information and searching, book and ebook acquisition, collection development, and workflow management. Through the OASIS platform, libraries are able to access a database of millions of titles; search, select and manage orders online; download records, including no-cost MARC downloads; monitor standing orders; manage approval plans and new title notification plans; track orders and access reporting information.

Source: Ingram Content Group, Inc.

Editor’s Note: In January 2013, ProQuest signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ebook Library (EBL) from Australia-based Ebooks Corp. Ltd. with plans to merge it with ebrary. According to ProQuest representatives, the deal has not yet closed, but is planned for May 2013. 

Expanded Public Access to Federally Funded Research—A Call to Action

Shulenburger states:

To assure that resulting plans serve scholarship well, it is critically important that we provide input to federal agencies while they are considering what to propose to the White House, as well as during the Director’s approval process. We must help ensure that agency plans are efficient and effective, and that they meet the needs of the academy, the Government, and the public.

The statement, “Expanded Public Access: A New Era with New Challenges,” issued this call to action.

Each research university campus, and the APLU and AAU who represent them, should develop a process for soliciting input and recommending to the agencies and Director Holdren desired practices for deposit. Otherwise, we have no one to blame but ourselves if compliance with the deposit policies is expensive, if access is cumbersome, or if the interests of higher education are not fully reflected in the agencies’ policies.

The statement also highlighted the special case of research data.

Turning responsibility for digital data management over to those who do not have the academy’s sole interest as their own might well result in a future where access to digital data generated by our faculty becomes increasingly expensive and difficult for them and their students. We should plan carefully in order not to repeat our experiences with the scholarly publications marketplace. The White House memorandum provides the academy with an important opportunity for such planning.

Source: Association of Research Libraries

Thomson Reuters Offers New EndNote Basic—Aimed at Mendeley Users

“Public response to Elsevier’s acquisition of Mendeley has been mixed,” said Amanda Addis, vice president and general manager of the EndNote solution from Thomson Reuters. “Thomson Reuters has always had a free EndNote product, and we’ve now made it even more appealing in light of current market conditions. We want researchers to know they have a ‘free’ choice from Thomson Reuters with our new EndNote Basic.”

EndNote Basic includes storage for 2GB of attachments and 50,000 references, as well as the top 20-plus most frequently used styles. In addition, there are intangible benefits including “the fact that we are publisher and publishing-model neutral. Our mission is to support the advancement of science and the research community with tools needed to accomplish individual, institutional, and societal goals,” said Addis.

EndNote is a premier research resource with flexible tools for searching, organizing, and sharing work, creating bibliographies, and writing papers. It is used by more than 3 million people around the world, comprising 100,000 enterprises and customer accounts. The EndNote iPad version will soon be updated to reflect the new EndNote Basic functionality. EndNote’s iPad version is available on iTunes for $.99 (discounted from $9.99) through the end of July 2013.

Thomson Reuters has made it easy for users to migrate Mendeley files to EndNote in a few simple steps. More information is at endnote.com/basic.

Source: Thomson Reuters

New Data Mining and Analytics Tools for the HathiTrust Digital Library

Indiana University and the University of Illinois are the founding partners of the HTRC. The new infrastructure release follows an aggressive development path set forth by the HTRC Executive Management Team at the 2012 HTRC UnCamp, a gathering of HTRC developers, researchers, and librarians. Users can now apply sophisticated computational research methodology across the large-scale collection, leveraging metadata crafted over time by libraries.

In Phase 2 of the HTRC (September 2012-March 2013), the HTRC Technical Working Group created production versions of the beta services previewed at the 2012 UnCamp event. The group is now working to open the resources to community testers who are part of the HTRC User Group Community. (For subscription details, see https://list.indiana.edu/sympa/subscribe/htrc-usergroup-l).

“This represents a major step forward in understanding how new knowledge can be derived from one of the largest digital library collections in the world,” notes J. Stephen Downie, professor in the graduate school of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois and co-director of the HTRC.

The HTRC service stack, which provides the analytical entry point, is based on a completely new technical architecture. This framework leverages existing analytics tools such as SEASR, digital library software such as Blacklight, and a services-oriented architecture application interface. The current production phase includes a HTRC Sandbox that is open to scholars for evaluation of the HTRC services stack as part of their experiments.

Source: HathiTrust Research Center

World Scientific Publishing Signs Ebook Agreement With YBP Library Services

Information on title availability for the full range of World Scientific Publishing handbooks and reference works will be accessible by libraries through GOBI³, enabling YBP's customers to view and select individual ebooks, as well as subject collection ebooks, from World Scientific Publishing with no change to their existing workflow. The result is a fully integrated, user-friendly library acquisition process, from selection and profiling to ordering and invoicing.

YBP Library Services 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 provides access to more than 10 million titles. YBP is located in Contoocook, N.H.

World Scientific Publishing Company currently has more than 200 employees at its headquarters in Singapore, and it has offices in New Jersey, London, Geneva, Hong Kong, Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. Within about 3 decades, it has established itself as one of the leading scientific publishers in the world, and the largest international scientific publisher in the Asia-Pacific region. World Scientific publishes about 500 new titles a year and 120 journals in various fields. 

Source: World Scientific Publishing