Information Today articles from February 2004

Information Today archives from February 2004

World Summit embraces open access, libraries.(Report From The Field)(World Summit on the Information Society)
February 1, 2004... The long-anticipated "first phase" meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held in Geneva in December, was supposed to have been about equal access. It turned out being equally about open access as leading scientific...

Online information 2003.(Report From The Field)
February 1, 2004... In December, most of us are focused on year-end issues: budgets, holiday plans, etc. But for the 27th successive REPORT year, thousands of participants in the information industry converged on London's Olympia Conference and Exhibition Centre...

The very heart of a college.(Poynder on Point)
February 1, 2004... Information Today regularly reports on the products and opinions of information vendors. But what about their most important customers: libraries? What issues confront them today, and how, as information and library services become increasingly...

Alexander Street Press indexes oral history collections.(News Bytes)(Oral History Online)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Alexander Street Press announced that it is bringing oral history to the forefront of research with Oral History Online, an index of English-language collections. According to the announcement, oral histories contain rare and personal...

NISO publishes white paper on patents, open standards.(News Bytes)(National Information Standards Organization )(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced that it has published a white paper on Patents and Open Standards by Priscilla Caplan, assistant director of the Florida Center for Library Automation. According to the...

EBSCO publishing acquires new database.(News Bytes)(International Bibliography of Theatre database)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... EBSCO Publishing announced that it has acquired the International Bibliography of Theatre (IBT) database. IBT is a comprehensive multicultural and interdisciplinary research tool available to theater students, educators, and professionals. ...

At the tipping point.(Up Front)(National Online Meeting conference postponed until 2005)
February 1, 2004... Epidemiologists have a term for when a lot of small changes seem to have little or no effect until they combine to reach a critical mass. This is the "tipping point," defined by one source as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the...

The latest news about Elsevier, BIOSIS, and more.(NewsBreak Update)
February 1, 2004... Following the usually quiet news period during the last half of December, January started off with a flurry of company and product news, much of it timed for ALAs Midwinter Meeting, held Jan. 9-14 in San Diego. In fact, it seemed like a press...

Swets Test International sold to Harcourt Assessment, Inc.(NewsBytes)(Royal Swets & Zeitlinger NV announced)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Royal Swets & Zeitlinger NV announced the sale of Swets Test International (STI) to Harcourt Assessment, Inc., a U.S.-based provider of high-quality assessment instruments and testing programs. STI, located in the Netherlands, France,...

Nstein collaborates with Health Canada.(NewsBytes)(Global Public Health Intelligence Network)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Nstein Technologies, Inc. announced that it has signed an agreement with Health Canada to spearhead a new Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) platform for monitoring potential public health risks and threats around the world....

ContentScan, Majors Scientific Books sign agreement.(NewsBytes)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... ContentScan, Inc., publisher of the Dome family of discipline-specific online information services, announced an agreement with Majors Scientific Books to distribute ContentScan's entire line of Dome services to medical and hospital libraries....

SLA now accepts multiple international currencies.(NewsBytes)(Special LibrariesAssociation)
February 1, 2004... The Special LibrariesAssociation (SLA) now accepts membership dues in selected international currencies. Members may now pay by check to join or renew in Euros, British pounds, Canadian dollars, and Australian dollars. The expanded options...

Percussion Software partners with Convera.(NewsBytes)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Percussion Software, a developer of practical software solutions that enable customers to maximize the value and quality of enterprise content, announced that it has formed a partnership with Convera, a provider of search and categorization...

ProQuest announces distribution agreement.(NewsBytes)(Schmalenbach Business Review)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... ProQuest Information and Learning has signed a new agreement with The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) to distribute its full text electronically to libraries, hospitals, and educational institutions. ProQuest also announced an agreement...

Copyright claims and trademark usage.(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... I read with some interest your article about The Library Hotel in the December 2003 issue of Information Today. I agree that it was indeed a funny lawsuit on its face, but I don't really think that it is all that controversial. Mostly, the...

'Can Spam' law needs to be enforced.(Can Spam Act)
February 1, 2004... The Can Spam Act went into effect Jan. 1, but you wouldn't know it by the looks of my e-mail box. The act (http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877.html), signed into law by President Bush on Dec. 16, makes it illegal for e-mail marketers...

Infotoons.
February 1, 2004... FOOLISH AMERICANS! THEIR SILLY LAWS WON'T EVER STOP MY SPAM! AH HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAA! LET'S SEE... 42 MILLION SEXY E-MAILS TO NEW JERSEY... 130 MILLION 'MR. AMADU MOBUTU' E-MAILS TO FLORIDA... THE NEW AMERICAN LAW WORRIES ME...

The Battle of the Windows.(Focus on Publishing)(Microsoft's Windows XP)
February 1, 2004... You may have a perfectly usable and acceptable computer sitting on your desk right now that has effectively been rendered obsolete, even though it may be only 4 years old or less. The solution is simple: Just buy Windows XP and all will be...

I am (finally) moved.(Internet Waves)
February 1, 2004... I recently moved into a new house. An old house, actually, but it's new to me. I've done way too much moving in the past year; number-two son pointed out to me that I have lived in four different places in a little more than 12 months. This is...

Privacy, security, and government Web sites.(Legal Issues)
February 1, 2004... In my job as a law librarian, the Web has become a wonderful tool for accessing legal information, government documents, and public records that had not previously been available to our patrons. Even the largest academic law library could only...

A unique international experience.(Haskell Library)
February 1, 2004... "Anything to declare?" is a question that's familiar to international travelers the world over. But how would you feel about routinely crossing an international border in your daily life, even for the simple act of going to the library and...

A fresh breeze at FIZ Karlsruhe.(Interview with Sabine Brunger-Weilandt.)(Fachinformationszentrums Karlsruhe)(Interview)
February 1, 2004... Founded in 1977, FIZ Karlsruhe is one of the three partners responsible for the sci-tech online service STN International. The German-based not-for-profit organization also produces a range of specialist sci-tech databases and runs the FIZ...

Privacy or security?(International Report)
February 1, 2004... Privacy, data protection, spam, and security are all issues that currently are high on the U.K. and international agendas, with the daily news challenging the legislation even as it hits the books. In the past few months, two tragic events have...

NewsNet founder dies.(NewsBytes)(Obituary)
February 1, 2004... John H. Buhsmer, 71, of Gulph Mills, Pa., died of complications from heart disease on Oct. 4, 2003. He was founder of NewsNet, Inc.; an online pioneer; a former vice president of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin; and a foundation president....

LexisNexis Group.(People Line)(appointments)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... LexisNexis Group announced that Kurt Sanford has been appointed president and CEO of Corporate and Federal Markets, which encompasses information professionals, corporate and government attorneys, chief information officers, and strategic...

Information Today, Inc.(People Line)(appointments)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Information Today, Inc. (ITI) announced that Donald T. Hawkins has accepted a position with EBSCO Publishing as editor in chief of Computer and Information Science Databases. He will continue editing Information Science & Technology Abstracts,...

Shore Communications, Inc.(People Line)(appointments)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Shore Communications, Inc. announced that Christine Lamb has joined as an industry analyst. She will develop new research and commentary services for the company. Most recently, Lamb developed an institutional site license for The New...

The World Wide Web Consortium.(People Line)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced that Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, will be made a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth. Buckingham Palace announced this as part of the 2004...

Project MUSE.(People Line)(appointments)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Project MUSE announced that it has added to its staff Brian Harrington, an authorities library specialist; Gizem Arslan, a metadata and indexing assistant; and Li Zhou, a production specialist. Harrington will take on special indexing and...

Mario Girard, President and CEO of Nstein Technologies, Inc.(the executive profile)
February 1, 2004... Mario Girard is the founder, president, and CEO of Nstein Technologies, an emerging leader in the enterprise information management industry. In 1984, he founded Gespro Techonologies, a successful Canadian information technology firm...

On the road.(Conference Circuit)(information industry conferences)(includes a calendar of spring conferences)
February 1, 2004... Lights, camera, action. It's showtime! Well, not quite yet, but plans are already in the works for the launch of a brand-new information industry conference and trade show in May 2005. The new event will replace the venerable InfoToday/National...

WSIS highlights.(Report from the Field)
February 1, 2004... What They Were Saying About... Open Source Software "Open source technology will facilitate the transfer in sci/tech information."--Walter Erdelen, assistant director general for natural sciences at UNESCO "Software development...

Promoting technological uptake.(Report from the Field)(Information technology development trade show)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Running parallel to the World Summit on the Information Society was the ICT for Development trade show, jointly organized by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the Global Knowledge Partnership; it featured booths for more than...

The guy who did the WWW thing at the place where he did it.(Report from the Field)(Tim Berners-Lee)
February 1, 2004... It was a wired Tim Berners-Lee, his flight to Switzerland delayed a day by snow, who spoke recently to a group of scientists gathered at CERN, just in advance of the World Summit on the Information Society. The CERN where the World Wide Web...

Off the exhibit floor in London.(Report From The Field)(Online Information 2003)
February 1, 2004... When wandering the exhibition hall at the Online Information show, it's easy to forget that there's an extensive conference program going on in the adjacent building. The session rooms are a bit remote from the exhibit hall, and getting there...

Conference calendar.(Calendar)
February 1, 2004... February 9: Washington, D.C. (Renaissance Mayflower Hotel). The Association of American Publishers' Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division will hold Financial and Organizational Impacts of Electronic Publishing, a daylong seminar. It...

Finding healthy recipes online.(Link-up @ home: your personal guide to the Web)(review of MayoClinic.com and Foodfit.com)
February 1, 2004... You probably know that the Mayo Clinic is one of the world's leading healthcare organizations, but it might not be the first place you'd go for a recipe for paella with chicken, leeks, and tarragon. Maybe it should be. MayoClinic.com offers...

Manna from heaven.(Cybersports)(review of Sportspages.com)
February 1, 2004... In normal-folks parlance, Sportspages.com is the archetypal links page or Web directory. But to those of us engaged in the communications business--that's a fancy way of saying we toil at word factories--Sportspages.com is the biblical...

A win-win situation.(Perspectives)(using the Internet to route voice telephone calls)
February 1, 2004... As telephone, cable, and independent entrepreneurial firms race to introduce Internet phone services to consumers, this "new" telecommunications technology promises to transform each of the businesses that market it. Using the Internet to...

Ingenta launches new service, designs web site.(Product News & Reviews)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Ingenta announced that it has launched a unified alerting service and has developed Oxford Scholarship Online (http://www.oxfordscholarship.com) with Oxford University Press. Unified Alerting Service Ingenta's unified alerting service...

IEEE enhances IEEE Xplore, signs FEDLINK agreement.(Product News & Reviews)(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... IEEE announced that it has added new search tools and cover-to-cover editorial materials to its newly enhanced IEEE Xplore online interface. The organization also signed an agreement that will allow U.S. government customers to order IEEE...

Thinking outside the box.(Database Review)(Amazon's e-tailing enhancement: Search Inside This Book)
February 1, 2004... Lately, I've been investigating a large, digital book-search service. It contains more than 100,000 digital texts from dozens of prominent trade, professional, and academic publishers, including mass-market titles, technical and professional...

ITI releases new version of fulltext sources online.(Product News & Reviews)(Information Today, Inc. introduces Fulltext Sources Online)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Information Today, Inc. announced the release of the January 2004 edition of Fulltext Sources Online (FSO), a comprehensive directory of periodicals that are accessible online in full text through more than 25 aggregators. FSO, which is...

EBSCO expands Springer-Verlag agreement, offers new database.(Product News & Reviews)(Art Index Retrospective)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... EBSCO Publishing announced that it has expanded its license agreement with publisher Springer-Verlag. The company also announced that H.W. Wilson's Art Index Retrospective: 1929-1984 database is now available via EBSCOhost. Springer-Verlag...

Engineering information launches database on Engineering Village 2.(Product News & Reviews)(National Technical Information Service)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Elsevier Engineering Information has launched the U.S. National Technical Information Service (NTIS) database on Engineering Village 2, a Web-based discovery platform for the engineering community. The NTIS database is a source for accessing...

Dialog upgrades NewsEdge.(Product News & Reviews)(enhancements)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Dialog Corp. announced a series of upgrades to Dialog NewsEdge, its industry-specific, personalized current-awareness and news-alerting service for corporations. According to the company, the improvements will facilitate information sharing...

FIND/SVP, Empire Media announce alliance.(Product News & Reviews)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... FIND/SVP, Inc., a provider of business advisory, research, and consulting services, and Empire Media, Inc., a media and marketing company, announced a joint venture in which FIND/SVP's staff of industry experts will provide select Trend Reports...

Ovid unveils PayPerView service.(Product News & Reviews)(service introduction)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Ovid announced the availability of its new PayPerView service. It enables researchers; clinicians, and students to buy full-text articles from Ovid's journal collection when their institutions have not purchased the rights to access those...

Alacritude announces agreement with Thomson Gale.(Product News & Reviews)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Alacritude announced that it has signed an agreement with Thomson Gale to enhance its eLibrary online news-article archive. With the addition of Thomson Gale's content, eLibrary provides access to more than 28 million documents from 2,600...

ATLA introduces ATLA Preservation Program Catalog Online.(Product News & Reviews)(American Theological Library Association)(ATLA Preservation Program Catalog Online)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... The American Theological Library Association (ATLA) has announced the introduction of its new ATLA Preservation Program Catalog Online (APCAT). This database resource includes more than 32,000 entries of the extensive monograph and serial...

CISTI launches Secure Desktop Delivery.(Product News & Reviews)(Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... CISTI has announced the launch of Secure Desktop Delivery, a new document delivery method that allows an organization to deliver copyright-cleared documents to its customers in electronic format. This service is based on a system that...

CSA licenses Earthquake Engineering Abstracts.(Product News & Reviews)(Cambridge Scientific Abstracts)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) announced that researchers who investigate earthquake engineering and earthquake hazard mitigation will be able to access Earthquake Engineering Abstracts through CSA's Internet Database Service (IDS). The...

CAS rolls out STN Express Analysis Edition.(Product News & Reviews)(Chemical Abstracts Service)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Chemical Abstracts Service announced the release of STN Express with Discover! Analysis Edition (version 7.0). According to the announcement, this tool will help information professionals see the big picture when they search and retrieve...

Elsevier, Really Strategies develop new system.(Product News & Reviews)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Elsevier's Health Sciences Division and Really Strategies announced the launch of a new editorial and production system for Elsevier's pharmaceutical reference Mosby's Drug Consult. Really Strategies was retained by Elsevier to replace a...

NPG, AfCS announce new publication.(Product News & Reviews)(Nature Publishing Group)(Alliance for Cellular Signaling)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the Alliance for Cellular Signaling (AfCS) announced the launch of AfCS-Nature Molecule Pages (http://www.signaling-gateway .org/molecule), a new scientific publication. AfCS's ultimate goal is to create a...

Blending theory and practice with cases.(Cover Notes)(Challenges in Librarianship: A Casebook for Educators and Professionals)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... Challenges in Librarianship: A Casebook for Educators and Professionals by Nancy J. Becker, Elizabeth B. Pollicino, and Dennis H. Holtschneider Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003 ISBN: 0-8108-4832-5 121 pages $34.95 In the past few years,...

Getting profitable.(In Other Words)
February 1, 2004... If cold weather is not your idea of fun, February can seem like the longest, not the shortest, month of the year. And if you're suffering from seasonal affective disorder, you may be feeling a bit like Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day:...

The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook: a Guide for the Serious Searcher.(New Titles for the Information Professional)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... By Randolph Hock Foreword by Gary Price The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook is the essential guide for anyone who uses the Internet for research: librarians, teachers, students, writers, business professionals, and others who need to...

Net Effects: How Librarians Can Manage the Unintended Consequences of the Internet.(New Titles for the Information Professional)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... Edited by Marylaine Block The Internet is a mixed blessing for libraries and librarians. Today, the Net challenges the librarian's ability to select, threatens the survival of the book, necessitates continuous retraining, presents unique...

The Web Library: Building a World Class Personal Library with Free Web Resources.(New Titles for the Information Professional)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... By Nicholas G. Tomaiuolo Edited by Barbara Quint With this remarkable, eye-opening book and its companion Web site, Nicholas G. Tomaiuolo shows how anyone can create a comprehensive personal library using no-cost Web resources. And when...

The Accidental Webmaster.(New Titles for the Information Professional)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... By Julie M. Still Here is a lifeline for the individual who has not been trained as a Webmaster, but who--whether by choice or under duress--has become one nonetheless. While most Web-mastering books focus on programming and related...

Building & Running a Successful Research Business: a Guide for the Independent Information Professional.(New Titles for the Information Professional)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... By Mary Ellen Bates Edited by Reva Basch This is the handbook every aspiring independent information professional needs to launch, manage, and build a research business. Organized into four sections, "Getting Started," "Running the...

Assessing Competitive Intelligence Software: a Guide to Evaluating CI Technology.(New Titles for the Information Professional)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... By France Bouthillier and Kathleen Shearer Foreword by Chun Wei Choo As commercial software products for competitive intelligence (CI) emerge and gain acceptance, potential users find themselves overly dependent on information supplied by...

Knowledge Management Lessons Learned: What Works and What Doesn't.(New Titles for the Information Professional)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... Edited by Michael E. D. Koenig and T. Kanti Srikantaiah Editors Srikantaiah and Koenig follow up their groundbreaking Knowledge Management for the Information Professional (2000) with this important book. While the earlier work offered an...

Business Statistics on the Web: Find Them Fast--At Little or No Cost.(New Titles for the Information Professional)(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... By Paula Berinstein Foreword by Charles Cotton Statistics are a critical component of business and marketing plans, press releases, surveys, economic analyses, presentations, proposals, and more--yet good statistics are notoriously hard to...