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NewsLink — Issue 55/May 2004 |
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| NewsLink is a free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring news and resources for the information industry. If you are receiving this issue as a forward and would like to become a subscriber, please visit our Web site at www.infotoday.com or send a blank e-mail to join-infotoday@lists.infotoday.com. | |
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IN THIS ISSUE 1) WELCOME 2) ITI SNAP POLL 3) NEWSLINK MONTHLY SPOTLIGHT 4) NEWSBREAKS 5) FEATURED ARTICLES 6) CONFERENCE CONNECTION 7) BOOKSHELF |
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1) WELCOME Welcome to the May 2004 issue of NewsLink, Information Today, Inc.'s FREE e-mail newsletter for library and information professionals. Paula Hane's monthly article, "Getting into Deep Content," looks at the growing number of electronic offerings in the book content area. From textbooks to scientific and technical titles, books are becoming available online at a quickening pace. Even here at ITI, we’ve been working with netLibrary to make our professional titles available through their service. To view our March press release about this project see https://www.infotoday.com/pressreleases/pr040326-1.shtml. Thanks to all of those who attended our Buying & Selling eContent event in Scottsdale this week. With nearly 200 of the most influential people in the industry there, representing buyers and sellers of electronic content, this event continues to be a key gathering place for the content world. Once again, thanks to our attendees and our sponsors—ClearForest Software, Copyright Clearance Center, e-Meta, FT—Financial Times, HighBeam Research, and Mark Logic. We look forward to next year. There is still time to register for our three May events (although time and seats are running out quickly). Enterprise Search Summit, WebSearch University, and Streaming Media East are all being held from May 10 through May 12 at the New York Hilton in NYC. To view the programs or register for the events, you can start at our conferences home page at https://www.infotoday.com/conferences.shtml. 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. Best Wishes,
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2) ITI SNAP POLL How valuable are Weblogs to you? https://www.infotoday.com. |
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3) NEWSLINK MONTHLY SPOTLIGHT By Paula J. Hane Getting into Deep Content
Pearson’s Textbook Program
Students will be able to either buy a print-edition textbook or access the same content by subscribing to one or more of over 300 SafariX WebBooks available this year at http://www.safarix.com. The WebBooks will allow users to print pages, make annotations, take notes, search the full text, and add bookmarks to organize their study anywhere they have browser access. While users won’t own or retain the text past the semester, the service will offer definite cost savings for cash-strapped students. Pearson cited a recent student survey in which half of those questioned said they’re likely to purchase a low-cost online text, assuming a savings of $25. Of those students surveyed, 31 percent said they don’t buy all of their required texts. SafariX Textbooks Online will be a significant new addition to PearsonChoices, which offers learning programs and a wide selection of media, formats, and price points. The SafariX textbook program joins other initiatives that have been around for a while, including ProQuest’s XanEdu, which has partnered for several years with Pearson Education. Pearson has also teamed up with BlackBoard to produce CourseCompass, an interactive online learning environment that combines educational content from Pearson Education textbooks and delivers it through a customized version of the Blackboard Learning System. In addition, Pearson has been active in the K-12 textbook space. Pearson Prentice Hall, a division of Pearson Education, has hosted PHSuccessNet’s Teacher Center, a portal that offers interactive online textbooks. Elsevier Book Series
ScienceDirect has been gradually supplementing its journal and database collections with a growing file of online reference works (with many more to be added in 2004 and 2005). Users can greatly benefit from both integrated searching of the various materials and seamless linking among texts. Engineering Books
According to the company, Referex Engineering is designed around a concept of layering content to create both breadth and focus. By layering broad-based handbooks, professional reference works, and how-to guides with specialized monographs and scholarly texts, Referex Engineering creates a foundation of information that helps searchers quickly find solutions. A9 It
Searchers get targeted book content, right there, available in a general Web search engine. Not all content from every book is searchable, but the tool should connect a lot more people to content that was formerly locked up in books, especially now that it’s also readily findable and accessible at A9. Amazon’s goal, of course, is to sell more books. Amazon says it now has 120,000 books scanned, and more are being added every day. Google has also been testing a book search service called Google Print, but with just small excerpts and a limited number of participating publishers (https://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb031222-2.shtml). The May issue of Information Today features an update on Project Gutenberg, the 33-year-long project to digitize classic texts. These texts are available as collections on CD and DVD, and users will soon be able to download them as customizable collections in Adobe PDF or ASCII. Project Gutenberg is one of the invisible Web sources that’s now being reached by Yahoo! Search’s new Content Acquisition Program. As if for final emphasis, while I was finishing this article, a news item reported on a Texas school that’s providing every 5th and 6th grader with an IBM ThinkPad loaded with digital versions of state-approved textbooks and 2,000 works of literature. For this project, IBM is working with software partner Vital Source Technologies, Inc. of Raleigh, N.C., which in turn is working with key publishers, such as McGraw-Hill, John Wiley & Sons, and Oxford University Press. So with these new services, plus existing services like ebrary, netLibrary, xrefer, and Knovel for scientific texts, book content is gradually becoming revealed and accessible. Paula J. Hane is Information Today, Inc.’s news bureau chief and editor of NewsBreaks. Her e-mail address is phane@infotoday.com. |
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4) NEWSBREAKS For a complete listing of previous NewsBreaks visit the Information Today, Inc. Web site at https://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks. NewsBreaks for Monday, April 26, 2004 Britannica Subsidiary Unveils
English-Arabic Search Engine
Melingo, Ltd. , a company that has provided advanced search capabilities for complex languages, has just introduced Morfix CL, its English-Arabic-English Cross-Language Search with Embedded Translation. What that means is that English-speaking researchers can search through Arabic material without knowing any Arabic at all—and see a results page with a translation of each Arabic word or phrase. Melingo, a subsidiary of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., is carefully positioning its Morfix technology as a complement to other search engines. -->https://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040426-1.shtml Amazon Introduces New Web Search
Engine
Amazon.com’s technical research subsidiary, A9, has released a new search engine that combines Google searching of the Web with searches of Amazon’s own full-text collection of books and site information from Amazon’s Alexa service. The A9 connection also offers a free downloadable toolbar. The new service, still in beta, emphasizes customization and personalization features, such as retention of complete search histories. Privacy issues have already begun to emerge. -->https://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040426-2.shtml NewsBreaks Weekly News Digest EDGAR Online to Expand Its News
Service
Nstein Acquires KMtechnologies
Inxight Introduces Visual Timeline
Tool
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5) FEATURED ARTICLES For full-text coverage of the following articles please use the hotlinks provided. INFORMATION
TODAY
In 1971, Michael Hart typed the text
of the U.S. Declaration of Independence into a mainframe computer at the
University of Illinois, creating the first electronic book. This was the
start of Project Gutenberg (PG), an ambitious effort to develop a free
public library of 10,000 public-domain e-books. Progress was slow at first,
but things have definitely picked up in recent years. In the first 11 weeks
of 2004, Project Gutenberg added 313 new e-books. It took from 1971 to
1997 to produce the first 313 e-books—that's 11 weeks compared to about
26 years.
ONLINE Magazine
Shortcuts are the searcher's friend.
Anything that saves time during a search helps expedite the entire online
process. The quicker the route to the answer, the better. I have written
about various types of shortcuts before. In May 1998, "Keyboard and Navigation
Shortcuts" covered keystrokes and browser shortcuts. In July 2003, I explored
a variety of JavaScript shortcuts in "Bookmarklets, Favelets, and Keymarks:
Shortcuts Galore."
COMPUTERS
IN LIBRARIES
This article focuses on our efforts
to implement and promote Geographic Information System (GIS) applications
at Weber State University. WSU is a 4-year public institution with two
campuses. The main campus is located in the foothills of Ogden, Utah (about
30 miles north of Salt Lake City), and the secondary campus, which opened
in fall 2003, is located in neighboring Davis County.
SEARCHER
Magazine
The world's universities, museums,
governments, and other organizations house treasures that have been hidden
in archives, basements, attics, print formats, and a variety of storage
devices. These treasures encompass scientific, technological, cultural,
artistic, and historical materials generally unavailable to searchers and
the public. Institutional repositories are now being created to manage,
preserve, and maintain the digital assets, intellectual output, and histories
of institutions. Librarians are taking leadership roles in planning and
building these repositories, fulfilling their roles as experts in collecting,
describing, preserving, and providing stewardship for documents and digital
information.
MULTIMEDIA
& INTERNET@SCHOOLS
Several years ago, I entered my school
media center with the goals of creating an environment that would cultivate
lifelong love of learning and include everyone in the process. I wanted
to keep students excited about learning, parents encouraged about participating,
and teachers feeling supported and appreciated. In AASL's "Information
Power," it said it could and should be done, and I believed it! New to
the field of media education, I brought with me experience as an art teacher,
a museum educator, and gifted and talented enrichment teacher.
LINK-UP
DIGITAL
I needed something to help me weed
out the spam from the legitimate messages. I’ve tried filtering spam using
my e-mail program, Eudora. I’ve reported spam to Spamcop.net. I even installed
Norton Antispam to try to control the spam coming into my Inbox.
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6) CONFERENCE CONNECTION Get the latest event information available for the library and information fields in the Conference Connection. The Conference Report/Update gives you an inside look at the most recent information industry events, while the Conference Calendar is updated monthly to provide you with important contact information for up-and-coming industry events. CONFERENCE REPORT/UPDATE WebSearch University
Enterprise Search Summit
Streaming Media East
CONFERENCE CALENDAR MAY 2004 May 5-7: AMIGOS LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, Dallas, TX
May 5-7: UTAH LIBRARY ASSOCIATION ANNUAL CONFERENCE, Ogden, UT
May 5-7: MARYLAND LIBRARY CONFERENCE, Ocean City, MD
May 13-15: NEW HAMPSHIRE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, Mt. Washington Hotel,
NH
May 13-15: AMERICAN SOCIETY OF INDEXERS, Alexandria, VA
May 17-18: SIIA CONTENT FORUM, San Francisco, CA
May 21-26: MEDICAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, Washington, DC
May 25-27: INTRANET SUMMIT FOR COMMUNICATORS, Chicago, IL
For the complete Conference Calendar visit https://www.infotoday.com/calendar.shtml |
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7) BOOKSHELF Super Searchers on Competitive Intelligence By Margaret Metcalf Carr; Edited by Reva Basch Foreword by Jan Herring Companies operating in today’s unpredictable roller-coaster economy have increasingly turned to Competitive Intelligence (CI) as an effective means of building and maintaining an edge. This book presents leading CI researchers in their own words, revealing their secrets for monitoring competitive forces and keeping on top of the trends, opportunities, and threats within their industries. Author, researcher, and CI pro Margaret Metcalf Carr asked experts from 15 CI-savvy organizations including Fortune 100 firms Compaq Computer, Dell Computer, Lockheed Martin, Merck, and United Technologies to share tips, techniques, and models that can be successfully applied to any business intelligence project. Here are dozens of useful examples of CI research in action and a range of sources and strategies that can help any organization stay several steps ahead of the competition. CyberAge Books
• 2003/336 pp/softbound
To purchase this
title at the discounted price please go to:
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If you like NewsLink, check out Information Today, Inc.'s other weekly eNewsletters: KMWorld Newslinks: http://www.kmworld.com/newslinks
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©2004 Information Today, Inc. all rights reserved. This newsletter
is published by Information Today, Inc.
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