STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, and CAE Healthcare, a medical simulation and healthcare learning solutions provider, have announced a new electronic nursing education solution to be made available in July. The new offering features evidence-based scenarios fully-programmed for CAE's METI line of human patient simulators, including an integrated electronic health record (EHR) and a library of teaching support resources to guide the student through every step of simulation.
This is the first product to result from the Elsevier-CAE collaboration, announced in May 2011. Elsevier will demonstrate the new product at the International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning Conference, June 20-23, in San Antonio, Texas, USA.
Elsevier and CAE Healthcare have combined the latter's METI human patient simulators with the former's suite of nursing simulation products, including the Simulation Learning System (SLS). This online toolkit helps instructors and facilitators effectively standardise and incorporate simulation into their nursing curriculum.
The SLS for Medical-Surgical Nursing provides more than 50 evidence-based scenarios, expanding the scope of topics covered in the nursing curriculum. Each simulation is presented in three steps. Preparation includes detailed outlines to guide educators through the staging of the simulation, identifying key resources to prepare educators, students, and the simulator.
Scenario is fully programmed for METI simulators and comes with instructions for initiating and progressing the simulation experience. Descriptions of the patient's condition for each phase of the scenario reportedly help nursing educators conduct the most realistic simulation sessions possible.
Debriefing offers guided discussion questions for each scenario to facilitate collaborative evaluation and analysis, directing students to corresponding content in their Elsevier textbooks for review and practice.
The combined solution is available to nursing education programs and schools through Elsevier or CAE Healthcare. Customers who previously purchased a METI human patient simulator can integrate Elsevier's SLS to have the complete solution.
Knovel, provider of a Web-based application integrating technical information with analytical and search tools, has announced its newest subject area, Manufacturing Engineering. The offering will help aerospace, industrial equipment, and equipment manufacturing firms improve their integrated design efforts for faster time to market, more efficient assembly, less waste and higher quality.
Knovel's 29th subject area is a unique collection of manufacturing-specific content from the industry's leading publishers and societies. With a focus on discrete manufacturing, this collection provides information about automation and advanced manufacturing techniques, material forming and machining, rapid prototyping, lean and agile manufacturing processes, and machine selection.
Knovel's Manufacturing Engineering Subject Area provides a wide range of information including details about materials and manufacturing processes; product, tooling, and assembly engineering; manufacturing systems and operations; and manufacturing competitiveness.
Key publishers in the new subject area include The Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), AMACOM, ASM International, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier Science, Industrial Press, Oxford University Press, Technology Perspectives, Trans Tech Publications, Ltd, and Wiley.
Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has announced that it is taking the first step toward adding linked data to WorldCat by appending Schema.org descriptive mark-up to WorldCat.org pages. WorldCat.org now offers the largest set of linked bibliographic data on the Web. With the addition of Schema.org mark-up to all book, journal and other bibliographic resources in WorldCat.org, the entire publicly available version of WorldCat is now available for use by intelligent Web crawlers, like Google and Bing, that can make use of this metadata in search indexes and other applications.
Commercial developers that rely on Web-based services have been exploring ways to exploit the potential of linked data. The Schema.org initiative - launched in 2011 by Google, Bing and Yahoo! and later joined by Yandex - provides a core vocabulary for markup that helps search engines and other Web crawlers more directly make use of the underlying data that powers many online services.
OCLC is working with the Schema.org community to develop and add a set of vocabulary extensions to WorldCat data. Schema.org and library specific extensions will provide a valuable two-way bridge between the library community and the consumer Web. Schema.org is working with a number of other industries to provide similar sets of extensions for other specific use cases.
The opportunities that linked data provide to the global library community are in line with OCLC's core strategy of collaboratively building Webscale with libraries. Adding linked data to WorldCat records makes those records more useful - especially to search engines, developers and services on the wider Web, beyond the library community. This will make it easier for search engines to connect non-library organisations to library data.
WorldCat has been built by thousands of member libraries over the last four decades and claims to be the world's largest online registry of library collections. OCLC will continue to engage the library community and the larger developer communities to research, discuss and inform the progression of linked data projects on behalf of member libraries.
OCLC sees Schema.org as a timely and significant development toward linked data technology adoption that will provide recognisable benefits for libraries. Further demonstrating its role in providing linked library data, OCLC recently announced that the full set of DDC 23 - more than 23,000 assignable numbers and captions in English - is now available as linked data.
Academic publisher SAGE and the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNC Greensboro) have announced a partnership designed to encourage social science and humanities faculty and students at the university to publish in SAGE Open. Launched by SAGE in 2011, SAGE Open claims to be the first peer-reviewed, broad-based 'Gold' open access social science and humanities journal.
UNC Greensboro will subsidise the author fee for 30 accepted papers to SAGE Open at a discounted rate. SAGE will reach out to UNC Greensboro faculty and students to let them know about the subsidised fees. Additionally, SAGE will handle the billing and accounting for the fees so that it is a seamless transaction for UNC Greensboro authors.
SAGE Open has had more than 1,100 submissions across a range of disciplines, including education, psychology, political science, management and communication. Papers are from universities across the globe and include authors from leading institutions such as UNC Greensboro, Harvard, Stanford, NYU, and others.
The voting members of the US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved a new project to develop recommended practices for the Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) of Monographs. Many libraries have embraced DDA (also referred to as patron-driven acquisition) to present many more titles to their patrons for potential use and purchase than would ever be feasible under the traditional purchase model. If implemented correctly, DDA is seen to make it possible to purchase only what is needed, allowing libraries to spend the same amount of money as they previously spent on monographs, but with a higher rate of use.
However, this model requires libraries to develop and implement new procedures for adding titles to a "consideration pool", for keeping unowned titles available for purchase for some future period, often years after publication, for providing discovery methods of titles in the pool, establishing rules on when a title gets purchased or only temporarily leased, and how potential titles are discovered, and for handling of multiple formats of a title.
Individuals interested in participating in this working group should contact Nettie Lagace, Associate Director for Programs (nlagace@niso.org). An interest group list for this project will be available for those who would like to receive updates on the Working Group's progress and provide feedback to the group on its work.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has announced that registration is now open for the 2012 Library Assessment Conference: Building Effective, Sustainable, Practical Assessment. It is claimed to be the only conference in North America to focus solely on library assessment. This fourth assessment conference will be held from October 29–31, 2012, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Co-sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the University of Virginia Library, and the University of Washington Libraries, the event will cover a full range of library assessment activities. These include: digital libraries, collections, information literacy and learning outcomes, statistics and management information, methods and tools including LibQUAL+, organisational issues, performance measurement, space planning and utilisation, usability, usage and e-metrics, user needs, and value and impact.
The 2012 conference is geared toward all library and information professionals interested in assessment activities. Keynote speakers at the 2012 conference are: Judith Eaton, President, Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA); John Lombardi, university professor and administrator; John Simon, Executive Vice President and Provost of the University of Virginia and the Robert C. Taylor Professor of Chemistry; and Siva Vaidhyanathan, Robertson Professor and the Chair of the Department of Media Studies, University of Virginia.
Registration deadline is August 25, 2012. Participants are encouraged to register early as registration for the previous conferences closed several weeks before the deadline due to high demand. If space remains after August 25, single-day registration will open at that time. Interested parties may visit http://libraryassessment.org/reg to register online.
Publishing services provider Allen Press, Inc., US, is offering mobile optimisation for its online journal hosting platform, Pinnacle. Pinnacle for Mobile enables publishers to present content attractively across all major mobile platforms while controlling access from the institution out to the end users and their devices. The use of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript makes it possible for content to display on most mobile devices, including those operating on iOS, Android, and RIM.
Device pairing is a key component of Pinnacle for Mobile. This feature allows institutional users to gain access through their mobile device while maintaining accurate usage statistics for institutions. This is projected to be a must-have for publishers who derive significant revenue from libraries and other institutional subscribers.
Pinnacle and Pinnacle for Mobile are seen to be ideal for society publishers who want to offer a robust feature set to their readers without the investment required for a custom site build or technical staff. Websites can be launched quickly and reinforce the brand identity of the society throughout the user experience. Pinnacle hosts full-text XML files in addition to PDFs, image files, and supplemental data.
Library automation solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced that George Mason University Libraries have selected the Primo discovery and delivery system.
Combined with the Primo Central Index of scholarly e-resources, the Primo system enables users to search the entire spectrum of a library's collections - e-resources, physical holdings and digital collections - through a single point of access, and to receive a single, relevance-ranked list of results.
George Mason University is an entrepreneurial institution with global distinction in a range of academic fields. Located in Northern Virginia near Washington, D.C., Mason offers strong undergraduate and graduate degree programmes in 185 fields.
Gale, part of Cengage Learning, and the National Geographic Society, a non-profit scientific and educational organisation, have announced an extended agreement to create additional library products as part of a new product suite, National Geographic Virtual Library.
Earlier this year, Gale announced the National Geographic Magazine Archive, 1888-1994, for libraries, which included all issues of the magazine for its first 107 years, fully searchable through an intuitive interface. The partnership has now been extended to provide all National Geographic magazine issues from 1995 onwards, as well as access to a new virtual reference collection of National Geographic books, maps, videos, images and National Geographic Traveler magazine (2010-current).
Some of the notable National Geographic resources made available as part of the agreement include titles such as Polar Obsession, by Paul Nicklen, and Sizing Up the Universe: The Cosmos in Perspective, by J. Richard Gott; videos exploring topics such as alternative energy and the lifestyle of beluga whales; and destination guides and expedition maps.
This is the first time all these resources have been offered to libraries together in digital and searchable form. These new resources will be created on the same platform as the National Geographic Magazine Archive, 1888-1994, and will work seamlessly together.
The online magazine archive and collection will have benefits for library users at all levels, introducing students to primary-source materials that are relevant and engaging, and giving teachers and professors exciting resources that can be incorporated into syllabi and reading lists. They will support learning and research in a wide range of subject areas. These include: Science and Technology; Peoples and Cultures; Environment; Geography; Animals; and Photography and Journalism.
These new resources will be available to customers starting in fall 2012.
The Independent Scholarly Publishers Group (ISPG), managed by Dragonfly Sales and Marketing Consulting, has added the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) to its ranks, along with its two journals - The Plant Cell and Plant Physiology. The ISPG will be representing ASPB to Australia/New Zealand, Turkey, and the Middle East.
As a professional society, ASPB works to advance the plant sciences by exploring the physiology and biophysics of plants as well as plants' molecular, environmental, and cell biology. With this new agreement, the two ASPB journals and an educational resource will be included with the ISPG's coalition of 53 journals and other resources from 22 publishers, all hosted on the HighWire platform and offered to library consortia, hospitals, and other organisations globally.
The Plant Cell publishes novel and significant research in plant biology, especially in the areas of cellular and molecular biology, genetics, development, and evolution. Established in 1989, this monthly journal ranks first in impact among journals publishing primary research in the plant sciences.
Plant Physiology is an international monthly journal devoted to physiology, biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology, genetics, biophysics, and environmental biology of plants. Established in 1926, the journal claims to be one of the world's oldest and most well-respected plant science journals.
Elsevier, CAE offer simulation technology for health science curriculums
Knovel adds Manufacturing Engineering subject area
SAGE partners with University of North Carolina Greensboro on SAGE Open
George Mason University Libraries select Ex Libris' Primo discovery and delivery system