Welcome to the February 2006 issue of NewsLink, Information Today, Inc.'s FREE e-mail newsletter for library and information professionals. 

February is always a busy month for us, as we are preparing for our conferences in the spring. We have five conferences in the next 3 months, and we expect continued growth and success at each one of them.

Next on the horizon is the Computers in Libraries conference and exhibition at the Washington Hilton in D.C. This year's event will feature three keynote speakers and 90 programs over 3 days. This year's theme is Managing Digital: Innovations, Initiatives & Insights. You can register for the early bird event discount now, or get a free exhibit hall pass at https://www.infotoday.com/cil2006.

Buying & Selling eContent is again returning to Scottsdale, Ariz., this April. Top-level content industry executives will gather to discuss major industry trends and issues affecting the content industry. This conference offers the unique networking opportunity for content buyers and sellers. For more information and program specifics, go to http://www.buy-sell-econtent.com.

In other news, Information Today is now accepting nominations for its 2006 People's Choice Awards. This is your chance to nominate the best companies, people, services, and innovations in the IT industry. An application form is now available at the Information Today Awards page. Have a candidate in mind for an award? Register your vote now.

Information Today, Inc. has begun podcasting. Barbara Quint, editor of Searcher Magazine, is now podcasting each of her monthly editorials, the Searcher's Voice. You can download the editorials to an Mp3 player or listen from your desktop. February's editorial will be available soon. Go to www.infotoday.com/searcher and click on the podcast icon.

We look forward to seeing you at our events this coming year. If you have any comments or suggestions on any special content you would like to see covered or on how to improve this newsletter and the information held in it, please let us know at newslink@infotoday.com . 

by Paula J. Hane

Most librarians think of EBSCO as a provider of databases and subscription management services for libraries. A few years ago, when I interviewed several top executives for a feature article in Information Today, I was surprised to learn of the wide-ranging nature of EBSCO’s business. The company doesn’t just encompass the familiar EBSCO Information Services but nearly 20 other business operations under the EBSCO Industries, Inc. umbrella—including real estate, steel manufacturing, and fishing lures. The company exudes the model of “diversification provides strength and stability.” So, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at the recent news that EBSCO Publishing—traditionally strong in the public and academic library space—has diversified and introduced a product for the corporate end-user market—one that it has not previously targeted.

Executive Daily Brief (EDB) is a new business information monitoring and alerting product for corporate end users in “global 5,000” enterprises. EDB was developed by EBSCO Publishing and Content Analyst Co., a Reston, Va.-based provider of text analytics technology. The service is being targeted at marketing and brand executives, sales personnel, engineering departments, research and development groups, corporate information officers, and corporate general counsels.

EDB combines Content Analyst’s patented Concept Search technology with business content drawn from EBSCO’s business databases. EDB’s content repository includes business journals, current articles, reports and yearbooks, and real-time business news from a variety of premium information sources. Users may also customize EDB’s content by exposing other sources of data to the Concept Search, such as pertinent company documents and intranet resources. 

EDB enables users to search for conceptually related content by entering phrases, paragraphs, or entire articles into a search box. EDB then finds and retrieves the best available relevant information. EDB “trains” itself as it operates, creating a more intelligent search with each use. Users set up customized folders on topics or projects of their own choosing. EDB monitors more than 10,000 premium business sources each day and automatically places relevant articles into the appropriate project folders for review, based upon example documents, e-mails, or articles that the user places in each folder. Users can also do an “archive search,” which pops up another window for searching using the EBSCOhost engine and interface. Some EBSCO sources date back to 1918, while most date back to the mid-1980s. Users can visit the EDB inbox to see what’s new in their folders or opt to receive e-mail alerts when documents of interest arrive.

“We’re delighted with both the partnership and the technology provided by Content Analyst Company,” said Joe Tragert, EBSCO Publishing’s director of market development. “Executive Daily Brief is a key component in our corporate information product line, and Content Analyst’s powerful conceptual search technology is an innovative resource for executives who need timely, relevant, and actionable business information.”

Tragert admitted that the new product is a deliberate move by EBSCO Publishing into a new space—the enterprise market. He said the company showed EDB to the corporate librarians on EBSCO’s advisory board—“and they loved it.” The product isn’t designed to compete with core business information services, such as Factiva or LexisNexis, but could be complementary and serve unmet alerting needs of end users within corporate departments. He noted that EBSCO has also branched out to provide medical information products—another growing market segment for the company that likes diversification.

Among its national news sources, EDB monitors USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. Tragert pointed out that other sources, such as a newspaper from London or Canada or The New York Times, could be added since EDB can handle RSS feeds.

Tragert said that EBSCO is looking into RSS technology in general and considering whether there’s a value-added way to include aggregated blog content, first for EDB and then for other EBSCO products. The company will need to consider the licensing and legal issues involved. But, he commented: “The different context it can create is stunning. You could see the entire flow of a particular event, from blog entries through major media coverage.”

Content Analyst Co. is a fairly new firm that was spun off from Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), a systems integrator. SAIC had been developing the Content Analyst technology for 6 years, offering it to its federal customers. The new company focuses on further developing and improving the technology for commercial markets—of which EBSCO’s application is one.

The Content Analyst technology automates the analysis and categorization of unstructured text and data using a machine-learning technique called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). According to the company, LSI technology is designed to extract every contextual relation among every term in every text object within a collection. It then generates a vector space representation of all terms based on those relations. Within that space, proximity is a good indicator of conceptual similarity. The result: similarities can be identified based on concepts within the material.

Pricing details for EDB were not available. According to an EBSCO Publishing representative: “EDB is a customizable resource. As such, pricing is based on the specific content involved with access, as well as additional factors including employee population/company size, buildings, number of end users, etc. For specific pricing and customized access, contact EBSCO Publishing at: information@epnet.com.” For more information about EDB, visit http://www.epnet.com/thisTopic.php?marketID=18&topicID=542.

Paula J. Hane is Information Today, Inc.’s news bureau chief and editor of NewsBreaks. Her e-mail address is phane@infotoday.com.
 

NewsBreaks for Monday, January 30, 2006

ProQuest Decides That Evidence Matters
by Paula J. Hane

Information overload is a critical problem in most professions, but none more so than in medicine, where life and death decisions can hinge on access to current treatment and research data. These days, there’s no way to keep up with the literature, even in one’s medical specialty. There’s a growing consensus that the future of clinical practice is in evidence-based medicine (EBM). And the major medical information vendors are clearly stepping up efforts to meet this need with appropriate content and tools. ProQuest Information and Learning announced it is now the exclusive global distributor of Evidence Matters to academic and hospital markets. Evidence Matters is an online subscription service that accesses and synthesizes relevant content and allows clinicians to compare therapies for their patients based on peer-reviewed medical research. The distribution agreement is a key move for ProQuest to compete in this hot market area. It helps to build ProQuest’s family of health sciences information products and offers interesting synergistic possibilities with ProQuest’s other digital products.

--> https://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb060130-1.shtml

NewsBreaks Weekly News Digest

LexisNexis Redesigns Congressional Interface
LexisNexis (http://www.lexisnexis.com) unveiled its redesigned LexisNexis Congressional interface during the recent American Library Association Midwinter Meeting. Improved functionality lets users search across different data sources, such as legislative histories, published or unpublished hearings, bills, and House and Senate reports, all within a single search. All material in a library’s collection—whether digital, print, or microfiche—can be searched using one search.
--> https://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/wnd060130.shtml#1

WebFeat Express Integrates with EBSCO A-to-Z
EBSCO (http://www.ebsco.com) and WebFeat (http://www.webfeat.org) announced a partnership that allows the federated search engine WebFeat Express to be sold as an add-on product to EBSCO’s online title listing service EBSCO A-to-Z. WebFeat Express is a streamlined version of the original WebFeat engine that integrates within the A-to-Z service. With A-to-Z, administration is greatly simplified, and changes to the library’s electronic collection are reflected in real time and may be indicated and maintained through this single interface.
--> https://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/wnd060130.shtml#2

EMC Documentum Adds Google Desktop Search
EMC Corp. (http://www.emc.com) announced the addition of Google Desktop for Enterprise. It will be available soon to users through a single query within EMC Documentum Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) Services. This is designed to give users a single point of access and an integrated user experience to search their local desktops and internal and external information sources, regardless of whether the information resides in an application, database, Web site, or content management repository.
--> https://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/wnd060130.shtml#3

For full-text coverage of the following articles please use the hotlinks provided. 

INFORMATION TODAY
Library Schools and the Copyright Knowledge Gap
By K. Matthew Dames

Years from now, once librarians gain the benefit of perspective fostered by temporal separation, we will consider 2005 a watershed year. Certainly, epochal change has been discussed for some time, but last year, a series of events ensured that information switched its dominant format from analog to digital.
--> https://www.infotoday.com/it/feb06/dames.shtml

ONLINE Magazine
The New Life Cycle of Business Information
By Marydee Ojala

Ten years ago, the life cycle of business information was more predictable and less chaotic than it is today. You could trace the development of a news item about a company, industry, or product with a fair amount of certainty as to where you were in the process. Information creation, and its subsequent retrievability, progressed in a relatively linear fashion. Understanding the life cycle of business information helped researchers gauge the validity and reliability of the information they found.
--> https://www.infotoday.com/online/jan06/DollarSign.shtml

COMPUTERS IN LIBRARIES
Delivering Services to Patrons’ Doorsteps
By Robert P. Rynkiewicz

By the time this article is published, I will have had yet another pleasant and stress-free holiday shopping experience. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I’ll have avoided the traffic jams and the maddening crowds at the mall in favor of the ease and comfort of shopping at home online. I save time, I can compare prices with just a few clicks of the mouse, and the products I purchase are delivered to my doorstep in a few days. And let’s not forget gift-wrapping either! It’s a wonderful thing that I can shop at thousands of Internet sites that serve millions of visitors 24 hours a day and not have to stand in long lines to purchase gifts. I want my library to be convenient and dynamic like this. I want to deliver services to my library users over the Internet and not require them to visit the physical building.
--> https://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/feb06/rynkiewicz.shtml

SEARCHER Magazine
Déjà Vu All Over Again
By Barbara Quint

Don't you love Yogi Berra? My personal favorite was his greeting to the Holy Father on a visit to the Vatican: "Hello, Pope." How often the garbling of his Yogi-isms [http://www.umpirebob.com/DATA/yogiisms.htm] still let the truth shine through! And, how well the commonality of those truths was revealed by the ease and speed with which we all understood what he meant! How many of us recall backwaters where "it gets late early out there"? Or remember attending events where "it was hard to have a conversation with anyone, there were so many people talking"? Hats off to Yogi Berra, one of the great social observers of our time. Well, not exactly "our" time, but close enough. Some of my readers may frame their timelines more in Third Millennium terms than those of the last 5 percent of the Second Millennium.
--> https://www.infotoday.com/searcher/feb06/voice.shtml

MULTIMEDIA & INTERNET@SCHOOLS
Digging into Databases--Using Databases to Inspire Novel Approaches to Creating Curriculum
By Sarah Cooper

Databases can inspire novel approaches to creating curriculum. As teachers become familiar with them, their thinking about lesson planning and student research often moves in innovative directions. In this article, Sarah Cooper describes five projects through which librarians can take the lead in helping history and English teachers see the potential of this new world of sources. Included is coverage of database resources from Accessible Archives, Country Watch, EBSCO, Gale, JSTOR, LexisNexis, NewsBank, The OED Online, and ProQuest.
--> http://www.mmischools.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=10686

ECONTENT
Secure Exchanges: The SEC’s Online Alternative to Paper Proxies
By Jessica Dye

Twenty-first century business is transacted online—even the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has trouble getting people to read paper versions of corporate proxy statements in the econtent age. In a move to regain investors’ attention, a recently proposed SEC rule change would allow them to read and post proxy communications via the Web.
-> http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=14887

LINK-UP DIGITAL
Self-Publishing
By Ken Rubino

Whether it be ego, passion, or just a desire to disseminate information on a topic we believe we’re knowledgeable about, there is an opinionated writer inside a lot of us. The relatively recent proliferation of individual Web sites and blogs certainly demonstrates this.
 -->https://www.infotoday.com/linkup/lud011506-rubino.shtml

CONFERENCE REPORT/UPDATE

Internet Librarian 2006 Call for Speakers Submissions
Internet Librarian is now accepting submissions for speaker topics for its 2006 event, which will be held in Monterey, Calif., from October 23 to 25, 2006. This year's theme will be Integrated Experiences: Compelling Content Combinations. Submit your proposal at https://www.infotoday.com/il2006/SpeakerSubmissions.shtml.

The deadline for submission is March 22, 2006.

CONFERENCE CALENDAR

February 2006

For the complete Conference Calendar visit https://www.infotoday.com/calendar.shtml
 

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 search the Web proficiently.

January 2004/272 pp/softbound
ISBND: 0-910965-68-4
Regular price: $24.95

To purchase this title, please go to https://books.infotoday.com/books/ExtSeaHan.shtml .
 

KMWorld Newslinks: http://www.kmworld.com/newslinks
mmis Xtra: http://www.mmischools.com/newsletters
EContent Xtra: http://www.econtentmag.com/ecxtra
EMedia Xtra: http://www.emedialive.com/Newsletters/Default.aspx 
CRM eWeekly: http://www.destinationcrm.com/newsletter/
 
 

Sponsor - D & B

Enable your customers to manage their credit with D&B's Credit Builder and Self-Monitor Solutions CreditBuilder is the perfect way for a new business to establish a complete credit file with D&B that will be used by other companies to evaluate them as potential borrowers, suppliers, or business partners. Self-Monitor is the most comprehensive and up-to-date way to monitor and manage credit and alert when credit has changed.   Information Reports  • Corporate Family Trees Credit Self-Awareness Solutions  •   Business Directory Private Company Information For more information, contact Adam Bernacki today at licenseourdata@dnb.com