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Vol. 20 No. 11 — December 2003

Nexcerpt Announces Product Enhancements

Nexcerpt, Inc., a provider of media-monitoring and media-report publishing products, announced several product enhancements that are designed to reduce the time spent managing media clippings and distributing this information to internal and external sources.

Nexcerpt's solution uses proprietary text analysis technology to monitor thousands of media sources and highlight a user's most relevant information in a digestible article excerpt. Nexcerpt then allows users to distribute this information to their relevant audiences with a publishing tool that can be configured for either manual or automatic delivery. Enhancements to this core functionality include the following:

• Improved text analysis that increases the accuracy of clippings, reduces the occurrence of nonrelevant articles, and optimizes the media-monitoring process

• Enhanced publishing capabilities, which now allow Nexcerpt customers to use XML when publishing to a database or use FTP when publishing directly to a company intranet site

• Expanded sources, which now include more than 3,800 daily and weekly newspapers; magazines; trade journals; Web sites; wire services; professional, technical, and governmental databases; corporate notices; and press release pages

• Expanded user functionality, which now includes the ability to archive and display past issues

Source: Nexcerpt, Inc., Kalamazoo, MI, 269/226-9550; http://www.nexcerpt.com.

ebrary, Society of Manufacturing Engineers Launch Manufacturing Engineering Database

ebrary and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers announced the availability of SME Source, an interactive, full-text database that contains more than 4,000 individual book chapters, journal articles, and technical papers.

Key features of SME Source include the following:

• Simultaneous, multiuser access to each publication with no seat or checkout limitations

• New books, journal issues, and technical papers added quarterly at no additional cost during the subscription term

• Bibliographic and full-text searching within a publication or all publications

• A browse menu for viewing publications by title, author, or publication date

• ebrary's streaming Adobe PDF technology, which enables instant, dynamic access to all pages of the selected publication while maintaining the exact appearance of the document's printed version

• InfoTools and other interaction features that facilitate online reading, including dynamic cross-referencing with other networked reference resources, text highlighting, annotating, and bookmarking

Source: ebrary, Palo Alto, CA, 650/475-8700; http://www.ebrary.com and Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Dearborn, MI, 313/271-1500; http://www.sme.org.

Dialog Offers New Content, Portal Service

Dialog Corp. announced that it has added three files of epidemiological data to the collection of medical information available through its online service. The company also announced the launch of Dialog Portals, a service that allows business news, research, and competitive intelligence to be integrated into enterprise portals.

Medical Data

The three new files now available exclusively through the Dialog services are Hospital Inpatient Profiles (File 462), Hospital Outpatient Profiles (File 463), and Emergency Room (File 454). Each is composed of data compiled in the U.S.

Hospital Inpatient Profiles provides information on more than 7,000 diseases afflicting U.S. hospital inpatients. The data covers approximately 270,000 records from about 500 hospitals. Hospital Outpatient Profiles delivers data on more than 2,400 diseases afflicting outpatients. Information available includes drugs prescribed, diagnostics provided, and visit characteristics. The Emergency Room file covers 2,600 diseases. Its data includes patient characteristics, visit characteristics, and diagnostics.

Dialog Portals

Dialog Portals is compatible with the systems offered by nine leading portal software and applications providers. According to the announcement, Dialog's objective is to offer the deepest and richest set of content choices and information services for integration into industry-standard portal implementations. Content categories include news, market research, business and financial information, STM information, and intellectual property records gathered from around the world.

Source: Dialog Corp., Cary, NC, 919/462-8600; http://www.dialog.com.

ProQuest Unveils eLibrary Curriculum Edition, Teams Up with Project MUSE

ProQuest Information and Learning announced the release of eLibrary Curriculum Edition, a collection of periodical and digital media content designed specifically for secondary schools and libraries. The company also announced that it will link abstract and index records from its online databases with the full text of the scholarly journals in Project MUSE.

eLibrary Curriculum Edition

The eLibrary Curriculum Edition includes the following:

• ProQuest Learning: Literature—This feature offers a comprehensive, integrated literary resource for 150,000-plus original full-text works of poetry, prose, and drama; more than 1,300 author biographies; and more than 11,000 articles, essays, and reviews.

• History Study Center—This provides more than 25,000 historical sources, both primary and secondary, covering ancient to modern U.S. and world history.

• eLibrary general reference—This resource holds more than 1,600 full-text periodicals and 230-plus newspapers and news wires, 5,000 historic and modern maps, 500,000 images, and 17,000 audio/video clips.

Project MUSE Partnership

Project MUSE is a collection of 220 peer-reviewed scholarly journals from 36 humanities and social sciences publishers. It's managed by The Johns Hopkins University Press in cooperation with the Milton S. Eisenhower Library.

Included are key titles such as Language, American Literature, Callaloo, American Literary History, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Opera Quarterly, Shakespeare Quarterly, TDR/The Drama Review, Victorian Studies, and Modern Fiction Studies.

Source: ProQuest Information and Learning, Ann Arbor, MI, 734/761-4700; http://www.il.proquest.com.

Cymfony Adds FluentMedia Sources to Brand Dashboard

FluentMedia, a content-licensing agency of Tribune Co., announced that it will augment Cymfony, Inc.'s Brand Dashboard by providing business and consumer news sources. Brand Dashboard is a media measurement and analysis solution that delivers business intelligence to marketing and communications executives.

Cymfony Brand Dashboard offers automated brand intelligence, message analysis, visibility metrics, and competitive comparisons across thousands of media sources. This information enables companies to quantify the ROI of their media strategies. FluentMedia will provide content from premium sources, including The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire.

Source: FluentMedia, Chicago, 312/527-8170; http://www.fluentmediainfo.com.

LexisNexis to Provide Free Legal Research Option to Microsoft Office 2003

LexisNexis announced it would provide free legal research to users of Microsoft Office. The company will offer a legal research option on Microsoft Corp.'s new Research Task Pane featured in Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003.

The Research Task Pane allows users to highlight a word or phrase in a document and research that term from directly within the program. They can choose from a list of resources from third-party content providers, including encyclopedias, dictionaries, news sources, and LexisNexis legal research.

Users who select LexisNexis will be able to match their search terms against the company's free database of court decisions found on its lexisONE legal portal. For a fee, they can then expand their research using the LexisNexis Shepard's Citation Service to determine the validity of a case. Users can also conduct a free search against approximately 3,400 titles in the LexisNexis Bookstore.

Source: LexisNexis, Dayton, OH, 937/865-6800; http://www.lexisnexis.com.

CSA Adds Database to IDS

Cambridge Scientific Abstracts announced that the Institute of Management International Database, published by the Chartered Management Institute, is now available on its Internet Database Service.

According to the announcement, the Institute of Management International Database provides access to high-quality, practitioner-oriented management material. It's designed to assist users in finding the best solution to everyday problems and queries. More than 300 journals published worldwide are regularly indexed and abstracted for the database. Also included are books, audiovisual materials and training packages, management working papers, and company practices.

Source: Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, Bethesda, MD, 301/961-6700; http://www.csa.com.

MuseGlobal Launches MuseSeek for Consumers

MuseGlobal, Inc. has announced the release of MuseSeek, a new consumer-oriented version of its metasearching technology. With its intuitive interface, MuseSeek will allow Internet users to perform simultaneous searches of an unlimited number of information sources.

By clicking on check boxes, users can select specific sources they want to search from hundreds of different information collections. These are arranged within topical categories such as Web Engines, Business, News, Entertainment, Booksellers, Sports, and Reference. An Advanced Search option allows more sophisticated searching using Boolean logic and by specifying keyword, title, author, subject, or description. Search rules can be changed to alter the number of results per page or per source, or to order retrieved results by relevance or date. Results can be de-duplicated, sorted, and filtered to produce a highly targeted, relevant group of items.

Source: MuseGlobal, Inc., Salt Lake City, 801/208-1880; http://www.museglobal.com.

Marcel Dekker Unveils E-Book Sites

Publisher Marcel Dekker, Inc., along with its technology partner OverDrive, Inc., an e-book distributor, has launched two e-book sites. The institutional site, http://www.ebooks.lib.dekker.com, allows libraries to purchase titles for perpetual access. The other, http://www.ebooks.dekker.com, serves the individual consumer.

The institutional site lets librarians buy titles instead of just licensing access. This perpetual access also includes multiple and concurrent viewing, which means that no patron will ever be turned away from a Dekker title. Dekker offers 500 e-books, with new titles added every week.

Discounts on bulk purchases of e-book titles are automatically applied to institutions that select six or more, with free trial access offered. Special terms are available for consortia. All Dekker e-books can be viewed through the free Adobe Reader 6.0, which manages the digital rights.

Source: Marcel Dekker, Inc., New York, 212/696-9000; http://www.dekker.com.

Copernic Releases Copernic Enterprise Search

Copernic, an information technology provider, announced the launch of Copernic Enterprise Search. This offering is specifically designed to meet the needs of the small-to-medium-sized enterprise and departments of larger enterprises.

Unlike competing products, which scale down pre-existing enterprise search solutions to fit the needs of the smaller enterprise, Copernic Enterprise Search was created to directly address the deployment, complexity, and cost issues that accompany larger, enterprisewide search solutions, according to the announcement. With Copernic Enterprise Search, users are able to navigate through enterprise data to find the precise, highly relevant document or piece of information they need.

Source: Copernic, Sainte-Foy, PQ, 418/527-0528; http://www.copernic.com.

H.W. Wilson Expands Legal Database

H.W. Wilson announced that 25 select journals have been added to its Index to Legal Periodicals Full Text database. This brings the total to more than 1,000. The new journals expand the database's international scope and focus on a range of key subjects in law. Coverage of the new journals will start with their January 2004 issues.

Index to Legal Periodicals Full Text brings users complete articles from nearly 200 titles (in full text and Adobe PDF page images), along with detailed indexing of more than 1,000 sources. Some 1,400 monographs per year are also indexed. Entries date back more than 2 decades, and records are added in daily updates.

This resource offers international coverage from law journals; law reviews; yearbooks; and bar association, university, and government publications, including sources from the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Source: H.W. Wilson, New York, 718/588-8400; http://www.hwwilson.com.

Convera, Nexidia Add Integrated Audio Search Component into RetrievalWare Platform

Convera, a provider of search and categorization software for enterprises and government agencies, and Nexidia, developer of a solution for audio/video searching and intelligent mining, announced a partnership that will add phonetic audio search as an optional component to Convera's RetrievalWare search and categorization platform.

Nexidia's technology, embedded within Convera's search platform, will allow RetrievalWare to search the equivalent of 30 hours of audio information in less than 1 second—100,000 times faster than normal playback speed. Nexidia's phonetic searching pinpoints spoken words in word or phrase formats by analyzing the phonetic content of indexed audio or video files based on the similarity of sound.

RetrievalWare's new audio search feature will enable customers to search for spoken words without converting the audio to text through speech-to-text software or human transcription. The phonetic audio search can be used by commercial and government organizations to address a range of applications, particularly compliance regulations.

Source: Convera, Vienna, VA, 703/761-3700; http://www.convera.com and Nexidia, Atlanta, 404/495-7220; http://www.nexidia.com.

EDGAR Online, Inc. Releases a New Version of Its Premium Subscription Service

EDGAR Online, Inc. announced the release of a new version of its premium EDGAR Online Pro service. The company also outlined a new strategic focus on selling EDGAR Online Pro to clients in financial services companies, including investment bankers, asset managers, credit-risk managers, compliance officers, hedge-fund managers, and market data professionals.

Fundamental, ownership, initial public offering, and secondary offering data sets as well as advanced search tools—all of which EDGAR Online previously offered only to large enterprises as part of its EDGAR Online Explorer product (via XML API data feeds for intranet integration)—are now available to more than 8,000 subscribers to the company's existing EDGAR Online Pro service.

Susan Strausberg, CEO and president of EDGAR Online, said the new focus on the financial services market will streamline the company's operations, increase product development efficiencies, and allow for more targeted marketing. The company also expects to add staff to its existing subscription sales force.

Source: EDGAR Online, Inc., Norwalk, CT, 203/852-5666;
http://www.edgar-online.com.

OverDrive Adds New Publishers to Its Digital Library

OverDrive, Inc. has announced that more than 150 publishers have been added to its Digital Library Reserve. Best-selling titles from Microsoft Press, Merriam-Webster, Barnes & Noble Digital Publishing, Tyndale House, Zondervan, Multnomah, Rough Guides, RosettaBooks, Peanut Press, and others will join e-book collections from Time Warner, HarperCollins Perfectbound, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, and Scholastic.

Using the OverDrive system, patrons can select and download e-books from the library's Web site for offline reading on PCs and virtually all PDA devices. The collection includes contemporary fiction, thrillers, romance novels, classic literature, how-to guides, business and finance titles, children's works, study and reference guides, and more. OverDrive provides libraries with custom integration services, including MARC records for their e-book titles from OCLC.

Source: OverDrive, Inc., Cleveland, 216/573-6886; http://www.overdrive.com

EBSCO Publishing Adds Databases to EBSCOhost

EBSCO Publishing announced that it has added the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, Biological & Agricultural Index, and Essay and General Literature Index to its EBSCOhost service.

Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals

Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, produced at Columbia University's Avery & Fine Arts Library since 1934 and published by the J. Paul Getty Trust and Columbia University, is a comprehensive American guide to current architecture and design literature. It covers international, scholarly, and popular periodical literature, including publications of professional associations; U.S. state and regional periodicals; and major serial publications on the architecture and design of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia.

Biological & Agricultural Index

Biological & Agricultural Index provides access to more than 1 million citations from agricultural and biological literature. It indexes articles, meeting reports, review articles, special supplements, and book reviews, dating from 1983 to the present. The database offers coverage of more than 350 periodicals and a wide range of scientific journals.

Essay and General Literature Index

Essay and General Literature Index cites records contained in collections of essays and miscellaneous works published in the U.S., Great Britain, and Canada. More than 320 single and multi-authored volumes are indexed each year, with more than 20 selected annuals and serial publications.

Source: EBSCO Publishing, Ipswich, MA, 978/356-6500; http://www.epnet.com.

Swets Blackwell U.K. has announced that Sjoerd Vogt is its new managing director.

Most recently, Vogt was vice president and general manager of Dialog's OnDisc/@Site division. Vogt began his career as Dialog's head of training and customer services in Europe. After that, he ran the Information Services Division of the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research. Back at Dialog, he took over the CD-ROM operations in Europe.

Source: Swets Blackwell, Lisse, Netherlands, 011-31-252-435-584; http://www.swetsblackwell.com.

Ingenta has announced four new appointments to lead its programs in the U.S. and the U.K.

Anne Orens will be the new director of business development for North America. Most recently, she was the American Mathematical Society's director of marketing. She has also held positions at the University of Chicago Press, the management consulting firm Mitchell Madison Group, and eMaven, an e-strategy company.

Janet Fisher is the new director of U.S. client management. She is responsible for the existing U.S. client management team and for overseeing the service needs of the publisher customers. Prior to this, she was associate director of journal publishing at MIT University Press.

Patrick Cooke is the director of European new business. He will manage the current European new-business team and develop sales and new product strategies. Previously, he was the managing director of eMeta's European subsidiary. He also worked at Oracle and Documentum in business-development roles.

Huon Butterworth is the company's new business-development manager and as such will provide technical and project management support to sales opportunities. Most recently, he served as European IT director at eMeta.

Source: Ingenta, Cambridge, MA, 401/331-2014; http://www.ingenta.com.

FIND/SVP, Inc. has announced that Richard Longenecker is its new executive vice president of business development. He will oversee sales and corporate business development efforts throughout the company. He will also be a member of its Operating Management Group.

Most recently, Longenecker was vice president of Metrus Group, a management-consulting firm. He has also held positions in sales and management at such companies as Sears, Roebuck & Co., Cargill, Inc., and Public Service Electric & Gas Co.

Source: FIND/SVP, Inc., New York, 212/463-6350; http://www.findsvp.com.

ProQuest Information and Learning has announced that Carolyn Dyer, its senior vice president of content operations, has been named Top Michigan Woman in Computing by the Association of Women in Computing. According to the announcement, this award honors scientific and technical achievement and service to the computing community through accomplishments and contributions on behalf of women in computing.

Currently, Dyer is responsible for the receipt and manufacture of content in all formats, including metadata and access tools. Previously, she held various positions with UMI, including senior vice president and general manager, vice president of content development, and director of electronic product management.

Dyer has a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan and has attended the executive M.B.A. program at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Source: ProQuest Information and Learning, Ann Arbor, MI, 734/761-4700; http://www.il.proquest.com.

EBSCO Industries, Inc. announced that James T. Stephens, its president and CEO, has been inducted into the University of Alabama's Communication Hall of Fame. According to the announcement, this award, created by the Communication and Information Sciences Board of Visitors in 1998, was meant to honor, preserve, and perpetuate the names and accomplishments of communication personalities who have brought lasting fame to the state of Alabama.

Stephens is a member of the board of trustees of Birmingham-Southern College and a member of ALA. He has an undergraduate degree from Yale and an M.B.A. from Harvard.

Source: EBSCO Industries, Inc., Birmingham, AL, 205/980-6794; http://www.ebsco.com.

Robert Granader, CEO of MarketResearch.com

Before his current position as MarketResearch.com's CEO, Robert Granader covered Capitol Hill and the White House as a reporter for a number of print news outlets. From 1994 to 1998, he reported from Washington, D.C., for several newspapers, including the Jacksonville Times Union, The Gainesville Sun, The Sarasota Herald Tribune, and the Wisconsin State Journal. During Granader's years as a journalist, more than 350 of his articles and essays appeared in 50-plus publications, such as The Washington Post, Legal Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Miami Herald.

In 1998, Granader purchased FIND/SVP's Published Products division and FINDEX, the worldwide directory of market research reports. The company went on to raise additional venture capital funding in 2000, allowing him to expand the distribution side of the business, growing it from a handful of reports to the largest collection of current market research products. During the same year, Granader led the acquisition of Newsletters.com, a move that would provide the technical and operational backbone of MarketResearch.com.

MarketResearch.com was launched in December 2000, with the goal of opening the previously closed and expensive world of market research to small and medium-sized companies. MarketResearch.com now allows customers to "buy by the slice," search for specific terms inside each report, and opt for instant online delivery. In the 3 years since its launch, the company has enjoyed triple-digit growth, and its database now has more than 60,000 reports from 350 research providers around the world.

In the past year, MarketResearch.com has been named "Best Information Service" by the Web Marketing Association and was selected by its peers as one of the three "Most Admired Companies in Business Intelligence." In addition, its customer-care module was a finalist for "Best New Product" at the American Business Awards.

Granader received a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from George Washington University. He is a member of the Washington, D.C., and Maryland bar associations.