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Weekly News Digest

September 3, 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.

Thomson Reuters Enhances Elearning Options

Thomson Reuters recently enhanced its governance, risk, and compliance solutions for the global community with a new Learning Management System (LMS), Accelus Learning Manager, and WeComply. These new solutions are designed to improve the company’s online educational courses with improved scalability, performance, capacity, and language support.

Thomson Reuters’ Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) business has been working on these elearning solutions through a variety of acquisitions and partnerships for the past 18 months. During this time, the company added 42 new courses and 59 refreshed courses to total 117 courses in an additional 21 languages as part of these partnerships. Acquiring MHA and Knowledge Platform extended the scope of content and language capabilities of its elearning courses. The portfolio of elearning courses were further enhanced with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s (FINRA) Firm Element CE elearning courses and courses on antibribery, anticorruption, and antitrust from Clifford Chance, and gamified, mobile, and analytics-rich courses with True Office.

The addition of Accelus Learning Manager, a flexible web-based LMS, helps firms identify and manage their training needs while delivering targeted content to mitigate risk of compliance breaches. And by integrating WeComply, Thomson Reuters expanded the scope of its business-critical compliance courses, including courses on code of conduct, preventing discrimination and harassment, ethics and compliance essentials, and global anticorruption.

Source: Thomson Reuters

Polaris Streamlines ILS Migration

Quality assurance and new structure for the implementations team helped Polaris Library Systems streamline its integrated library system (ILS) migration process.

Polaris, which works with a variety of libraries to implement technology solutions efficiently, decided that its implementation model needed improvement. So libraries that migrate to the Polaris Library Systems ILS will now see it going live more quickly.

“The process of switching to a new integrated library system is often perceived as a hassle or inconvenience,” according to Brad Rogers, director of customer operations. The changes to Polaris’ migration process can “reduce inefficiencies and shorten the amount of time our customers are offline,” he says.

The implementations team, which is responsible for partnering with libraries to address any challenges that arise in the migration process, plan to continue to find ways to streamline the migration process.

Polaris has already migrated several library systems to the Polaris ILS, including the Salt Lake City Public Library System (six libraries in 3.5 months), the Metro-Boston Library Network (53 libraries in 8 months), and the Baltimore County Library System (19 libraries in 4 months).

With a promise of holding the migration process to 4–5 months on average, Polaris has worked with more than 1,800 public, academic, and special libraries in the U.S. and Canada on ILS integration.

Source: Polaris Library Systems

OA Collection Welcomes Frontiers in Energy Research

Frontiers, now part of Nature Publishing Group, introduced Frontiers in Energy Research as the newest addition to its open access (OA) journal collection. The new journal is designed to connect scientists who are exploring ways to weave innovative energy systems into the global economic and social framework.

As the newest member of the Frontiers in … journal series, the peer-reviewed Frontiers in Energy Research will focus on a range of energy-related topics, including:

As one of the largest and fastest-growing OA publishers, Frontiers promotes open science by fostering a network of researchers in various fields who can edit and contribute to its peer-reviewed journals. Frontiers prides itself on having a quick publication time frame: Users can expect an average of 84 days from submission to final decision for a paper.

Source: Frontiers

SwetsWise Medical Searcher Boosts Discovery

Swets rolled out its SwetsWise Medical Searcher Starter Package, which will accelerate discovery for physicians, researchers, and healthcare professionals. Swets partnered with Deep Web Technologies, a provider of federated search technologies, to give healthcare professionals fast and easy options to access trusted content and the SwetsWise database.

SwetsWise Medical Searcher offers search capabilities using the full platform or preferred-only resources. The results are faster response times to patient questions and time-sensitive queries. In addition, metrics and statistics are available on searches, along with ranked-view, deduplicated results, and intelligent clustering (grouped data). With the new starter package, users can conduct simple searches, consult with up to 20 sources, create data visualizations, filter sources by full text, access a medical thesaurus, and set up alerts.

“This package was developed specifically with medical institutions in mind as we understand their need for advanced, industry-specific searching capability at an affordable price,” according to Jose Luis Andrade, president of Swets Americas.  

Source: Swets

LexisNexis Legal & Professional Boosts Marketing Solutions

LexisNexis Legal & Professional’s internet marketing solutions business forged a deal with Internet Brands’ legal marketing services for website hosting, lead generation, and online listings.

“This partnership will enhance the range of digital marketing offerings available and significantly improve the speed, efficiency and effectiveness with which lawyers can reach potential clients,” says Mike Walsh, LexisNexis Legal & Professional CEO.

Internet Brands, a marketing solutions company, will work with LexisNexis Legal & Professional, part of Reed Elsevier. LexisNexis will integrate its Martindale-Hubbell marketing solutions and Lawyers.com with Internet Brands’ Nolo service to help consumers and small businesses with legal research.

Source: LexisNexis

Grant to Study How Public Libraries, Government Interact

The SUNY University at Albany’s Center for Technology in Government (CTG) will be taking a closer look at how public libraries help citizens interact with their local government, thanks to a $99,713 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

Official work on this grant, which will sponsor a national forum of academics and government/organization officials to conduct online surveys, workshops, and reports, will begin in 2014. The goal of the initiative is to help libraries and governments collaborate in meeting public needs. Since local governments are using more technology to ensure that information is transparent and accountable for its citizens, the popularity of these open government initiatives gives public libraries a chance to invite the community to get involved, according to the CTG website.

“One missing element in our efforts to create more open governments is full understanding of the role of public libraries in the larger open government ecosystem,” says Theresa Pardo, CTG director. She hopes that the grant will also help CTG discover how open government influences patrons’ decisions about how and when they use the library.

Source: The Institute of Museum and Library Services

Ex Libris Group Adds New Statistical Content

Ex Libris Group recently added Data-Planet statistical content to its Primo Central Index. Researchers who use the scholarly resources index can search Data-Planet’s collection of datasets to access Data-Planet Statistical DataSheets for data analysis.

The cloud-based Primo Central Index provides fast data searches by aggregating hundreds of millions of scholarly e-resources such as journal articles, ebooks, reviews, and legal documents. Adding Data-Planet to its list of providers provides more than 120,000 records to Ex Libris Group’s sources.

Data-Planet Statistical DataSheets display visualizations (charts, maps, graphs) of the data searched in the Data-Planet Statistical Ready Reference repository. Users can also access links to the underlying data, contextual descriptions of the data source, and the original indicator and dataset. DataSheets, which cover subjects ranging from agriculture to international relations, use DOIs (digital object identifiers) to link to the 5,000-plus datasets in the repository. Now the data will be available to more than 1,900 institutions that use the index, according to the Data-Planet website.

Source: Data-Planet



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