Online articles from March 2009

Online archives from March 2009

The winds of change.(homepage)(Editorial)
March 1, 2009... 'Game changing" was the way the Serials Solutions publicist described its new Google-like search engine, Summon. It was announced at ALA Midwinter--too early to review for this issue of ONLINE. But we'll remedy that. Summon has the potential to...

New dawns for Morningstar.(industry news)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Morningstar, a leading provider of independent investment research that is famous for its five-star ranking system, has been busily acquiring other companies. It began 2008 by buying Hemscott from Ipreo Holdings. Hemscott covers U.K. investment...

Revealing academicians and dons.(industry news)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... A new website for academic researchers launched in late 2008, with an opt-in listing aiming to capture "every academic in the world" as faculty members, postdocs, graduate students, and independent researchers. Created by a team from Oxford,...

Reed business information sale shut down.(industry news)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... The sale by Reed Elsevier of its subsidiary, Reed Business Information (RBI), publisher of some 80 trade magazines, was halted mid-December. The plan to sell RBI, announced in February 2008, was scuttled by the tight credit market and a...

LexisNexis.(Legal)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... LexisNexis acquired IDEX, Inc., a leading provider of expert witness content to the legal market. Its database of more than 1 million records on 200,000-plus experts includes expert profiles, testimonial histories, verdict awards, settlement...

HeinOnline.(Legal)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... The U.S. Code was added to HeinOnline's core collection at no additional charge to subscribers. Coverage of the U.S. Code will date from its inception in the 1920s to the most current edition. Users will be able to search across the text of...

Law School Exchange, a new online networking and content sharing site from West and Foundation Press, allows law school professors to publish and distribute articles, books, and other materials for research, teaching, and scholarly purposes.(Legal)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Law School Exchange, a new online networking and content sharing site from West and Foundation Press, allows law school professors to publish and distribute articles, books, and other materials for research, teaching, and scholarly purposes....

Credo Reference.(Social Sciences & Humanities)(University of Chicago Press )(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Credo Reference signed an agreement with the University of Chicago Press to integrate four titles into the Credo General Reference collection, including Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd edition; Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd...

Readex, a division of NewsBank, announced the release of The Civil War: Antebellum Period to Reconstruction.(Social Sciences & Humanities)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Readex, a division of NewsBank, announced the release of The Civil War: Antebellum Period to Reconstruction. Drawn from the Archive of Americana, this digital resource includes historical American newspapers, government documents, broadsides,...

EBSCO Publishing will release three historical digital archive collections, bringing centuries-old content into an electronic format.(Social Sciences & Humanities)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... EBSCO Publishing will release three historical digital archive collections, bringing centuries-old content into an electronic format. These collections require new ways to view digitized content, which reproduce the best aspects of the physical...

Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, announced two new interfaces.(Online Services)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, announced two new interfaces. Its main page (www.gale.com) has a new look. The center of the page, which highlights major product launches, sales, and news, is now animated, showing three revolving promotions....

OverDrive announced an agreement with Simon & Schuster to distribute more than 1,000 unabridged and abridged digital audiobook titles.(Online Services)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... OverDrive announced an agreement with Simon & Schuster to distribute more than 1,000 unabridged and abridged digital audiobook titles. Popular and best-selling works from David McCullough, Jimmy Carter, and Jeffery Deaver are among the...

Ingram Digital announced that it now offers more than 175,000 titles on its My-iLibrary aggregated ebook and econtent solution, which is more front-list content than any other institutional ebook aggregator offers.(Online Services)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Ingram Digital announced that it now offers more than 175,000 titles on its My-iLibrary aggregated ebook and econtent solution, which is more front-list content than any other institutional ebook aggregator offers. Library patrons can also...

Serials Solutions.(Online Services)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Serials Solutions released Serials Solutions 360 Resource Manager Consortium Edition, a new e-resource management service for consortia, groups, and their member libraries. It helps consortia managers increase efficiency by consolidating...

Publishing Technology, PLC announced the release of IngentaConnect mobile, a product that allows subscribers to read articles and abstracts on their mobile devices.(Online Services)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Publishing Technology, PLC announced the release of IngentaConnect mobile, a product that allows subscribers to read articles and abstracts on their mobile devices. The beta product is being trialed by a number of academic publishers that...

Nature Publishing Group.(Online Services)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Nature Publishing Group announced that Nature published its first PDF containing a 3D interactive figure in the Jan. 1, 2009, issue. Figures embedded in a paper by Alyssa Goodman and her colleagues enable Nature readers to view and rotate maps...

As part of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Digital Repositories Meeting 2008, the Digital Repository Federation (DRF) of Japan and DRIVER agreed to work together on promoting federated repository infrastructures, signing a Memorandum of Understanding to take the collaboration forward.(Open Access)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... As part of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Digital Repositories Meeting 2008, the Digital Repository Federation (DRF) of Japan and DRIVER agreed to work together on promoting federated repository...

ticTOCs.(Open Access)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal table of contents (TOCs) service. The service provides access to the most recent TOCs of 11,000-plus scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. With ticTOCs, users can find journals of interest by...

The Scientific business of Thomson Reuters announced a partnership with the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) to establish the ISTIC-Thomson Reuters Joint Lab for Scientometrics Research.(Sci-Tech)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... The Scientific business of Thomson Reuters announced a partnership with the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) to establish the ISTIC-Thomson Reuters Joint Lab for Scientometrics Research. Both organizations will...

Deep Web Technologies announced the addition of essential Chinese research to WorldWideScience.org, the global science gateway.(Sci-Tech)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Deep Web Technologies announced the addition of essential Chinese research to WorldWideScience.org, the global science gateway. China is the world's second largest publisher of scientific papers, with output that is new to many of the world's...

The Association for Computing Machinery.(Sci-Tech)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) introduced a new search capability for its Digital Library that enables users to explore existing data as well as discover unexpected information beyond simple query results. This technology, based...

CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, is now offering access to 23.8 million predicted proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra in SciFinder, its research and discovery tool and source for more than 41 million chemical substances.(Sci-Tech)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, is now offering access to 23.8 million predicted proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra in SciFinder, its research and discovery tool and source for more than 41 million chemical...

H.W. Wilson announced a new reference database focused on the environment.(Sci-Tech)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... H.W. Wilson announced a new reference database focused on the environment. Current Issues: Environment is an "information hub" based on the company's Current Issues: Reference Shelf Plus and Current Issues: Health databases...

Nature Education.(Sci-Tech)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Nature Education launched Scitable, a free, online educational resource for undergraduate biology students and educators. Currently focused on genetics, Scitable combines authoritative scientific information from more than 180 overviews of key...

Swets.(Peopleware)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Arie Jongejan retired as CEO of Swets on Dec. 31, 2008, after 4 years in the job. A search is underway for a successor.

Dialog.(Peopleware)(Morten Nicholaisen)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Dialog promoted Morten Nicholaisen to vice president of Global Sales. Previously, he was executive director, North American sales, and has held other international positions within Dialog, Thomson, and M.A.I.D A/S.

Ingram Digital.(Peopleware)(Mike Lovett new chief executive officer and James Gray named as chief strategy officer )(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... James Gray, previously CEO of Ingram Digital, has been named chief strategy officer for Ingram's content group. The new CEO is Mike Lovett, formerly SVP of Ingram Digital.

William S. Hein & Co., Inc.(Peopleware)(William Shannon )(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... William S. Hein & Co., Inc. promoted William Shannon Hein to the position of vice president, sales.

ProQuest announced that two resources supporting evidence-based nursing study and practice from the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) are now available through ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source.(Biomedical)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... ProQuest announced that two resources supporting evidence-based nursing study and practice from the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) are now available through ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source. The services are RAPid and SUMARI. The RAPid...

The Global Library of Women's Medicine.(Biomedical)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... The Global Library of Women's Medicine was recently launched as a free online clinical resource. More than 650 world experts provide a definitive resource on the latest therapeutic options in women's medicine for doctors and women concerned...

Life in Research announced a search engine for biology research.(Biomedical)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Life in Research announced a search engine for biology research. Designed to supplement peer-reviewed journal articles and textbooks, Vadlo provides information scraped from the web on protocols, online tools, presentations and seminars,...

Elsevier introduced eClips Consult, a website and email digest service that provides article abstracts from 350 major medical journals and journal abstract databases, plus expert commentary, through daily emails based on subscribers' search criteria.(Biomedical)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Elsevier introduced eClips Consult, a website and email digest service that provides article abstracts from 350 major medical journals and journal abstract databases, plus expert commentary, through daily emails based on subscribers' search...

Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, acquired HighBeam Research, Inc., producer of the HighBeam Research Library and the online reference site Encyclopedia.com.(Alliances & Deals)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, acquired HighBeam Research, Inc., producer of the HighBeam Research Library and the online reference site Encyclopedia.com. Some Gale data has long been available through HighBeam, making its premium content...

Consumers Union (CU), an independent publisher of Consumer Reports magazine and ConsumerReports.org, has purchased Consumerist.com from Gawker Media.(Alliances & Deals)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Consumers Union (CU), an independent publisher of Consumer Reports magazine and ConsumerReports.org, has purchased Consumerist.com from Gawker Media. The consumer watchdog blog will operate independently of Consumer Reports publications and...

SirsiDynix, provider of library automation solutions, announced a partnership with ChiliFresh, offering libraries and patrons a way to create and read reviews with complete customization abilities.(Alliances & Deals)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... SirsiDynix, provider of library automation solutions, announced a partnership with ChiliFresh, offering libraries and patrons a way to create and read reviews with complete customization abilities. The partnership gives libraries seamless...

The National Library of Israel and OCLC completed a pilot project that resulted in the addition of more than 788,000 new bibliographic records and 1.1 million holdings to WorldCat, the world's largest online resource for finding information in libraries.(Alliances & Deals)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... The National Library of Israel and OCLC completed a pilot project that resulted in the addition of more than 788,000 new bibliographic records and 1.1 million holdings to WorldCat, the world's largest online resource for finding information in...

MetaCarta, Inc., a provider of geographic search and referencing technology.(Alliances & Deals)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... MetaCarta, Inc., a provider of geographic search and referencing technology, announced that the BBC will be using MetaCarta Geographic Search and Referencing Platform to enhance its search capabilities for all content at its online news site...

Dow Jones expanded its coverage of European venture capital data by acquiring the database assets of The Library House,Ltd., a Cambridge, U.K.-based provider of data on emerging private companies in Europe.(Business & Finance)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Dow Jones expanded its coverage of European venture capital data by acquiring the database assets of The Library House,Ltd., a Cambridge, U.K.-based provider of data on emerging private companies in Europe. The Library House had been placed in...

In mid-December, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finalized the proposed rule on XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language).(Business & Finance)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... In mid-December, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finalized the proposed rule on XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), making the SEC one of the world's largest repositories of XBRL content (www.sec.gov).

Cuil.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Cuil has added some map and local search results via a partnership with MapQuest. Some searches with ZIP codes or location names will bring up a MapQuest result in the top center position. Hulu video content has also been added. Cuil now has...

Google.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Google introduced SearchWiki to all Google users who have signed into a Google or Gmail account. Those searchers who are signed in can now elevate and delete web search results, add new ones, and post comments. SearchWiki runs by means of light...

Google Blog Search.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Google Blog Search changed its indexing process from feeds to posts. Since RSS feeds do not always contain the full text of a post, the previous version did not index all the text of such postings. While the new approach better indexes the full...

Google Book Search.(search engine update)(adds full-text magazine content )(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Google Book Search has added full-text magazine content again. The magazines include many in-copyright titles such as Popular Science, New York, Ebony, and more. Most of these are available in only partial runs (1968-1997 for New York Magazine...

Google Image Search.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Google Image Search can now limit searches by three more image types: line drawings, clip art, and photos. These new formats are available after a search from the "Any content" dropdown box. On the Advanced Image Search page, the new limits are...

Google Maps.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Google Maps has doubled its coverage of U.S. Street View imagery, adding many rural areas and smaller cities and towns. The Street View images are also now available on Google Earth. The Street View interface on Google Maps has changed as well...

hakia.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... hakia now includes "Credible Sites recommended by Librarians" in its results and a Librarians' Corner. It has also launched a custom start page called my hakia, which the company suggests using as your own digital newspaper. Greg R. Notess...

The Librarians' Internet Index.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... The Librarians' Internet Index (www.lii.org) is now hosted by The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology, and has merged with The Internet Public Library (www.ipl.org). Greg R.Notess...

Live Search.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Live Search has joined Yahoo! and Google in flagging some suspicious sites in search results. Sites that host malware or phishing attempts may display a warning. Live Search Images now has an option to find similar images by mousing over an...

Mahalo.com.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Mahalo.com launched Mahalo Answers, joining the ever-growing field of Q&A databases. Taking a slightly different approach, Mahalo is offering monetary incentives for answering. The cash "tipping" is an optional system. Greg R. Notess...

Open Library.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Open Library (http://openlibrary.org) upgraded its site, search, and collections. The Open Library beta site has expanded greatly on its prior collection of full-text, online, out-of-copyright books. While not as large as Google Books, Open...

SearchMash.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... SearchMash, Google's experimental test site that has offered little since the launch of Google Universal Search in 2007, "has gone the way of the dinosaur," as its website now proclaims. Greg R. Notess (greg@notess.com;www.notess.com) is...

Twitter.(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Twitter has revived people search. It is only available to those who are logged in. It then appears at the top right as Find People. It searches by first name, last name, and username. It also has a phonetic similarity algorithm for finding...

Yahoo!(search engine update)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Yahoo! expanded Search Assist to its image search database to guide users differently to the answers they seek. Like Search Assist in Yahoo! web search, the image search version also suggests alternative textual queries. However, in image...

Exploiting synergies: among digital repositories, special collections, and online community.(Cover story)
March 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There was a time, just a few short years ago, when the Library of Congress and a couple of other leading research libraries were the principal developers of high-quality digital collections. Not now. Today,...

'I's to the future.(Conference news)
March 1, 2009... Taking as its theme 'I's to the Future: Invention, Innovation, Impact, the 2008 ICT (Information and Communication Technology) conference attracted more than 4,000 delegates to Lyon, France, in late November...

Implementing search at the University of Wyoming.
March 1, 2009... THE ALLURE of federated searching is potent in academic libraries. Students and faculty want to streamline their searching across web-based search engines, library collections, and the bibliographic databases to which the library subscribes....

Corbis' visual metadata.(Company overview)
March 1, 2009... Nowhere are the issues surrounding controlled vocabulary versus user-generated tagging more obvious than in visual media. Attempting to effectively retrieve an image from, say, Flickr (www.flickr .com), depends entirely upon the expertise,...

Twitter for libraries (and librarians).
March 1, 2009... For many people, the word "twitter" brings to mind birds rather than humans. But information professionals know that Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a fast-growing, free messaging service for people, and it's one that libraries (and librarians)...

The new versus old schools of taxonomies, metadata, and information architecture.
March 1, 2009... In its "Technology Predictions for 2009," released on Dec. 16, 2008, content management industry observer CMS Watch (www.cmswatch.com), proclaimed, "Taxonomies are dead. Long live metadata." Its analyst said, "With social computing coming to...

Innovation and information quality at FIZ Karlsruhe.(Sabine Brunger-Weilandt)
March 1, 2009... A flurry of announcements from FIZ Karlsruhe (www.fiz-karlsruhe.de), in conjunction with the Online Information (www.online-information .co.uk) show last December (2008), prompted me to contact Sabine Brunger-Weilandt, the organization's...

Forget not the forums.(on the net)
March 1, 2009... Social network use exploded in the past year, as more and more people got involved with the likes of Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Ning, Jaiku, MySpace, Bebo, Second Life, or many other related sites. New Web 2.0 tools spring up almost every...

Searching business news.(the dollar sign)(Editorial)
March 1, 2009... Business news is everywhere--and business news is nowhere. There are dedicated business news sources, such as Bloomberg (www.bloomberg.com), Yahoo! Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com), American City Business Journals (www.bizjournals.com), and...

Ramping up the one-shot.(infolit land)
March 1, 2009... A few years ago our library director retired, and one of my fellow reference librarians took his place. This created a threat to our one-shot orientation sessions for English 103, because Ted, our new boss, no longer had the time to do them....

Skytrax, Kayak, OAG.(peter's picks & pans)(Personal account)
March 1, 2009... Early spring is the time to get your summer vacation and/or your conference travel planned. Depending on the destination, your airfare may be the most expensive component of the trip. The quality of service rendered by the airlines sets the...

Filter failure: rescued by visual search.(control-shift)
March 1, 2009... Increasingly, online information is escaping the text trap and being presented in visual terms. Think about things such as newspaper "infographics," car navigation systems, and iTunes' Cover Flow display. Humans are fundamentally highly visual...

Futurism and libraries.(crawford at large)(Column)
March 1, 2009... What's your version of libraries in the future--or the future of libraries? Have you bought into one of the following Messages? "Physical libraries are passe, but librarians have a bright future as information specialists." ...

Recommended reading on DRM, design, public records, and SEO writing.(hardcopy)(Digital Rights Management: A Librarian's Guide to Technology and Practise.)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... *** Digital Rights Management: A Librarian's Guide to Technology and Practise by Grace Agnew ISBN: 978-1-84334-125-5 Published: 2008 Pages: 437 pp.; softcover Price: 39.95 [pounds sterling] [about $58.58 U.S] ...

Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company.(Book review)
March 1, 2009... **** Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery with Russ Hall ISBN: 978-0-13-714244-6 Published: 2009 Pages: 236 pp.; hardcover Price: $24.99 Available...

The Manual to Online Public Records: The Researcher's Tool to Online Resources of Public Records and Public Information.(Book review)
March 1, 2009... *** The Manual to Online Public Records: The Researcher's Tool to Online Resources of Public Records and Public Information by Michael L. Sankey and Cynthia Hetherington ISBN: 978-1-889150-53-6 Published: 2008 Pages: 590 pp.;...

Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web.(Book review)
March 1, 2009... * * 1/2 Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web by Jon Wuebben ISBN: 978-0-9797629-0-1 Published: 2008 Pages: 296 pp.; hardcover Price: $19.95 Available from: Encore Publishing, 124 S. Mercedes Road,...

When you come to a fork in your search, take it!(online spotlight)(Viewpoint essay)
March 1, 2009... One of the things I love about doing online research is all the tangents I get to follow--or that I would like to follow if I had all the time in the world. "Oh, I never thought of that aspect of it!" and "Ah, that looks like an interesting...