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Weekly News Digest

April 1, 2014 — 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.

XanEdu and SharedBook Agree to Merge

Custom course materials provider XanEdu will merge with the SharedBook publishing and compilation platform. The agreement, which includes SharedBook’s AcademicPub custom textbooks division as well as SharedBook’s noneducational operations, is expected to conclude within the next 30 days.

This merger creates a unified solution that combines technology and services across the custom course materials delivery spectrum. More than 1,000 institutions use XanEdu to order custom materials outside of traditional textbooks, clear copyright permissions, and deliver digital solutions. Institutions use AcademicPub to aggregate and order custom course materials to quickly build print or digital course packs. The company has more than 12 million copyright-cleared materials from publishers and professors.

“The combined value proposition for customers is immense,” says John DeBoer, XanEdu’s CEO. “Separately, we each solve different industry needs. Together, we become the best end-to-end provider in the market, providing both full-service and do-it-yourself options.”

Both companies will operate under XanEdu’s brand, and the employees of both companies will report to DeBoer.

Source: XanEdu

Thomson Reuters Rolls Out WestlawNext Updates

Thomson Reuters added two new features to its WestlawNext online legal research service: Custom Pages and eLibraries.

Custom Pages helps WestlawNext subscribers create as many personalized pages as they need from specific content sets. They can build pages around practice areas, jurisdictions, content libraries, and other content sets by selecting resources from search results or from a list of matching databases. Users can share their Custom Pages with colleagues who are either inside or outside their organization, add tools and frequently searched content, and choose a Custom Page as their start page for WestlawNext research.

eLibraries, which focuses on large accounts with multiple users, streamlines the research experience by switching between billable and nonbillable research during sessions so research can be charged to specific accounts. This provides a clear billing structure for firm administrators, who can manage cost recovery expectations and users’ nonbillable content. They can also track individual users’ metrics with Westlaw Analytics.

Source: Thomson Reuters

Innovative Acquires Polaris Library Systems

Innovative acquired Polaris Library Systems, allowing the companies to share best practices, combine product management and development groups, and work together to enhance support and services to Innovative and Polaris public library customers around the world.

Innovative’s CEO Kim Massana will lead the combined companies, while Bill Schickling, Polaris’ former president and CEO, will become Innovative’s VP of public library products.

“By bringing our public library expertise under one roof, we will be … ultimately accelerating the pace of product development with a clear strategic direction for first-class products and services that will shape the industry,” says Massana.

“We’re joining forces with Innovative because we think the combined company will provide Polaris customers with a long term partner for innovation and growth,” according to Schickling.

Innovative announced the acquisition on its website, where itoffers an FAQ for customers.

Source: Innovative

Factiva Updates Searches and Newsletter Builder

Dow Jones announced updates to its Factiva news aggregator that are designed to improve search efficiency and newsletter-building capabilities.

The updates, which are in response to customer feedback, are the first in a series of enhancements that will make Factiva faster and more user-friendly. Dow Jones added the option for more saved searches, the ability to multiselect source lists and individual sources, and upgrades to search summaries. The Factiva Workspace is also streamlined: Dow Jones removed podcasts from the publishing page; increased the number of available workspaces; and added industry, subject, and region codes to the Screening tool.

Newsletter Builder updates include a Save button and the option of a default Newsletter date.

Source: Dow Jones 

Gale Adds New Digital Collections

Gale, part of Cengage Learning, launched the following Gale Digital Collection archives for academic and special libraries, now available on the Gale Artemis research platform.

The Associated Press Collections Online archive has two of its three planned 2014 subcollections: the News Features & Internal Communications Collection, which offers 20th-century news materials dating from 1940 such as news analysis, sports and entertainment reporting, human interest stories, and internal Associated Press (AP) publications; and the U.S. City Bureaus Collection, which offers news stories and records from AP bureaus in nine cities from 1931 to 2004.

Part II of the Science, Technology and Medicine archive is available as part of Nineteenth Century Collections Online. It covers topics including natural history and public health from European periodicals and American monographs.

Indigenous Peoples: North America explores the political, cultural, and social history of American Indian tribes and their supporting organizations from the 16th to the 20th centuries.

Source: Cengage Learning

dinCloud and ThreatSTOP Partner to Enhance Security

dinCloud, which helps organizations migrate their information technology infrastructure to the cloud, partnered with ThreatSTOP, a provider of real-time IP reputation (IPR) management services. Their collaboration gives dinCloud customers a constant threat-source-detection and -blocking service that protects against criminal malware.

“Cloud users no longer need to be tied to a specific location in order to access their data, but that also means criminals have ease of access too,” says Tomás Byrnes, ThreatSTOP’s founder and CEO. “Integrating ThreatSTOP will even further enhance dinCloud’s offerings and the security around them, making their hosted virtual desktop one of the most secure cloud offerings today.”

ThreatSTOP’s cloud-based service protects against botnets, Trojans, worms, and other malware that target dinCloud, successfully stopping or isolating 40,000-plus daily attacks before they reach dinCloud’s system.

Source: dinCloud

OCLC Adds Japanese Metadata to WorldCat

OCLC partnered with the Japanese distributor NetAdvance to add Japanese-language metadata to WorldCat from the Japan Knowledge Lib database and the JKBooks ebook platform.

Japan Knowledge Lib has more than 50 Japanese encyclopedias and dictionaries, law and history content, and other reference materials that 1,000-plus global institutions use for Japanese studies. JKBooks features Japanese magazines from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. This new WorldCat content will be discoverable through WorldCat Discovery Services, OCLC’s suite of cloud-based applications launching this month.

“Incorporation of JapanKnowledge and JKBooks metadata with OCLC’s vast bibliographic data collection offers an opportunity for a new discovery experience that we never thought would be possible,” says Masashi Tanaka, NetAdvance’s general manager. “We have great expectations for increased visibility of our content through OCLC’s worldwide library community.”

Source: OCLC



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