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Weekly News Digest

November 7, 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.

ASIS&T Welcomes New Regional Chapter

This third international chapter was approved by the ASIS&T board of directors and the chapter assembly advisory committee. It joins the Europe chapter and the Taipei chapter in representing ASIS&T’s diverse membership. Countries represented in the new chapter include India, Australia, Singapore, China, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.

The Asia Pacific chapter’s goals range from facilitating networking among Asia Pacific countries to participating in and publicizing ASIS&T activities in the Asia Pacific region. The chapter’s first chairperson is Songphan Choemprayong, Ph.D., who is a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Choemprayong also coordinated the chapter’s formation.

Source: Association for Information Science and Technology

Thomson Reuters and SciELO Join Forces

This partnership is designed to bring emerging economies such as Latin America and the Caribbean greater visibility and improved access to their research.

The SciELO Citation Index now connects to the Web of Science citation database, which covers scholarly literature and other indexes within the Web of Knowledge, so researchers can review and analyze regional content. The SciELO Citation Index includes about 650 titles and more than 4 million cited references. It includes sources from Latin American, Portuguese, Spanish, Caribbean, and South American open access journals.

Collaborating with SciELO will “further the reach of important research from emerging regions, as well as augment our own data by integrating high-quality, Open Access content into Web of Knowledge,” says Christopher Burghardt, VP of Thomson Reuters’ Scholarly & Scientific Research. “Researchers around the world will gain new insights via the works emanating from these regions.”

Source: Thomson Reuters

Internet Archive Brings Old Programs Back to Life

Instead of finding and installing the hardware to run outdated computer programs, researchers can embed JSMESS in their Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Internet Explorer browsers to run software from the IA’s new Historical Software Collection and from consoles and computers on the JSMESS website.

“Acquisition, for a library, is not enough—accessibility is where knowledge and lives change for the better,” Jason Scott wrote in an IA blog post. “The JSMESS interface lets users get to the software in the quickest way possible.”

JSMESS, developed by hundreds of volunteers for 15-plus years, is a nonaffiliated port of MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), a software emulator that documents hardware for vintage computers, consoles, and calculators.

Source: Internet Archive

InfoDesk Delivers Regulatory Monitoring Service

Regulatory InfoMonitor combines InfoDesk’s technology with a professional editor’s review. “Having our Regulatory Intelligence Monitor is like having your own personal regulatory librarian,” according to Lynn Epstein, InfoDesk’s COO.

Pharmaceutical companies collaborated with InfoDesk to develop Regulatory InfoMonitor, which is a regulatory affairs version of InfoMonitor, its newsletter service designed primarily for pharmaceutical clients.

A team of pharmaceutical and biomedical information professionals reviews, selects, and summarizes all content. These editors deliver news items that include summaries with links to original sources, email links for easy sharing, and interactive rating buttons so readers can vote on an item’s relevance.

Source: InfoDesk

Alexander Street Press Hosts Streaming Media

Alexander Street Press’ platform delivers more than 28,000 streaming media titles to the 4,000-plus global libraries and higher education institutions using the publisher’s interface. The platform was designed to improve how library patrons find and use video; content is searchable alongside a library’s other collections.

“We’ve had a number of requests from libraries to use [our video and listening platform] for their own content,” says Jordan White, senior product manager at Alexander Street Press. All local hosted content will include fully searchable transcripts, discovery service integration, annotation tools, and other features.

The service’s first partner, Tufts University, plans to upload and integrate its content into the new platform by the end of the year.

Source: Alexander Street Press

DPLA Launches Bookshelf Feature

Users can now see search results by scrolling through a visual representation of a bookshelf, with titles and authors visible on the ebooks’ virtual spines. Ebooks are stacked vertically on the results page.

“We knew that when we announced the addition of a large number of books to the DPLA collection that we would have to find an easy, yet powerful, way for our users to browse the collection,” says Dan Cohen, DPLA’s executive director. “This creative new interface adds to our discovery portal the most familiar of library metaphors: a quickly scannable shelf full of books.”

An ebook’s width on the vertical Bookshelf corresponds with the physical book’s height, and an ebook’s thickness corresponds with page count. Results are ranked using shades of blue to indicate the most relevance.

Clicking on an ebook brings up the metadata and related images from the DPLA’s collection. Clicking an ebook’s subject area loads a shelf of other ebooks with the same subject.

The Harvard Library Innovation Lab took inspiration from its StackLife book browsing project to create the bookshelf with the help of a DPLA grant.

Source: Digital Public Library of America