Citation
(2001), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918cab.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2001, MCB UP Limited
New & Noteworthy
INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS PUBLISHING (IOPP)Announces Free Journal Access
Following a successful free journals access promotion, which ran from October to December last year the IOPP has announced that until further notice it will be giving electronic access to the latest issues of many of its journals to anyone who registers online at www.iop.org/EJ A total of 29 of the institute's journals are involved in this promotion and access to the journals is free. Non-subscribers will have access to issues once they are complete, but accelerated publication is available to subscribers who can view articles as soon as they are accepted and ready for publication. Titles involved in this new service include A to G of the widely-used Journal of Physics series and the European Journal of Physics.
The learned society and not-for-profit publisher hopes that this service will help further its aims of promoting physics, serving physicists, disseminating information and raising the visibility of its authors' work, as nearly 1.5 million articles were downloaded from its electronic journals service last year alone.
IOPP: c/o Lucy Pearce, Electronic Journals Product Manager, Dirac House, Temple Back, Bristol BS1 6BE Tel: +44 (0) 117 929 7481; Fax: +44 (0) 117 930 1187; E-mail: lucy.pearce@iop.org
INNOVATIVE INTERFACESLaunches Millennium Access Plus
Innovative Interfaces has recently made significant updates to its Millennium integrated library system and launched Millennium Access Plus, which gives fast access to Internet content via the Web OPAC, while protecting library and content holders' rights. Other new features include acquisitions Web content linking, a new Web-based content linking function for book selection, and WebCrawler, an XML Web-crawler project conducted in partnership with Michigan State University, which will extract metadata from XML EAD records which can then be uploaded to Millennium. There is also a wireless public access catalogue interface, a serials checking server, which automates the setting up of links to URLs for electronic journals and a new Web-based payment system for users of library services.
Innovative Interfaces: www.iii.com
INSTITUT DE L'INFORMATION SCIENTIFIQUE ET TECHNIQUE (INIST) AND SILVERPLATTERMake PASCAL SciTech and PASCAL Biomed Available as a Package
SilverPlatter Information, publishers of electronic reference databases, have cooperated with INIST, a service unit of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, to make INIST's PASCAL SciTech database available as part of a package with their PASCAL BioMed database.
PASCAL SciTech is an international bibliographic resource for all aspects of science, covering cross-disciplinary fields such as biotechnology and environmental engineering as well as the major disciplines. PASCAL Biomed includes title coverage in all major medical disciplines and it also covers cross-disciplinary fields such as biomedical engineering.
The two databases complement each other and provide subscribers with an important multi-disciplinary, multilingual resource with tri-lingual indexing which means that keyword searching can be conducted in French, English and Spanish. The content includes all the major international journals as well as reports and conference proceedings.
SilverPlatter: c/o Sue Velilla, Marketing Communications Manager, 100 River Ridge Drive, Norwood, MA 02062 5043 USA. Tel: 781 769 2599; Fax: 781 769 8763.
INIST. Tel: 33 (0) 3 83 50 46 64; Fax: 33 (0) 3 83 50 46 66; E-mail infoclient@insit.fr
ISI AND ULRICHSWEB.COMAnnounce Bi-directional Linking
The Thompson Scientific company, ISI, owners of ISI Journals Citation Reports on the Web (JCR), the science and social science editions of which cover approximately 7,000 journals, has announced that bi-directional linking with ulrichsweb.com (Ulrich's) is now available. R R Bowker's Ulrich's is a library reference tool which provides access to information for more than 242,000 serials on wide-ranging subjects from more than 200 countries. Hypernavigation between these two Web-based products will provide mutual subscribers, who are typically librarians and publishers, with a new method for researching serials data. Linking JCR, a core journal evaluative tool, and Ulrich's is seen as being of particular benefit to collection development librarians, giving them a more streamlined means of evaluating and earmarking serials and of connecting directly from the analytical information in JCR to the detailed listings in Ulrich's.
Additional features are to include an enhancement of JCR Web, to include a trend graph showing the individual impact factors for each journal over the last five years, and the ability for subscribers to move from ISI Web of Science, to JCR Web and then directly to Ulrich's.
ISI: c/o Jacqueline H. Trolly, Director Corporate Communications, 3501 Market St, Philadelphia, PA 19104 E-mail: jay.tolley@isinet.com; Tel: (215) 386 0100; Fax: (215) 243 2235.
R R Bowker: c/o Yvonne Rose, Marketing Director, Tel: (908) 665 2804; E-mail: yvonne.rose@bowker.com
PEARSON EDUCATION AND EBSCO PUBLISHINGBuild Custom Research Collections
A recent agreement means that EBSCO Publishing is building customised online research collections correlated to Pearson texts so that students will be able to search for articles relating to their subject areas. Pearson has 1,400 companion Web sites online and plans to add another 100 by the end of the year, and students using these sites and texts from Pearson's Addsion Wesley, Allyn & Bacon, Benjamin Cummings, Longman and Prentice Hall imprints will be able to access the new collections directly from its password-protected Web sites. Pearson has set up a new student portal, cresca.com, to provide a central point of access and this site will launch fully in August 2001.
EBSCO is introducing its ContentSelect program with this partnership, where the two companies will work to build customised collections of periodical content. The first phase includes the creation of discipline-specific collections in eleven fields including education and information management, to be searched by software with a student-oriented interface.
EBSCO Publishing: www.ebsco.com
Pearson Education: www.pearsoned.com
E-mail: communications@pearsoned.com
DIALOGAdds New Business Information to Profound
Dialog has added Global Industry Analysts (GIA), one of the world's largest market research companies, to its providers of content available on its online information service Profound. This means that Profound users will now have greatly enhanced market research information, through access to GIA's portfolio of off-the-shelf research reports which cover over 14,000 business segments with over 1,500 reports published each year. The reports, prepared by GIA's team of 235 analysts, identify and analyse a range of business issues including key technology and market trends, and are concerned with such broader themes as global strategic business and competitive assessment. This move will produce a significant increase in the business intelligence available through Profound and will greatly increase GIA's delivery channels.
Dialog: c/o Dorothy Briggs, Vice President, EMEA Marketing E-mail: dorothy_briggs@dialog.com
GIA: www.globind.com
BRITISH LIBRARYLaunches Public Catalogue
The British Library has launched the British Library Public Catalogue (BLPC) at blpc.bl.uk, giving free public access to over 10 million books, journals, reports, conferences and music scores. Users can find detailed bibliographic records on almost any subject and order articles and conference papers direct from the library's document supply centre, or find details of how to access the reading rooms. The service includes details of books and reports from 1980, journals and serials from 1700 and conferences from 1800, and features onscreen context-sensitive help and a new Web interface with Boolean search functions, which can search across the entire catalogue or just in specific files. The catalogue will be available at all times and builds on the success of the Online Public Access catalogue (OPAC 97) service system which received more than 2 million hits each month in 2000.
British Library: c/o Dan Beety, Press and Public Relations, 96 Euston Rd, London NW1 2DB E-mail daniel.beety@bl.uk
ONLINE COMPUTER LIBRARY CENTER (OCLC)Announces Two Test Sites for WorldCat Enhancements
OCLC is undertaking a three-year project to transform the WorldCat database, a shared catalogue of more than 45 million books and other materials held by more than 8,000 libraries worldwide, into a global information exchange connecting librarians, libraries and their users. Over the next three years OCLC intends to extend WorldCat's cooperative framework to include new participants, new types of content and automated tools to capture, organise and deliver metadata. The first phase of enhancements includes new content, interface features and database functionality, and OCLC has announced that the Peninsula Library System (PLS) in California and the North Suburban Library System (NSLS) in Illinois have agreed to serve as test centres and provide input on the direction, features and usability of the new database and interface.
Among the new features planned to be included in the next phases of development, are 10 million article records from ArticleFirst and Electronic Collections Online, links to full text licensed through FirstSearch and integration of Z39.50-accessible resources under a single interface.
OCLC: Nita Dean, Public Relations Manager, Tel: +1 614 761 5002; E-mail: nita_dean@oclc.org
CONVERAAdds New Language Capabilities to Excalibur Systems
Convera (a new merger between Excalibur Technologies and Intel's Interactive Media Services) has launched new functions for its information management and textual search tool RetrievalWare and its video logging system Screening Room. RetrievalWare's language processing module enables it to work with multiple languages within a single system, a single database and in a single document, enabling searching across all language repositories with a single query. A new language toolkit simplifies the task of building language models for Excalibur and its partners. To make a complete system for video and text content management, Screening Room also has cross-lingual abilities. It extracts visual and textual metadata from analogue or digital video by controlling subsystems for closed-caption text extraction. It can control multiple video encoders no matter where they are, and its video-logging capabilities can be scaled across as many computers as necessary.
Convera: Peter Doyle, European Marketing Director Tel: +44 (0) 1344 893444; Fax: +44 (0) 1344 893666; E-mail: pdoyle@excalib.co.uk
YALE UNIVERSITYReceives Grant from Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has granted $42,000 to the Yale University Library to fund a one-year pilot project that will be conducted by 8 of the 18 members of NERL (the NorthEast Research Libraries consortium). The project is called BYTES, Books You Teach Every Semester, and grows out of the NERL libraries' desire to exploit and influence effectively the rapidly developing electronic book marketplace, which began clearly to emerge in 1999. The participating institutions include: Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, New York University, Syracuse University, University of Connecticut, and Yale University.
netLIBRARYJoins US and International Printers to Create the First Truly Global Short-Run Digital Book Printing Service
netLibrary Inc., a leading provider of eBooks and Internet-based content and collection management services, recently announced the launch of the Global Print SolutionTM, a short-run digital printing service that allows publishers to make their content available to a secure network of quality digital book manufacturers. The service allows publishers to increase the number of titles they consider for short-run printing by decreasing costs associated with title conversion and print procurement. The combination of eBooks and short-run printing enables publishers to better manage overall costs and forecasts.
netLibrary has signed agreements with premier short-run printers in North America, including Bookmobile, Dehart's Printing Service, Edwards Brothers, Integrated Book Technology (IBT) and Matrix Digital Printing. netLibrary has also signed agreements with leading international printers including Antony Rowe and Basingstoke Press in the UK, dBooks in Australia and Silkbook.com in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
GOOGLENow Indexes PDF Files
Google is now indexing PDF files. This means that their Uncle Sam search engine for US gov sites also will search for PDFs. For example, if you search for 1040a the first result is the PDF file for the 2000 form at Fedworld. If you do this search in Alta Vista you may get the IRS page with the list of all forms. I think this is going to be a tremendous tool given the number of PDFs produced by the government.
ZD NETRenting Software
Bye-bye, buying. Why you'll "rent" your software soon By David Coursey, AnchorDesk
http://cgi.zdnet.com/slink?/adeskb/adt0212/2684371:1083169
XML4LIB ELECTRONIC DISCUSSIONhttp://sunsite.berkeley.edu/XML4Lib/
An electronic discussion on XML and its use in libraries. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is now being used by libraries for a variety of purposes. The purpose of this electronic discussion is to assist library staff in learning about XML and how to apply it to library problems and opportunities.
To subscribe: send the mesage "subscribe xml4lib YOUR NAME" to listserv@sunsite.berkeley.edu
The discussion archive is browsable and (soon to be) searchable at the XML4Lib Web site.
COLLEGES SHOULD VIE FOR STUDENTS TAKING COMPANIES' COURSESAdministrator Says
Community colleges are better suited to educate people to work in information-technology careers than the many private companies that now conduct such training, a college administrator recently announced.
"We're getting our butts kicked by a lot of privates" offering courses that lead to industry-sponsored certifications, said John Avakian, director of new media at San Mateo College.
But the community colleges are better equipped to educate the workers taking those courses, he said, because the colleges also can teach other skills that corporations now realize they want in their employees such as the ability to research, analyze, and communicate.
"You're never going to get that from a certification program," Mr Avakian said. The industry-focused courses offered by companies also aren't likely to help certain kinds of students, like 19-to 25-year-olds coming off welfare. To prepare themselves for productive careers, those students also need other skills that certification courses don't provide.
Mr Avakian spoke at one of the dozens of sessions at the annual Conference on Technology of the League for Innovation in the Community College. More than 3,000 college officials and technology vendors attended the four-day event.
Offering technology-oriented courses, Mr Avakian said, fits well with community colleges' mission, which includes promoting economic development. But for the colleges to be effective in offering such courses, he said, they will have to adjust the courses' schedules and formats to make them more attractive to working adults. Shorter course segments and more-convenient hours are important, he said.
The colleges also must do a better job of marketing their courses. "Business doesn't know what we're doing," he said. "If we have our act together, we should be able to provide better training that's less expensive."
(From The Chronicle of Higher Education, Thursday, November 16, 2000).
ALEXA RESEARCHStudy Results
Two-year Alexa research study of ten leading portals and search engines finds that "sex" is the most searched term online and that millions of people search for specific Web sites rather than just enter URLs. http://www.alexaresearch.com/clientdir/news/report.php?id=23
"This study shows that for many, there's a conceptual misunderstanding of how to effectively navigate the Web," said Matthew Work. "Some people think that their homepage is the Web, that they have to go through their homepage in order to get to the site they want, without realizing that any Web site can be accessed directly. This notion is supported by our Web traffic popularity rankings, where eight of the top 10 sites are portals and/or search engines."
Contact: Marc Engel, E-Commerce Analyst, Alexa Research 415/561-6951 E-mail: marc@alexa.com
iUNIVERSERecent investment of $21 million
iUniverse, one of the industry's largest digital publishers, announced recently that it has secured $21 million in venture capital financing. Officials say the major investment, made by the Warburg Pincus's technology group, will support expansion of iUniverse's digital publishing program. "Warburg Pincus's investment is a tremendous validation of our technology and vision for digital content publishing, distribution, and management," said iUniverse CEO Richard Tam. "In the coming year, we intend to solidify our position as the technology of choice and continue to transform the publishing industry".
iUniverse.com is a leading provider of digital publishing services. In addition to publishing original work under its own imprints, the company also has a range of partnerships including those with Publishers Group West, Hungry Minds (formerly IDG Books), Barnes & Noble, MediaBay, and Adobe. "Our decision to invest in iUniverse is based largely on the long-term value we see in the company's business model and technology," said Stewart Gross, senior managing director of Warburg Pincus. "As provider of digital publishing infrastructure services, iUniverse is uniquely positioned".
(From Library Journal Academic Newswire, January 17, 2001).