Online articles from March 2003

Online archives from March 2003

Dialog on world Chambers Network. (Industry News).(WCN users will be able to access subset of Dialog databases)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Users of World Chambers Network (WCN), a Paris-based trade organization, will now have access to a subset of Dialog databases through a customized search form. Included in the deal are 15 global news wire and newspaper databases and 14 business...

Classical.com. (Social Sciences & Humanities).(Launches streaming media classical music service )(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Classical.com has launched a streaming media classical music service featuring over 10,000 recordings for libraries. The interactive service offers on-demand listening to users in a library building as well as remote access from a home PC....

The National Criminal Justice Reference Service Abstracts Database is now available on Cambridge Scientific Abstract's Internet Database Service. (Social Sciences & Humanities).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... The National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) Abstracts Database is now available on Cambridge Scientific Abstract's Internet Database Service (IDS). The U.S. government-funded NCJRS covers all aspects of local, state, and...

The Gallup Organization has launched a subscription-based news service called the Gallup Poll tuesday Briefing. (Social Sciences & Humanities).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... The Gallup Organization has launched a subscription-based news service called the Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing. Delivered via e-mail each Tuesday morning, the service features a weekly summary and analysis of the latest proprietary Gallup Poll...

Cambridge Scientific Abstracts' Internet Database Service bibliographic databases can now link their results to the full text of AIAA Meeting Papers. (Sci-Tech).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Researchers using Cambridge Scientific Abstracts' (CSA) Internet Database Service (IDS) bibliographic databases can now link their results to the full text of AIAA Meeting Papers. AIAA (the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics)...

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS). (Sci-Tech).(Patents documents were basis for much of the information in CAS Chemical Registry System during 2002)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) reports that more than 50 percent of the organic and inorganic chemical substances recorded in the CAS Chemical Registry System during 2002 were derived from patent documents as opposed to journal literature and...

STN International. (Sci-Tech).(Enhances STN Easy for Intranets)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... STN International has announced significant enhancements to its STN Easy for Intranets. The new capabilities enable information professionals to easily distribute customized sci-tech information to their corporate end users. Changes include...

Public Library of Science (PLoS). (Sci-Tech).(Will publish series of open access journals funded by $9 million grant from Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... The Public Library of Science (PLoS) has decided to publish a series of open access journals funded by a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Following the lead of BioMed Central in the movement to widely distribute...

Elsevier Science. (Sci-Tech).(Has launched the quarterly newsletter Library Connect)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... In an effort to inform librarians across all disciplines regarding electronic publishing and digital libraries, Elsevier Science has launched the quarterly newsletter Library Connect. Elsevier Science personnel will announce educational events...

MicroPatent has announced the release of the MicroPatent Patent Index Database (MPI) and Aureka 8.0. (Legal).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... MicroPatent has announced the release of the MicroPatent Patent Index Database (MPI) and Aureka 8.0. MPI combines the European Patent Office's (EPO) INPADOC collection with other EPO files and supplements them with exclusive content and...

Derwent Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems and NEMS Industry and Technology Patent Profiles. (Legal).(New products from Thomson Derwent)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Thomson Derwent has announced the launch of Derwent Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and NEMS Industry and Technology Patent Profiles (ITP). These products provide the only source of MEMS specific patent information that tracks research...

Google. (Search Engines).(Has launched four new country-specific domains )(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Google has launched four new country-specific domains that offer a localized interface to enable users to restrict searches to pages from their respective countries. In an ongoing effort to make its search service available to people throughout...

Search engine optimization and marketing firm MoreVisibility.com. (Search Engines).(Is chosen as approved reseller of LookSmart search listings)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Search engine optimization and marketing firm MoreVisibility.com has announced that it has been selected as an approved reseller of LookSmart search listings. MoreVisibility.com also has reseller and strategic agreements with Ask Jeeves,...

Entopia Government Solutions LLC. (Search Engines).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Entopia has announced the launch of Entopia Government Solutions LLC in response to demand for its KM software and services in the government sector. As an exclusive provider to the U.S. federal government, Entopia Government Solutions provides...

Mergent, Inc. (Business & Finance).(Mergent Online will feature fully searchable database of more thanr 15,000 U.S. and 20,000 non-U.S. companies)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Mergent, Inc. has released a new flagship product to replace FISonline. Mergent Online will feature a fully searchable database of over 15,000 U.S. and 20,000 non-U.S. companies. New content includes financial statements, annual reports,...

Bureau van Dijk (BvD). (Business & Finance).(Adds data on all Chinese listed companies to its OSIRIS database)
March 1, 2003... Bureau van Dijk(BvD) has added data on all Chinese listed companies to its OSIRIS database. The information is sourced from Huaxia Credit, a pioneer in credit risk management in China [212/797-7120; www.bvdep.com].

Schlumberger Limited, has been selected by European Business Register. (Business & Finance).(SchlumbergerSema is selected by European Business Register to be distributor of official company information on U.K. market)
March 1, 2003... SchlumbergerSema, a business segment of Schlumberger Limited, has been selected by European Business Register (EBR) to be the distributor of official company information on the U.K. market. The information from national members of EBR such as...

Disaster Recovery Yellow Pages. (Business & Finance).
March 1, 2003... To help users cope with a riskier world environment, an electronic version of the Disaster Recovery Yellow Pages has been released. Over 3,000 vendor listings in 270 categories, such as drying and dehumidification of paper and microfilm...

Reed Elsevier Group's Global Education. (Peopleware).(Pat Tierney is appointed chief executive officer of Reed Elsevier Group's Global Education publishing division)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Pat Tierney has been appointed chief executive officer of Reed Elsevier Group's Global Education publishing division, reporting to CEO Crispin Davis. Mr. Tierney joins Reed Elsevier from The Thomson Corporation, where he was CEO of Thomson...

Focus Enterprises. (Peopleware).(Names Mark Capaldini as partner )(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Mark Capaldini has been named partner with the investment banking and consulting firm Focus Enterprises.

ECNext. (Peopleware).(Appoints Chris Skudder as chief executive officer)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... ECNext has announced the appointment of Chris Skudder as chief executive officer. Skudder's initial focus will be to scale the company's sales and marketing activities to take advantage of growing market opportunities, according to ECNext. He...

Journal Division and Publisher Services. (Peopleware).(Cambridge Scientific Abstracts promotes Sheila Marks to position of senior director)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) has announced the promotion of Sheila Marks to the position of senior director. She will oversee both the Journal Division and Publisher Services at CSA, which will now operate as one unit.

Nstein Technologies. (Peopleware).(Yves H. Boucher named to the board of directors)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Yves H. Boucher has been named to the board of directors of Nstein Technologies. Mr. Boucher joins the board from his former position as vice president and chief financial officer at Nstein.

Ingenta plc. (Peopleware).(executive appointments)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Ingenta plc has announced two appointments in the formation of a new global customer service group. Adam Chesler has been named vice president, New Business, and Christopher Woodhead has been named director, Client Management. Both will report...

InfoSpace Inc. (Peopleware).(James Voelkner named CEO)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... InfoSpace Inc. has replaced the company's chairman and chief executive Naveen Jain with James Voelkner, a company director and former president of XO Communications. Jain will remain on the board of directors.

Serials solutions. (Portals & Intranets).(new linking services from Serials Solutions)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Serials Solutions has announced the development of two new linking services. Journal Linker enables patrons to link from an abstract or index to a list of all the library's full-text holdings for that journal; from there they can link to the...

Inmagic, Inc. has released a Spanish version of DB/Text WebPublisher. (Portals & Intranets).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Inmagic, Inc. has released a Spanish version of DB/Text WebPublisher for enterprise use and DB/Text WebPublisher Lite for single database use. Similarly, French versions of the two products were released in May 2002, as Inmagic is aggressively...

Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature is now available online via WilsonWeb. (Online Services).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Long the most widely consulted index of subjects in the popular press, Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature is now available online via WilsonWeb. The entire retrospective content dating back to 1901, with nearly 3 million citations from...

Swets Blackwell Service. (Online Services).(added to offering by H.W. Wilson)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... H.W. Wilson has announced that Swets Blackwell Service has joined the list of WilsonLink full-text sources accessible with its open-URL technology. SwetsWise offers over 7,000 titles with a focus on scholarly and research journals...

e-books. (Online Services).(several of H.W. Wilson's print reference books are now available in libraries as e-books)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Several of H.W. Wilson's familiar print reference books are now available in libraries as e-books, including Famous First Facts, 5th Edition; Famous First Facts About Sports; Facts About the Presidents, 7th Edition; and Speeches of the American...

The expansion of Book Review Digest. (Online Services).(on WilsonWeb )(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Over 1 million reviews on over 700,000 books are now searchable with the expansion of Book Review Digest. Available on WilsonWeb with full-text reviews in addition to excerpts and citations, Book Review Digest Plus will be updated annually with...

ProQuest's UMI. (Online Services).(partnership program with The Berkeley Electronic Press)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... ProQuest's UMI group has unveiled an electronic dissertation submission program in conjunction with The Berkeley Electronic Press. The new system allows a graduate student to upload an approved dissertation into the publishing system for...

Information Today, Inc. (Alliances & Deals).(completes acquisition of Streaming Media, Inc. from Penton Media, Inc.)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Information Today, Inc. (ITI) announced that it has completed the acquisition of Streaming Media, Inc. from Penton Media, Inc. The acquisition was a stock purchase whereby ITI acquired 100 percent of the stock of Streaming Media from Penton...

Yahoo! Inc. and Inktomi Corporation. (Alliances & Deals).(acquisition deal)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Yahoo! Inc. and Inktomi Corporation announced a definitive agreement has been signed under which Yahoo! will acquire Inktomi for a purchase price of approximately $235 million. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions,...

Nstein Technologies, Inc. (Alliances & Deals).(partnership with Thomson/Gale)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Nstein Technologies, Inc., a provider of computer-aided indexing (CAI) solutions to the e-publishing industry, and Thomson/Gale have announced an agreement to provide Gale's subject taxonomy through Nstein's automated indexing software....

BIOSIS Previews, Biological Abstracts, and Biological Abstracts/RRM. (Biomedical).(enhancement of content )(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... BIOSIS has announced the largest-ever enhancement of the content of BIOSIS Previews, Biological Abstracts, and Biological Abstracts/RRM. In addition to its core academic market, BIOSIS has been expanding its customer base into business and the...

Taxonomy Management System. (Biomedical).(relationship between Wordmap Ltd and Mohomine)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Mohomine, a provider of text-processing automation software, and Wordmap Limited, developers of taxonomy management systems, have announced a strategic relationship to develop an integration of their content-classification technologies....

Thomson Corporation announced that it has acquired Delphion Research. (Biomedical).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... The Thomson Corporation announced that it has acquired Delphion Research from privately held Delphion, Inc. for approximately $22 million. Delphion Research offers full-text patent documents, including over 35 million records from 70 patent...

Cuadra Associates and Access Innovations, Inc. (Biomedical).(joint venture reaps proceeds)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... A joint venture between Cuadra Associates (CA) and Access Innovations, Inc. (AII) has resulted in the development of MAI STAR, combining Cuadra's STAR information management and retrieval system with Access's Data Harmony Machine Aided Indexer...

Thomson ISI ResearchSoft has announced a parthership agreement with Openly Informatics, Inc. (Biomedical).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Thomson ISI ResearchSoft has announced a partnership agreement with Openly Informatics, Inc., developers of the 1Cate OpenURL link service. Under terms of the agreement, ISI ResearchSoft will distribute 1Cate as part of the company's new...

BIOSIS has also launched BiologyBrowser. (Biomedical).(life sciences portal)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... BIOSIS has also launched BiologyBrowser, an interactive portal designed for the life sciences community. This Web-based free portal creates a dynamic environment that connects users through discussion forums, controlled Web links, science news,...

Biological & Agricultural Index Plus. (Biomedical).(passes 1 million record mark)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Biological & Agricultural Index Plus has now tipped the scales with over 1 million records from leading journals. The H.W. Wilson database is updated daily and features full-text articles. It supports WilsonLink SFX open-URL technology...

Significant expansion of international information now comes from ProQuest with the acquisition of Norman Ross Publishing. (Online Services).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Significant expansion of international information now comes from ProQuest with the acquisition of Norman Ross Publishing. Materials ranging from rare newspapers and journals to music scores and government documents in Slavic, Japanese, and...

SkyMinder has announced the online integration of Eastern European and Japanese credit information from local providers. (Online Services).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... SkyMinder has announced the online integration of Eastern European and Japanese credit information from local providers. Through Graydon UK, SkyMinder now offers data from Coface Intercredit Holding AG covering companies based in Poland, the...

Factiva has announced enhancements to its Factiva.com product. (Online Services).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Factiva has announced enhancements to its Factiva.com product. Historical market data from Reuters and Sun-Gard, the Celex database of European Union documents, and a Japanese-language interface have been added, as well as the ability to view...

Factiva and AtHoc, a provider of enterprise communication and alerting software. (Online Services).(alliance)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... A strategic alliance between Factiva and AtHoc, a provider of enterprise communication and alerting software, has been reached. The Factiva-AtHoc solution will allow users to receive real-time news updates on an ongoing basis [www.factiva.com;...

AlltheWeb. (Internet Search Engine Update).(new services)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... AlltheWeb is now indexing and including Microsoft Word files available on the Web. The advanced search form has added Microsoft Word as a File Format limit to the PDF and Flash options. In addition, the file formats can be searched from the...

AltaVista. (Internet Search Engine Update).(new features)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... AltaVista has added a few new features to its news search. It now claims about 3,000 news sources, including feeds from Moreover and sites like the New York Times. New search features include a date range limit with both pre-selected time...

Ask Jeeves. (Internet Search Engine Update).(ends the use of banner ads)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Ask Jeeves has announced that it will no longer have banner ads on its site. The ban on banners joined the earlier ban of pop-up and other interstitial ads on Ask Jeeves sites (which includes Teoma). Instead, it plans on generating income using...

Google. (Internet Search Engine Update).(new services)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Google has been busy on the experimental front again. It recently launched Froogle, a product search engine currently available in beta mode [http://froogle.google.com/]. Named as a play on both Google and Frugal, this new search engine...

HotBot. (Internet Search Engine Update).(enhanced services)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... HotBot has relaunched and now can search four distinct databases: Inktomi, Google, FAST, and Teoma. While it makes it easy to search all four of these important databases, a few search features are lost from the old days: truncation, word...

Inktomi. (Internet Search Engine Update).(Web Search 9 released)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Inktomi released its Web Search 9, although it is not yet available from all its partners. It now includes indexed file formats such as PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, and Excel spreadsheet files. It offers English-language spelling suggestions...

Northern Light. (Internet Search Engine Update).(ends some services)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Northern Light retreats even further from the useful search engine it used to be. Parent company divine, Inc. stopped selling Special Collection documents on a pay-per-view basis as of early January and is no longer accepting new enterprise...

Teoma. (Internet Search Engine Update).(advanced search page and customization options)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Teoma now has an advanced search page and some customization options. The advanced search includes word filters, field searches for title or URL (although those two cannot be used together), expanded language limits, a geographic region limit,...

Yahoo! (Internet Search Engine Update).(to acquire Inktomi)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... Yahoo! announced a definitive agreement to acquire Inktomi. Assuming the deal goes through, Yahoo! will finally have its own search engine. What that will eventually change on its site remains to be seen, since it currently uses Google results...

The numbers. (Internet Search Engine Update).(search engine database size )(Brief Article)
March 1, 2003... The Numbers: There have been many claimed huge size increases from several of the search engines, with Google and Inktomi claiming 3 billion. The December size comparison of search engine database size at Search Engine Showdown...

Patent information has arrived: the message from the EPIDOS annual conference 2002.
March 1, 2003... The EPIDOS division of the European Patent Office (EPO) holds its annual conference in a different venue each year in one of the member states. In 2002, it was Denmark's turn. Over 400 delegates from some 35 countries descended upon Copenhagen...

Free lunch legal resources from plain to polished.(Free Internet sites that offer legal information)
March 1, 2003... Is there still such a thing as a "free lunch" for legal information? Do credible free legal resource sites still exist on the Web? Or is the legal information world following the general trend from free to fee-based? Since I first examined this...

Australian virtual libraries for Crocodile Dundee and the Sheilas.
March 1, 2003... AUSTRALIA is a huge country almost the size of the United States of America but with only six people per square mile. Nearly 70 percent of Australians live in 10 cities, mainly along the 22,000-mile coastline. The rest live in small...

The legal community meets the Internet.
March 1, 2003... The Internet has affected many professions, even such a backward-looking and tradition-bound profession as law. Lawyers as a group tend to be conservative and somewhat resistant to change. Their training in law school emphasizes precedent and...

Fiddling with the Internet dials: understanding usability.
March 1, 2003... In the early days of radio, tuning in a broadcast was not a simple process. People "fiddled with the dials, counted the stations they could receive, and marveled at how far away they were," says Steven Lubar in his book InfoCulture (Houghton...

Web idea on tree: autopilot.(Web Idea Tree (WIT) software for site creation and maintenance help)
March 1, 2003... Although the Web is a major advance in information accessibility, there's considerable cost involved. I don't mean in identifiable monetary costs for operating site servers, but in the mushrooming of real labor costs when you consider design...

Evaluating web search result rankings.(search engine results management)
March 1, 2003... Calvin Goklieb Given that the Internet has been growing at an exponential rate, there are probably tens of millions of pages currently online in cyberspace. Yet by its very nature, the Internet lacks any sort of bibliographic control....

The European legal information market: an interview with Judy Vezmar, CEO, LexisNexis Butterworths Tolley.
March 1, 2003... Because our schedules didn't mesh during the Online Information conference and exhibition the first week of December 2002, Judy Vezmar graciously invited me to LexisNexis Butterworths Tolley headquarters in Chancery Lane, located in the heart...

A decade on the net. (On the Net).(Tenth anniversary of author's first column proclaiming meeting of Internet and online search world)
March 1, 2003... Ten years ago, my first Internet column was published in ONLINE (March 1993, pp. 84-86). Titled "The Internet Meets Online," that first column introduced a variety of information sources available about the Internet. In those early days, the...

Researching markets online. (The Dollar Sign).(Use of market research reports)
March 1, 2003... Why turn to market research reports to answer business questions? For one thing, these reports frequently condense a vast array of statistics, forecasts, analyses, and opinions on markets, technologies, products, industries, and countries. That...

Designing Web forms using boxes and arrows. (Intranet Librarian).
March 1, 2003... Intranets usually offer interactive applications for their users. Whether interactive form-based applications are crowd pleasers or sources of major frustration depends on their purpose and design. It's an uphill battle to create effective...

DialogPRO seeks small business. (Oleary Online).
March 1, 2003... Among end-users, the name Dialog is less well known than those of rivals like Factiva and LexisNexis. This is ironic, because none of the proprietary online services have worked harder to develop end-user products than Dialog. Most recently...

Assessing Web site usability. (Web Site Management).
March 1, 2003... A priority for those who build and manage large Web sites is ensuring the site is usable by its intended audience. Even though usability is the significant priority for site development, few take the time to formally test usability or engage...

Managing up: stakeholder relationship imperatives. (Industry Insights).(There is a gap between content deployment functions' value to users and perception of that value by management)
March 1, 2003... Content deployment functions (libraries, information centers, knowledge management groups, market intelligence operations) are fighting for survival in the current "lean-and-mean" economy. While the users of these functions profess to receive...

Peter's picks & pans.(Databases that offer information about serial publications are discussed)
March 1, 2003... I dedicate this month's column to databases that offer information about serial publications. I spent a couple of years of my career dealing with serials automation, including the creation of union catalogs of serials, the design of the...

Personal computers--they're not so boring? (PC Monitor).(Personal experience of purchaser of a new PC)
March 1, 2003... Four months ago I commented on how boring PCs had become. But what's boring for the industry (and jaded journalists) may not be so boring for individual users. For many home users and library uses, if your current PC is at least 3 years old you...

Recommended reading. (Hardcopy).(Reviews of several books)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... This month I look at the dangers of trusting information on the Web, a guidebook to troubleshoot your PC problems, secrets of non-super searchers, and the latest Internet communications mechanism--blogging. Web of Deception: Misinformation...

HotBot. (Online Spotlight).(recent search engine enhancements)
March 1, 2003... I often hear the Web search gurus--Greg Notess, Chris Sherman, and Gary Price, among others--talk about how important it is to use more than one search engine for in-depth research. There's surprisingly little overlap among the search engine...