The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has announced the release of its prototype History of Medicine Finding Aids Consortium, a search-and-discovery tool for archival resources in the health sciences that are described by finding aids and held by various institutions throughout the US. A finding aid is a tool created by archivists to give information about the contents of archival collections.

Finding aids provide contextual information about collections oftentimes with detailed inventories to help researchers locate relevant materials. NLM claims to be the world's largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health.

The resource crawls existing Web content managed by several partner institutions, offers keyword search functionality, and provides results organised by holding institution. Links point to the holding institution's websites. Formats indexed consist of HTML, PDF and Encoded Archival Description XML. The project does not include content held in bibliographic utilities or other database-type information. Crawls are conducted monthly to ensure information is current and to capture new content as it is released.

Current Consortium partners are: NLM History of Medicine Division, Archives and Modern Manuscripts Program; Columbia University Health Center Library Archives and Special Collections; Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions; University of California-San Francisco Library Archives and Special Collections; University of Virginia Health Sciences Library Historical Collections; and Virginia Commonwealth University Tompkins-McCaw Library Special Collections and Archives.

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Internet search services provider Google, Inc., US, has announced that its methods for recommending websites are being reviewed by Texas' attorney general. The investigation was spurred by complaints that the company had abused its power as the Internet's dominant search engine.

The antitrust inquiry disclosed by Google is seen as just the latest sign of the intensifying scrutiny facing the company as it enters its adolescence. Since its inception in a Silicon Valley garage 12 years ago, Google is observed to have gone from a quirky startup to one of the world's most influential businesses with annual revenue approaching $30 billion.

A spokesman for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott confirmed the investigation, but declined further comment. The review appears to be focused on whether Google is manipulating its search results to stifle competition. The pecking order of those results can make or break websites because Google's search engine processes about two-thirds of the search requests in the US and handles even more volume in some parts of the world.

That dominance means a website ranking high on the first page of Google's results will likely attract more traffic and generate more revenue, either from ads or merchandise sales.

European regulators already have been investigating complaints alleging that Google has been favouring its own services in its results instead of rival websites.

Several lawsuits filed in the US have also alleged Google's search formula is biased. Google believes Abbott is the first state attorney general to open an antitrust review into the issue.

According to Google, its closely guarded search formula strives to recommend websites that are most likely to satisfy the needs of each user's request. Regulators and lawmakers in the US and Europe also have been looking into Google's privacy practices and its acquisitions as the company tries to fortify its power.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has announced that EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) customers will now have access to content from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - expanding the list of information accessible from within the discovery service.

As a result of a recent agreement with NBER, EBSCO Discovery Service now indexes more than 20,000 working papers, conference papers and monographs published by the NBER since 1920. NBER is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organisation dedicated to promoting greater understanding of how the economy works. Content in NBER is developed with a focus on four types of empirical research - developing new statistical measurements, estimating quantitative models of economic behaviour, assessing the economic effects of public policies, and projecting the effects of alternative policy proposals.

Content from NBER teamed with other comprehensive collections of metadata from the best content sources make EDS one of the most comprehensive services for searching the complete full text of journal articles and other sources. NBER joins Baker & Taylor, the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents File (ETOC), NewsBank, Readex, LexisNexis, Alexander Street Press, Web of Science (for mutual customers) and many others.

EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized index of an institution's information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box. The EDS Base Index forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalog, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes.

The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from the world's foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.

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JSTOR, the preservation archive and research platform arm of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, recently released a new interface. One feature of the new interface - the ability for any user to submit a search against all JSTOR content - has reportedly drawn strong reactions from many in the library community. The key concern expressed was that JSTOR users at participating institutions with a subset of JSTOR collections could get search results pointing to content they could not access; and that JSTOR had not yet enabled OpenURL for all articles, making it difficult for libraries to use link resolvers to re-direct users to other copies of the articles that might be available to them.

In response, JSTOR will issue an update to the interface changes released in August. Beginning September 2, the default option for authenticated users on all search forms will be to search licensed content only. Authenticated users include users on campus or users logged in via a remote access option. The reason for taking this step is to reduce any potential frustration for authenticated users until JSTOR extends support for OpenURL linking throughout the platform. At that point, librarians will be able to direct their users to alternative options for accessing content not licensed through JSTOR.

For authorised users at participating institutions, the checkbox for 'Include only content I can access' on the Advanced Search form will be selected by default. Individual users will be able to deselect the checkbox if they wish to search across all content. Other JSTOR search forms - the new basic search box on each page, the Citation Locator, and search within a journal - will also default to searching only licensed content. After receiving search results for any search, any user may still elect to view all results for all content including unlicensed content.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has announced that Grant MacEwan University (MacEwan) has selected EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) as its library discovery solution. As a long time EBSCO Publishing customer, MacEwan was confident that EBSCO's familiar interface and deep content coverage would provide a strong foundation upon which to launch its new discovery service.

The university is offering a number of resources in EDS via EBSCOhost Integrated Search (EHIS), a complement to EBSCO Discovery Service which extends the discovery experience to external resources that are not made available for local harvesting. MacEwan is also taking advantage of a number of customisability options available within EDS to include value-added features such as widgets to Lib Guides, Meebo chat and RSS feeds.

EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customised index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box. The EDS Base Index forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalogue, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes.

The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from the world’s foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.

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Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced that the National Library of Finland has chosen the Primo discovery and delivery solution and the Primo Central mega-index of scholarly materials, to provide a unified interface for the discovery and delivery of the entire country's collections and electronic resources.

Representing the full spectrum of museums, academic and public libraries, research institutes and archives, the National Library of Finland chose Primo as the public interface from which users can access digital content and local collections throughout the country. The product was selected as it met all of the network's extensive requirements for comprehensive search technology and impartial access to scholarly global content.

Primo claims to be a one-stop solution for the discovery and delivery of local and remote resources, such as books, journal articles and digital objects. It assists libraries in fully utilising their collections and offering users an up-to-date discovery and delivery experience. Primo services can be embedded in commonly used applications such as course management systems and institutional portals, helping library serve users wherever they are.

The National Library of Finland claims to be the oldest and largest scholarly library in Finland as well as the largest independent institute at the University of Helsinki. It is responsible for the collection, description, preservation and accessibility of Finland's printed national heritage and the unique collections under its care. The library also serves as a national service and development centre for the library sector and promotes national and international cooperation in the field.

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STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced the launch of SciVerse, a platform that seeks to integrate the company's key products and encourage the scientific community to collaborate on the development of customised search and discovery applications. Elsevier is releasing the APIs (application programming interfaces) for all of the content on SciVerse and will offer application development support tools on the site.

SciVerse is projected as a multi-phased initiative aimed at accelerating science through applications targeted to specific researcher needs. At launch, the platform will include SciVerse Hub beta, a module that integrates ScienceDirect, Scopus and targeted web content from Scirus, Elsevier's science-specific Internet search engine. SciVerse Hub beta allows for a single search across its integrated content with results ranked by relevancy and without duplication, in a bid to save researcher time.

Combining familiar resources with new efficiencies, SciVerse is also seen to enable interoperability among ScienceDirect, Scopus and the new SciVerse Hub beta. For instance, ScienceDirect users who also subscribe to Scopus will now be able to access key author information without leaving the article, and link directly into comprehensive lists of an author's documents and citations in Scopus.

SciVerse Hub beta will include three search and discovery applications at launch. These are: Methods section search application, Matching Sentences application; and Prolific Authors application. The Methods section search application will allow researchers to search only the methodology and protocol sections of full-text articles. The Matching Sentences application returns search results with the query words highlighted in the full sentence where they appear. Prolific Authors application prominently displays the most prolific authors for each search result.

The initial applications offer an example of the possible solutions that can be built using content APIs. These were developed by NextBio, a provider of a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform for life sciences researchers which includes ontology-based semantic tools. Elsevier began collaborating with NextBio in 2009.

Elsevier will begin rolling out its APIs on SciVerse in the fourth quarter of this year including content APIs for ScienceDirect, Scopus and SciVerse Hub beta. In opening up this content to development by the worldwide scientific and developer communities, SciVerse claims to allow for collaboration on applications that meet specific researcher challenges. It also expects to enable the creation of customised solutions for efficiently finding, using and re-using SciVerse content.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced that Chadron State College has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) as part of its overall goal to improve information literacy. The college was looking to wean students off typical search engines while encouraging students to access valuable library resources by reducing the intimidation factor that searching the OPAC typically causes.

The goal was to provide students with a search system that offers the convenience they are accustomed to from searching online while delivering the rich resources they need to complete their assignments. Providing a single search experience and encouraging critical thinking to improve student assignments were additional factors that brought faculty support for EDS and a new required course. Customisation options available in EDS, including the ability to import Lib Guides, will allow Chadron State to further hone results to direct students to the highest usage materials available in a given subject.

The addition of EDS comes before the addition of Information Literary 101 to the course list. Information Literary 101 is a required course being introduced in the Fall of 2011. The information literacy course is designed to highlight resources like EBSCO Discovery Service, and also to teach students to be critical about the information they are receiving.

EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customised index of an institution's information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box. The EDS Base Index forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalog, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes.

The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from the world's foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.

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Online information services provider Dialog, part of the ProQuest family of brands, has launched the first release of the ProQuest Dialog service. The new service is seen to be an important milestone toward unifying Dialog and DataStar while simplifying access and searching of their breadth of content. The move emphasises ProQuest's continuing investment in reinventing the acclaimed brand.

ProQuest Dialog offers an intuitive search interface for end users, combined with a new approach to precision search based on relevancy, transparency, control and completeness. The service was developed over nearly 18 months of research and testing with users - from professional searchers to corporate end-users. Detailed personas, in addition to live testing, enabled developers to consistently iterate to the ideal, user-centered interface and tool set.

The first release of ProQuest Dialog is intended for pharmaceutical and biomedical researchers in corporate and government organisations. It offers subscription-based access to databases from some of the world's most trusted publishers. These include Embase, BIOSIS Previews, MEDLINE, SciSearch, Adis Reactions and IMS R&D Focus. Automatic text translation of search results, left-hand truncation, iterative filtering and date histograms are among the advanced features that enhance search.

The next major release, scheduled for late 2010, will add more scientific, technical and medical content to meet the needs of scientists and engineers in a wide range of R&D-driven organisations. Additional releases will follow in 2011 to round out the entire collection of intellectual property and business intelligence content now available on Dialog, as well as continuously enhancing functionality.

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Internet search services provider Google, Inc., US, has announced plans to bring its visual search application Google Goggles to Apple's iOS platform. With this move, the company seeks to make the application available for iPad and iPhone users.

Google Goggles retrieves useful information from a picture a user snaps along with his/her respective GPS position. The application is already available for Google Android powered mobile devices via the Android Marketplace.

Still in its Beta, Google Goggles works on a few main things, such as books, business cards, artwork and landmarks. According to Google, future updates will make the product more effective and useful with more accurate and relevant information.

With Google Goggles, taking a picture of a book will take a user to Google Books, where the user could actually read the entire book online, assuming it is offered on Google Books. Google says the application also has facial recognition capabilities. The company has, however, opted not to include this feature for now, due to privacy concerns.

The current version of Google Goggles is in the process of getting approved by Apple, in order to have the app published in Apple's App Store.

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A team from Sheffield Hallam University, working on data search technology, has secured €370,000 funding from the European Commission with help from Enterprise Europe Yorkshire. The funding is part of a €4 million collaborative project lead by German technology leaders, SAP, that will focus on how improved data searching will impact on business.

Called the 'Semantic Web' by father of the Internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the next generation of the World Wide Web will allow users to search more data than ever before, return more relevant results and save users time surfing the web. Currently only a proportion of data posted on the Internet can be 'read' intelligently by computers and users have to visit multiple websites to find the information that they want.

The project, Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies (CUBIST), will focus on creating new visual tools to help businesses make sense of the vast amounts of data that is available. The project will develop methodologies and a platform that combines essential features of semantic technologies and business intelligence. The Communication and Computing Research Centre (CCRC) at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) is committed to research in the areas of computing and communication.

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Enterprise content management (ECM) software provider Open Text Corporation, US, has announced a tool called Open Text Semantic Navigation. The tool is designed to help audiences naturally navigate through volumes of information based on the inherent meaning of the content and increasing web marketing and online search effectiveness. Available as a cloud-offering or on-premise, Semantic Navigation seeks to give organisations an easy way to improve engagement with online audiences.

The announcement was made at the Search Engine Strategies conference, a global conference and training series focused on search engine marketing, taking place this week. Open Text is a top sponsor of the event and is exhibiting in booth 214.

Companies of all sizes invest heavily to develop content they hope will boost brand awareness, sell goods and services, and increase customer loyalty. This content, however, can be spread across multiple servers and repositories where it is difficult for readers and search engines to find. Simple keyword searches assume the audience is willing to manually scroll through pages of results and hunt down countless blind alleys to find relevant content.

Open Text Semantic Navigation offers a way to improve the user experience. At the core of the offering is the Open Text Content Analytics engine. The engine is claimed to intelligently extract meaning, sentiment and context from content, and in turn marries that content to what a customer or prospect is looking for on a website. Audiences are expected to more consistently and quickly find helpful, valuable information with much less effort.

A complete solution, Open Text Semantic Navigation is designed to complement any existing website, independent of the web content management system used, either installed on local servers or as an online service provided by Open Text. With the cloud-based offering (currently in beta), organisations can expect to rapidly and inexpensively upgrade their sites user experience using a free, fully functional 30-day trial.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced that Drake University and Cowles Library have selected EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to enhance access to scholarly information. The customisable resource from EBSCO Publishing will be known as Cowles SuperSearch. Cowles SuperSearch will search across multiple databases, the library's catalogue, as well as Drake's Institutional Repository.

In looking for a discovery solution, Drake University was determined to meet three goals - increase the use of scholarly resources overall; increase the interdisciplinary use of scholarly resources; and enhance the technical and financial management of digital content resources. This initiative is a key component of the strategic 'knowledge base' programme goal of the library. In opting for EBSCO Discovery Service, the university determined that EDS had key components designed to meet their goals - an end user interface, providing a single search box with multiple search function options, and an advanced support platform designed to manage multiple digital content elements.

The customisability of EBSCO Discovery Service, including the ability to choose the name Cowles SuperSearch, was also a big part of the decision to go with EDS. Drake has added D-Space; the school's Institutional Repository to EDS and plans to implement several specialised SuperSearch options such as SuperSearch for Education, SuperSearch for Pharmacy and SuperSearch for Humanities. EBSCOadmin, the administrative interface behind EDS and other EBSCOhost resources, make it simple to configure, support and deploy these specialised profiles.

The Cowles Library has acquired an extensive array of eJournals, databases and eBooks along with its own unique collection of digital content (www.escholarshare.drake.edu). Adding the base index in EBSCO Discovery Service to the Drake collection allows Drake University to provide students and faculty with an impressive custom collection of scholarly resources.

EDS seeks to create a unified, customised index of an institution's information resources and provide access via a single search box. The EDS Base Index forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalogue, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes.

The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from various global information providers. At present, the index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.

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Internet search services provider Google, Inc., US, is reportedly set to acquire Like.com, a visual search and e-commerce company that lets users search for products using images. Media reports estimate the deal size at $100 million.

This is not the first time that Google has looked into visual search. It first made an attempt to acquire Like.com's predecessor, Riya.com, in 2005. Like.com uses core technology developed by Riya, which was focused on facial recognition.

Like.com, co-founded in August 2004 by Munjal Shah and Burak Gokturk, has often been named as one of the best startup companies. The company's image-matching technology has certain important patents, making the acquisition economically and legally beneficial to Google.

Like.com has shown interest in developing visual search technology. Google provides a similar feature on its own search engine. In December 2009, it launched a visual search application for mobile phones. Google had also acquired UK-based startup Plink, which develops mobile visual search applications, for an undisclosed sum in April 2010.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced that the amount of news content in its EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) has grown to more than 100 million articles since January 2010 from its partnership with Newsbank alone. Additional news content sources and the addition of more than 10,000 articles each day means a rapidly expanding news content collection that is seen to bring added value to EDS users. EDS is focused on bringing journal and book coverage to library users.

Newspaper coverage dominates other discovery services by as much as by 75 percent of the total records. However, it is the scholarly content with robust metadata and full-text searching of journals and books that have been the focus of EDS. The ability for researchers to now find rich newspaper content alongside scholarly journal articles in EDS is projected to provide an ideal balance. Additionally, EDS' powerful user experience allows end users to quickly limit to the appropriate type of content they are most interested in, according to EBSCO.

EDS seeks to create a unified, customised index of an institution's information resources and provide access via a single search box. The EDS Base Index forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalogue, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes.

The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from various global information providers. At present, the index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.

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Library cooperative OCLC has announced that repository managers from libraries, museums, archives and other cultural heritage and research institutions can now contribute metadata records for digital materials to WorldCat using the enhanced WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway. The tool is projected to increase the visibility and accessibility of special collections, institutional repositories and other digital content to web searchers worldwide.

In July 2009, OCLC had introduced the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway to users of OCLC CONTENT Digital Collection Management software. Based on the OAI protocol, the Gateway enabled CONTENT users to upload the metadata of their digital collections to WorldCat. Recent enhancements to the Gateway now make it possible for any OAI-compliant repository to contribute metadata to WorldCat to gain broader visibility for their digital content.

The enhanced WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway is freely available to institutions interested in increasing the visibility of their digital content through WorldCat. Visibility is increased through WorldCat.org, a web destination for discovery of collections, and also through partnerships with Google, Yahoo! and a growing library developer network.

Designed for self-service use, the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway is a web-based tool that enables repository managers to customise how their metadata displays in WorldCat.org and determine their metadata harvesting schedule - monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually. Additionally, it applies their institution's "holdings symbol" to their records, thereby highlighting the unique information resources their institution is contributing to WorldCat.

There are more than 25 million metadata records for digital items currently accessible through WorldCat.org, most of which were contributed as part of OAIster, a union catalogue of records representing open archive resources from around the world. The number of digital records in WorldCat and their use is stated to be growing. Since 2006, there have been more than 600 million visits to WorldCat.org and more than 36 million click-throughs to libraries. With WorldCat.org, users are said to be only three clicks away from an institution's digital content.

To date, more than a half million metadata records have been entered into WorldCat through the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway. A record for a thesis titled 'The Implementation and Impact of Data Mining', from Taiwan's National Chengchi University's library, marks the 500,000th record entered into WorldCat using the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway. The University's library staff is harvesting the metadata from its theses and dissertations collections and its institutional repository into WorldCat to help increase the visibility of their collections worldwide.

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Publisher EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced that James Madison University (JMU) has selected the EBSCO Discovery Service(EDS) as its discovery solution, combining the university library catalogue with article content into an integrated result list. The deciding factors for JMU reportedly were the customisation options, article and journal metadata plus the rapid response times available with EDS. EDS was also seen to offer all the major features of today's discovery tools: real-time availability, faceted search and integrated result sets.

EDS is claimed to offer a variety of customisability options that build on the EBSCOhost platform. It allows sites to add widgets to the right hand column of the interface and customise the toolbar to allow for the addition of more library resources and functionality. Each institution is also able to choose interface colours and logos to brand the library and its services rather than EDS itself.

JMU was also reportedly attracted to EBSCO's track record with article search as well as delivery speed. Additonally, JMU appreciated the approach EBSCO had taken regarding development including regular webinars with librarian beta partners.

EBSCO Discovery Service seeks to create a unified, customised index of an institution's information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box. The searching is stated to be made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.

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Serials Solutions, a US-based provider of tools and services for libraries, has announced that the Columbia University Libraries (CUL) have chosen to adopt its Summon web-scale discovery service. The move is projected to address what studies have shown is a fundamental barrier between libraries and users: the lack of an easy and fast starting point for research.

CUL reportedly selected the discovery service after careful consideration of many different tools as well as a close examination of the user experience. In 2009, CUL conducted a survey about the quality of its library resources, among other service quality factors. The survey showed that faculty and graduate student users perceived CUL's e-resources as lacking and not easy to navigate.

Summon claims to offer a comprehensive single unified index that enables sub-second searches. Its service is seen to go beyond federated search and leap-frogs next-generation catalogues by providing one search box, one results screen and access to the breadth of library content. Results from a Summon search are supposedly content neutral, based only on relevancy and never impacted by its provider's technological expertise.

The service is claimed to enable a familiar web-searching experience of the full breadth of content found in library collections - from books and videos to e-resources such as articles. It aims to bring researchers back to library content and resources by providing a premiere and easy-to-use discovery tool. Librarians are claimed to like the service's ability to transform their institution's search experience, and to have found it easy to set up and integrate into their current library operations.

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Information solutions provider Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, US, has announced that it has expanded its publishing relationship with Wiley-Blackwell, the STM and scholarly business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., US. The deal is to add ebooks and ebook collections in medicine, nursing, and behavioural sciences to the Wiley-Blackwell full-text offerings that are currently available through OvidSP.

Through Books@Ovid, customers can now access 308 references covering cardiology, neurology, internal medicine, nursing, and other medical sciences, as well as psychology and other behavioral sciences. Six book collections are also available. These are: Wiley-Blackwell Complete Book Collection; Wiley-Blackwell Psychology Book Collection; Wiley-Blackwell Evidence-Based Medicine Book Collection; Wiley-Blackwell Neurology Book Collection; Wiley-Blackwell Cardiology Book Collection; and Wiley-Blackwell Nursing Book Collection.

Books@Ovid offers a streamlined, efficient ebook search experience for novice and experienced online researchers. Users can search books simultaneously with their other online resources, and flexible search, results management, and workflow tools make online research fast and easy. With the addition of these books from Wiley-Blackwell, Books@Ovid now offers access to more than 3,000 books from the world's premium publishers in science and medicine.

Recent OvidSP enhancements include new work productivity tools for more streamlined results and citation management; MyProjects - a dedicated work area within the platform for creating and managing research projects; the Ovid Toolbar, for saving URLs and search engine results retrieved through browsing online outside of the OvidSP environment; as well as additional interface feature enhancements.

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Information solutions provider Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, US, recently partnered with nine new premium publishers to deliver full-text content across a wide variety of medical, scientific, and health science disciplines through its OvidSP search, discovery, and management platform. As one of the world's leading aggregators of online scientific information, Ovid works with more than 150 international and society publishers.

Recently signed new publishers include EB Medicine; Future Science (part of the Future Science Group); Expert Reviews (part of the Future Science Group); Future Medicine Ltd. (part of the Future Science Group); Jannetti Publications; Manson Publishing; MJ Powers and Co.; Thomas Land Publishers; and Willan Publishing.

OvidSP is an online information search and discovery platform that seeks to transform how researchers search for and manage online information. Recent enhancements to the search and discovery platform include new work productivity tools for more streamlined results and citation management; MyProjects a dedicated work area within the platform for creating and managing research projects; the Ovid Toolbar, for saving URLs and search engine results retrieved through browsing online outside of the OvidSP environment; as well as additional interface feature enhancements.

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iChemLabs, a US-based developer of chemical software for students and professionals, has announced a strategic partnership with RSC ChemSpider, a provider of chemical services and data on the Internet. As part of the deal, iChemLabs has integrated ChemDoodle, its chemical drawing programme, with the ChemSpider database containing almost 25 million compounds to search for pre-drawn chemical structures through the MolGrabber widget.

ChemSpider is integrating ChemDoodle Web Components into its service in a bid to provide users with a next generation HTML5 experience. The aim is to take a further step towards creating an advanced and futuristic chemical database on the web. ChemDoodle Web Components are fully supported on iPhone OS and Android, enabling partners to push rich media services to their customers across all browsers and mobile devices, according to the company.

ChemDoodle is available for download immediately. New users can request a free 30 day trial at http://www.ChemDoodle.com. The free and open source ChemDoodle Web Components can be accessed at http://web.ChemDoodle.com.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has announced that Bournemouth University has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) as its discovery solution, bringing a single search box to the library collection. Bournemouth selected EDS after a detailed review of the service, determining that it met the university's long term plan for a single source for the discovery of all library resources.

The university will maintain mySearch, the name of its outgoing federated search service for the new discovery tool. mySearch will serve as an important part of the library website bringing library content into the virtual learning environment (VLE) via direct links to EDS and quick search boxes. The library's chat widget will also be added to EBSCO Discovery Service.

Bournemouth will add more resources to the result list by pairing EDS with the optional EBSCOhost Integrated Search (EHIS). EHIS is a complement to EBSCO Discovery Service extending the discovery experience to external resources that are not made available for local harvesting. Bournemouth also has more than 20 databases on EBSCOhost and uses EBSCO A-to-Z and LinkSource in addition to using EBSCO Information Services as its subscription agent.

EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customised index of an institution's information resources and provides access via a single search box. The Base Index for EDS forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalogue, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes.

The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from the world's foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from about 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has announced that Millersville University has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) as its discovery solution. While working with EBSCO as an EDS beta partner, the university found that EDS fit very well into the library's overall goal of becoming an engagement-based organisation rather than the holder of disparate collections.

Millersville University was able to assist EBSCO in developing a process for handling standard file and record group extracts from their ILS that allows institutions to easily add their local catalogue to the EBSCOhost platform. The catalogue can then be included in a comprehensive discovery index or included in indexes specifically for a particular subject or academic discipline. In addition, Millersville has added a number of additional Dublin Core based special collections to the EDS platform to enhance the exposure of local content as well.

EDS has a functional out of the box configuration and a simple implementation process while allowing customisation options including profiling appropriate library subject specialists, relevant or related services and logical content. This facilitates logical placement of the library in spaces such as the learning management/course shell space, programme or department Web presence and more traditional library guides.

EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customised index of an institution's information resources and provides access via a single search box. The Base Index for EDS forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalogue, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes.

The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from the world's foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from about 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has announced that the Northeastern University has chosen to work with the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), a unified, customised index of available information resources, to explore the impact of a one-stop 'discovery' system on user research.

Northeastern will work with EBSCO in the next several months to add its Institutional Repository and local digitised content into EDS, providing even more content from the single search interface. The ability to pull these additional resources into the EBSCOhost platform was one of the reasons for choosing EBSCO Discovery Service.

EDS is part of EBSCO's Complete Discovery Solution combining the core discovery layer/index with the federated search capabilities of EBSCOhost Integrated Search and the familiar, powerful EBSCOhost search experience. The service creates a unified, customised index of an institution's information resources and provides access via a single search box. Metadata is harvested from both internal (library) and external (vendors) sources, creating a pre-indexed service of significant size and speed.

The Base Index for EDS forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalogue, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes. The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from the world's foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from about 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced that the University of Michigan (U-M) has chosen the Summon web-scale discovery service to make searching its library collections effective, fast and easy. More than 50,000 students and faculty at all three of its campuses, which encompass more than a dozen libraries, will benefit from the Summon service.

U-M is one of many top-ranked institutions selecting the Summon service to create a familiar web searching experience for users, enabling access to the breadth of the libraries' collections from a single search box. The Summon service is provided by Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest.

U-M formed the Article Discovery Working Group to evaluate a variety of discovery tools, including Google Scholar and the Summon service. The team analysed 'personas' - personality profiles of typical users - to understand the article discovery needs of U-M's users. The working group bolstered the analysis with expert reviews of the University's three campus systems and then broadly surveyed its community, asking users to rank the importance they place on particular functions and features. The team found that researchers were passionate about the value of articles in scholarly databases, but wanted to access them in a more familiar way, such as through a single search box. Ultimately, the findings led them to the Summon service.

The Summon service was built from scratch using a technology architecture that's entirely new for libraries. At its core is a comprehensive single index that enables sub-second searches and results that are 'content neutral', based only on relevancy and never impacted by their provider's technological prowess.

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Internet search services provider Google Inc. has acquired Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of people, places, and things called Freebase. Google will integrate this information into its search algorithms. This is expected to further boost Google's ability to accept search queries, and to provide smart contextual information based on the synthesis of the search input.

Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world. Both parties plan to contribute to and further develop Freebase, and are inviting other web companies to use and contribute to the data.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Germany, has announced that the Austrian Library Network has gone live with the Primo discovery and delivery solution. Austrian Library Network joins the rapidly expanding international Primo community, now over 280 strong and spanning 29 countries.

Primo provides a unified interface to the Network's central catalogue and is now in use at the University of Innsbruck library and the University of Vienna library. Over the coming months, the Austrian National Library, the University of Graz, the Vienna University of Economics and Business, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna will join the consortium.

Primo claims to be a one-stop solution for the discovery and delivery of local and remote resources, such as books, journal articles and digital objects. It assists libraries in fully utilising their collections and offering users an up-to-date discovery and delivery experience. Primo services can be embedded in commonly used applications such as course management systems and institutional portals, helping library serve users wherever they are.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, and information services provider Thomson Reuters have announced an agreement allowing mutual customers to access Web of Science within EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS). Institutions subscribing to both EDS and Web of Science may conduct their search via the single search box of EBSCO Discovery Service. These institutions will now be able to access the content in Web of Science within the results and be able to link to the full Web of Science record. Web of Science provides access to leading citation databases with current and retrospective coverage in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities - including 256 disciplines. The content in Web of Science covers more than 11,000 of the highest impact journals worldwide, including Open Access journals and more than 110,000 conference proceedings.

EDS is part of EBSCO's Complete Discovery Solution combining the core discovery layer/index with the federated search capabilities of EBSCOhost Integrated Search and the familiar, powerful EBSCOhost search experience. The service creates a unified, customised index of an institution's information resources and provides access via a single search box. Metadata is harvested from both internal (library) and external (vendors) sources, creating a pre-indexed service of significant size and speed.

The Base Index for EDS forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalogue, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes. The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from the world's foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from about 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.

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The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), UK, and InhibOx Ltd., UK, have partnered to create a drug discovery service offering. Users of the new service are expected to benefit from the shared expertise that includes extensive commercial drug discovery experience and from the proprietary technologies developed by the Oxford and Cambridge bodies.

The combined service seeks to offer pharmaceutical, biotech and governmental research organisations access to new capabilities to accelerate drug discovery and improve productivity. It includes full-spectrum computer-aided drug discovery (CADD) from receptor site modeling, through lead identification, lead optimisation, and ADME property prediction to formulation modeling. The new service seeks to offer life science companies a step-change in the quality and effectiveness of CADD services through the use of proprietary technologies and databases, applied by scientists with commercial drug discovery experience.

CCDC is a not-for profit organisation that supports drug discovery through its industry-standard Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). The database contains over half a million small molecule crystal structures. It also offers knowledge-based tools to support receptor modeling, ligand design, docking, lead optimisation and formulation studies. Its database and modeling systems are claimed to be in use at research operations worldwide, including at all of the world's top pharmaceutical companies.

InhibOx, the Oxford-based drug discovery service specialist, has developed proprietary drug discovery technologies to support target- and ligand-based lead identification, fragment- based de novo design methods and formulation modeling. It is claimed to be pioneering the use of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service delivery methods to offer on-demand lead identification and optimisation services. These services have demonstrated dramatically improved results over traditional HTS and virtual screening methods, according to the company.

The two bodies have set up a joint team to commercialise and support the new service and will share operating expenses and revenues. Sales and service operations for the new, combined service are based out of Oxford and Cambridge, UK and Princeton, NJ. The two organisations will also collaborate on the development of new approaches to bring scientific breakthroughs and productivity benefits to all aspects of computer-aided drug discovery, delivering the greatest possible rigor to the process.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced a collaborative agreement with the State and University Library, one of Denmark's oldest and largest academic institutions. This agreement enables Aarhus' central research library to enhance resource discovery and improve resource management using Serials Solutions innovative library technologies.

As a result of collaborating with Serials Solutions, the State and University Library and Aarhus University, libraries will benefit from the technology of the Summon web-scale discovery service. More than 37,000 Aarhus students and faculty will now be able to search the breadth of the library's collection - both physical and digital - from a single search box. The Summon service is powered by a single unified index that pre-harvests content from 94,000 journals from 6,800 content providers. Despite the size of the index, the technology enables sub-second searches and true relevancy ranking across all of this content, delivering unbiased results.

In addition to the Summon web-scale discovery service, the State and University Library and Aarhus University libraries' staff will further maximise e-resource access and streamline workflow through Serials Solutions' 360 services. These include 360 Link, 360 Resource Manager, 360 Counter and 360 Core.

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Supercomputing services provider Super Computing Solutions (SCS), Italy, has released an interactive digital library service called PhysiomeSpace. The service is designed to manage and share a large collection of heterogeneous biomedical data, such as medical imaging, motion capture, biomedical instrumentation signals and finite element models.

The digital library services are hosted on the Biomed Town community portal and can be accessed from www.physiomespace.com. PhysiomeSpace is currently a free service which offers up to 1GB of space. It is managed using a client-server approach. The client application, PSLoader, is used to import, fuse and enrich the data information according to the PhysiomeSpace resource ontology and also to upload and download the resources to the library.

A search service seeks to capitalise on the domain ontology and on the enrichment of metadata for each resource, providing a powerful discovery environment. The metadata are described in an extensible ontology composed of a master ontology and a series of sub-ontologies which can be added by the users' communities, depending on their needs.

PhysiomeSpace is currently in the process to release the Living Human Digital Library (LHDL), a multiscale musculoskeletal data collection co-fundeded by the European Commission. The LHDL seeks to provide a unique systematic quantification of morphological and functional aspects of the musculoskeletal system, at a range of dimensional scales from the whole body down to the tissue constituents. The full data collection will be progressively released with a cadence of two weeks, starting from June 29, 2010. The LDHL ran from February 2006 to February 2009 under the scientific coordination of the Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli (IOR, Italy) and with the participation of the University of Bedfordshire (UK), the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium), the Open University (UK) and the CINECA supercomputing centre (Italy).

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The InChI Trust (InChI Trust), a not-for-profit organisation to expand and develop the InChI open source chemical structure representation algorithm, and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) have announced the release of a new version of the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) software. Version 1.03 of the open source software is now available.

The InChI algorithm turns chemical structures into machine-readable strings of information. Among other enhancements, version 1.03 integrates the generation of the standard InChI string and non-standard, customised strings. The standard InChI/InChIKey should be used as a public identifier to allow linking and interoperability. Options to generate the non-standard InChI within the same package make it easier for organisations to use these additional options within their internal systems, conforming to their business rules. Developers and users can download the new software from http://www.inchi-trust.org/?q=node/14 or www.iupac.org/inchi/download.

Version 1.03 also fixes a number of minor bugs, with respect to stereochemistry. It clarifies how undefined/unknown stereochemistry is handled, and also explains some structure perception and stereo interpretation option issues.

IUPAC and the InChI Trust recommend the use of the standard InChI, an interoperable standard, as it enables linking between journals, databases and other sources of chemical information. This interlinking is one of the major advantages of the InChI standard. Originally developed by IUPAC, InChIs are unique to the compound they describe and can encode absolute stereochemistry. The InChI was developed as a new, non-proprietary, international standard to represent chemical structures. The software is open source, with ongoing development done by the community.

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Information resources and technologies provider Proquest, US, unveiled latest developments for its all-new platform at the American Library Association Conference in Washington, DC. Highly anticipated for its promise to unify all ProQuest content in a single framework, the new platform will now include ProQuest Extended Search, a Serials Solutions technology that will enable libraries to connect to other non-ProQuest databases as well. The ProQuest platform is the highlight of a wave of new technology being released by the company throughout 2010 and beyond. ProQuest will begin migrating customers to the new platform in late summer.

ProQuest Extended Search will enable libraries to enrich results by building connections to databases from other providers, using Serials Solution's clustering technology. Libraries will simply choose the databases they want to add from thousands of options and Serials Solutions will manage the connections for them. The new platform's sophisticated technology tools will enable users to save, organise, and manipulate all the content - whether from ProQuest or not - in personal accounts.

ProQuest is also expanding the platform's content manipulation tools. As the platform develops, users will move beyond consuming content to consuming and creating content. The company is exploring this user role with the launch, earlier this year, of a variety of vertical social networks that connect scholars in subject disciplines.

The platform's all-new technology architecture is built from scratch and designed 'for purpose.' The agile development process was informed by 'personas' - a dozen highly detailed user profiles - and regular testing with live subjects from every user group. The platform is a blend of new technologies and user-favourites from other legacy ProQuest and its brand family platforms.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced that it is moving its Web-scale library management services from pilot phase to production with the release of acquisitions and circulation components to a limited number of early adopters.

Beginning July 1, OCLC will work with libraries that are interested and prepared to implement Web-based services for acquisitions and circulation. This will be followed by successive updates for subscription and license management, and cooperative intelligence - analysis and recommendations based on statistics and workflow evaluation among participating libraries. The cloud computing environment and agile development methodology will facilitate incremental updates while minimising impact to library operations.

For the past eight months, OCLC has worked with an Advisory Council and six libraries and library groups as pilots for Web-scale management services. These groups have provided advice to OCLC on an overall direction, offered new ideas that were not in the original development plan, and validated strategic positioning for the service.

OCLC Web-scale Management Services offer a next-generation choice for traditional, back-office operations. Moving these functions to the Web alongside cataloging and discovery activities allows libraries to lower the total cost of ownership for management services, automate critical operations, reduce support costs and free resources for high-priority services. It will also allow libraries and industry partners to develop unique and innovative workflow solutions that can then be shared across the profession.

OCLC will host an online event on July 21 to discuss how OCLC Web-scale Management Services can positively impact a library's budget and workflow. The online registration form for this event can be found at www.oclc.org/info/ala/webscalejuly21.htm.

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Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced that more libraries around the world have selected the Primo discovery and delivery solution. In addition to gaining access from the redesigned user interface and the rich functionality of Primo version 3, these libraries, together with the other 280 members of the international Primo community, will benefit from the integration with the Primo Central index of scholarly e-content.

Among the newest members of the Primo customer base are: Atlanta University Center (United States); Monash University Library (Australia); University of Applied Arts Vienna (Austria); Parliament of Hungary; Coventry University (United Kingdom); Aberystwyth University (United Kingdom); and University of the West Indies (Caribbean countries).

Released in May 2010, Primo version 3 provides the end user with a simplified, modernised interface, enhanced search and display options, the incorporation of library OPAC functions into the Primo interface, and seamless expansion of the search scope to include the Primo Central mega aggregate index of hundreds of millions scholarly materials. In addition to complete interoperability with the Aleph and Voyager integrated library systems (ILS), Primo can serve as a discovery and delivery layer for all major ILS products, including Millennium, Horizon, Unicorn, Geac, SISIS, Libero, and a variety of regional and local systems. Primo presents a single result list that blends items from local collections, including the local library catalogue, with global e-resources from the Primo Central index.

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Information management systems provider Symyx Technologies, Inc., US, has released the Symyx Direct 7.0 data cartridge, an innovative, one-stop solution for registering, searching, and retrieving chemical and biological entities stored in relational databases. Symyx Direct 7.0 will seek to improve R&D efficiency, project team collaboration, and IP management by enabling multidisciplinary project teams to visualise, explore and compare novel macromolecular sequences and chemical structures stored in a single, fully searchable corporate registry system.

Many scientists today are searching for ways to reduce off-target effects and improve the stability of chemically modified short interfering RNA (siRNA) sequences, peptides, and other large molecules. Aiding these efforts, Symyx Direct 7.0 supports natural post- translational modifications (PTM) and custom modifications while also providing seamless support for D-amino acids and complex cyclisations, including the imidasolinone fluorophore found in the fluorescent proteins.

Symyx Direct 7.0 offers a new, hybrid representation that combines the best features of bioinformatics and cheminformatics notations, improving multidisciplinary collaborative research by enabling scientists to register and retrieve molecules, reactions, and biomolecular sequences including peptides, oligonucleotides, and oligosaccharides; search for and view chemical modifications in sequences; and develop structure-activity correlations in sequences. Used by more than 80 percent of life sciences organisations worldwide, the Symyx Direct data cartridge offers proven performance with databases containing more than 30 million structures and more than 17 million reactions.

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The Royal Society of Chemistry recently announced that its ChemSpider platform has scooped the Innovative Software Award at the iExpo/KM Forum 2010. The award is organised by GFII (the Association for Professionals of the Information Industry) and recognises leading software providers in the information industry for their innovative capabilities and user interfaces.

Presented by Didier Benard, from Sanofi Aventis R & D, the award recognises a non-commercial initiative in enhancing information online whether for the professional community or for the general public. The jury selected ChemSpider as an award winner for providing free access to data on chemical information (both text and structure-based), which is reliable and controlled by an international expert community.

ChemSpider links together compound information across the web, providing free text and structure search access of millions of chemical structures. With an abundance of additional property information, tools to curate and use the data, and integration to a multitude of other online services, ChemSpider claims to be the richest single source of structure-based chemistry information available online.

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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), US, a technical professional association for the advancement of technology, has announced the launch of IEEE Xplore Mobile. The new mobile version of IEEE Xplore incorporates enhancements based on user feedback collected from a beta test period that began in June 2009.

Users can now conduct a basic search from the IEEE Xplore Mobile home page, then refine it by searching within the results or by using subject filters. A predictive type-ahead feature, that suggests searches as you type, is available for mobile devices that are JavaScript-enabled. All results that one would find on the classic IEEE Xplore for abstracts and citations are displayed ten at a time by relevancy. Users can then decide to read or e-mail the abstracts to a remote computer.

Users with proper subscription can view the full-text of an article by e-mailing the link to any e-mail address, then viewing the article directly from the main IEEE Xplore Web site when they are on their personal computer. Non-subscribers can purchase the articles or subscribe to the IEEE Xplore digital library. Some users at subscribing institutions will be able to access full-text PDF documents using a Wi-Fi-enabled mobile device.

The growing popularity of using mobile devices for Internet access was a key motivation driving the development of the mobile version. Another impetus for the mobile search option was the popularity of IEEE content. According to IEEE Publications Staff Director, Anthony Durniak, IEEE Xplore users now conduct an average of 200,000 searches a day and make more than seven million downloads a month. IEEE Xplore Mobile gives users the ability to perform searches of over two million technical documents with any mobile device connected to the Internet.

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Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, US, has announced that it will be highlighting its OvidSP platform enhancements at this year's Special Libraries Association (SLA) conference in New Orleans, LA. Enhancements include new productivity tools, improved results management features, and greater customisation options to search, browse and manage results and research projects.

In addition to the latest OvidSP enhancements, visitors to Ovid's booth #713 can also learn about QUOSA full-text documentation tools as well as important, industry-leading Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Science databases and full-text resources available through OvidSP.

Ovid representatives will demonstrate how OvidSP offers quick, easy access to accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date information in pharmacology, pharmaceutical science, toxicology, and related specialties - everything from regularly-updated pipeline databases to specialty journals on drug therapy to comprehensive reference textbooks and more.

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Federated search services provider Deep Web Technologies, US, has unveiled multilingual translation capability for the WorldWideScience Alliance using its federated search application. The international science portal, WorldWideScience.org, claims to be the first application to be deployed with this capability. Abe Lederman, President and CTO of Deep Web Technologies, demonstrated the new technology at the recently concluded International Council for Scientific and Technical Information's (ICSTI) 2010 Summer Conference in Helsinki.

ICSTI is a primary sponsor of the WorldWideScience.org Alliance, whose purpose is to provide 'a geographically diverse, governance structure to promote and build upon the original vision of a global science gateway.

Multilingual federated search translates a user's search query into the native languages of the collections being searched, aggregates and ranks these results according to relevance, and translates result titles and snippets back to the user's original language. The translation, powered by Microsoft, makes it simple to search collections in multiple languages from a single search box in the user's native language.

While many countries have a wealth of research content in local collections, much of this information has not been translated to other languages. Deep Web Technologies' multilingual translation capability augments the company's Explorit Research Accelerator federated search engine, allowing users to search multiple collections from different countries and languages simultaneously. This release of multilingual Explorit provides for searches of collections in English, Spanish, German, French, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese.

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Internet search services provider Google, Inc., US, recently announced the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. According to Google, Caffeine will provide 50 percent fresher results for web searches than the company's previous index. Also, users can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible before.

Google's old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. Content was not added to the Google search index until a layer was refreshed. This caused a significant delay between publishing content and having it show up on the search engine.

Caffeine is projected to analyse the web in small portions and update the search index on a continuous basis, globally. As it finds new pages, or new information on existing pages, it can add these straight to the index. Caffeine is projected to allow for indexing of web pages on an enormous scale. According to the company, it takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.

Google reportedly opted for a new search indexing system because content on the web is expanding significantly. It is growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

Google recently went live with Caffeine, and the service is now being used in all Google searches. A regular Internet-trolling search-engine user may start seeing different search results, hopefully more up-to-date, relevant news stories and blog posts, according to the company.

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STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced an agreement with US-based technology company InfoDesk to co-develop a federated drug pipeline intelligence solution for pharmaceutical and life science companies. Both companies will work together to develop a search and delivery tool that will increase productivity and improve the quality of results, securely inside or outside of a customer's firewall. Building on the sophisticated synonym index developed as part of the Universal Integrator project initiated by Elsevier in 2007, InfoDesk will apply their knowledge and experience to develop the new search tool. The first release is expected to be available in the second half of 2010.

A fast, federated search of multiple content sources - either proprietary or open access - will give users a single results set, thereby increasing productivity. Rich content drawn from a variety of sources will be filtered using InfoDesk's advanced custom taxonomy, which can be modified to meet end-user requirements. Elsevier's team of expert editors (MD and PhDs) will tag the data at ingestion (when it is first compiled) and continuously monitor as the sources are updated.

In addition, customer-defined taxonomy for specific user groups and individuals will further increase the relevance of results. InfoDesk's intelligent algorithms will rationalise data by contrasting and comparing results from multiple databases to ensure the reliability of the results.

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Open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS) has announced that it has restructured its search capability to deliver an improved scholarly publishing search experience. The new search engine is claimed to be significantly faster than before and also return more relevant results with many ways to narrow, broaden, filter or sort.

The publisher has also re-organised its infrastructure for better search performance. It is now using Solr, an open source search server originally developed by CNET Networks, with the Lucene Open Source search engine. A separate server is dedicated to the search engine to efficiently fetch information from PloS's library of articles without impacting journal performance.

According to PLoS, users will now have more search choices, better results and faster service whether they choose simple or advanced search. Now, when a user does a 'simple' or 'advanced' search on any PLoS journal, the search will return a list of all PLoS articles from that journal, but will additionally be able to view a whole range of ways to narrow, broaden, filter or sort the results.

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Michigan's Grand Valley State University (GVSU) recently conducted an analysis of resource usage. The study revealed that the library's implementation of the Summon web scale discovery service has had a significant impact on how students connect to content and the type of content they use. The Summon service was introduced by Serials Solutions in 2009. The service allows library users to search the breadth of library collections in a single search.

Led by GVSU's Head of Collection Development Doug Way, the library compared year- over-year use of databases, journals, and link-resolvers before and after the Summon implementation. Results show that the service allows students to go directly to full-text, boosting the use of a variety of databases. The library also reported significant rise in journal usage. After Summon's implementation at the close of August 2009, GVSU's top 100 journals showed an average increase in usage of 48 percent and the top 1000 had increased usage of 82 percent. Increased usage occurs even for databases from content providers that are not participating in the Summon service, a result of the service's indexing of the same content from alternate sources.

GVSU is among the scores of libraries around the world which are embracing web scale discovery as their path to bringing students and faculty back to the library as the starting point for research. Way presented the library's findings at a webinar entitled 'The Success of Web-Scale Discovery in Returning Net-Gen Users to the Library'. The webinar was hosted by Serials Solutions and Library Journal.

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Information management systems provider Symyx Technologies, Inc., US, has announced the release of All New DiscoveryGate, an easy-to-use portal for accessing a wealth of scientific information through the Web. In its initial release, All New DiscoveryGate seeks to speed chemical sourcing and reduces costs by providing a fast and comprehensive tool for assessing compound availability and comparing compound prices across over 890 suppliers in the Symyx Available Chemicals Directory (ACD).

For one-stop chemical sourcing with Symyx ACD, All New DiscoveryGate offers easy text searching by common identifiers such as MFCD numbers or chemical names, along with the ability to search by chemical structure. Straight-forward filtering of results facilitates price, quantity, and purity comparisons across all suppliers, enabling researchers to identify the most cost-effective purchases quickly and easily. Additionally, users can access a new online DiscoveryGate Forum facilitating customer and industry discussions.

Used and trusted for more than 20 years by researchers in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, chemical, and agrochemical sectors worldwide, Symyx ACD is a meticulously curated chemical sourcing database containing over one million unique chemical structures, over three million chemical products, and over six million packages in bulk and research quantities. With a username and password, researchers can now rapidly build shopping lists of commercially available compounds from hundreds of suppliers worldwide.

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Applied life science publisher CABI has announced that it will make all of its full-text content available through the Summon web-scale discovery service from Serials Solutions.

Library users will now have one-click access to the full text of over 450 CABI eBooks, comprising more than 7000 individual chapters, and nearly 500 CAB Reviews - peer-reviewed articles analysing current research and emerging trends in animal and veterinary science, agriculture, applied plant sciences, environmental sciences and nutrition and food science.

The Summon service is used by academic libraries in 14 countries worldwide. It simplifies the experience of library users by providing a single search box for the breadth of the library's collections - integrating physical and digital works. Entering a search term will trigger an instant search against both Summon's massive content store and the library's local catalogue. The user can then see a list of the most relevant resources available through that library and link directly to the full text of digital content.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, a business unit of ProQuest, has announced that it is developing Serials Solutions Access Control Service, a hosted authentication and proxy service that will improve access for users and free up library staff time. Access Control Service is expected to simplify the process of accessing library resources from remote locations, combine data management with access control, and eliminate the current requirement for IT resources to implement and manage this service.

Available later in 2010, Serials Solutions Access Control Service will authenticate users, verify their entitlement to electronic resources, and then, connect them to the library's subscribed content providers. Further, libraries will be able to consolidate management of their e-resource subscription data and its access control through the Serials Solutions Client Center, which will include a user authentication component and a Software as a Service (SaaS) proxy.

Serials Solutions Access Control Service is part of the company's overall mission to provide simple solutions to everyday issues that surround e-resources.

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Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, has announced that OvidSP and Nursing@Ovid platform enhancements including new productivity tools, improved results management features, and greater customisation options to search, browse and manage results and research projects will be featured at MLA 2010 in Washington, DC. New content offerings from Primal Pictures, Wiley-Blackwell, and other key publishing partners will also be highlighted.

Representatives from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), Ovid's sister company at Wolters Kluwer Health, will join Ovid in booth #227 and showcase 2010 new full-text journals and more. Visitors to Ovid's booth can preview new productivity functionality for OvidSP, a complete online research solution. OvidSP offers a single online destination for search, discovery and managing critical information needed to streamline research productivity and work.

New content offerings and 3-D anatomy modules from Primal Pictures will also be highlighted as well as more than 300 books from Wiley-Blackwell spanning a wide range of medical, nursing, and behavioral science disciplines. More than 300 medical and nursing ejournals from Wiley-Blackwell are also available on OvidSP.

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Online information services provider Dialog, US, and RefWorks, a web-based research management, writing and collaboration tool, are enabling their shared customers to export Dialog and DataStar search results into RefWorks. This direct export ability is supported through multiple interface options plus Alerts, boosting researchers' ability to manage, store and share results, as well as generate citations and bibliographies.

Founded in 2001 by a team of experts in the field of bibliographic database management, RefWorks is known for its high quality within the academic, government and corporate research communities. Customers subscribing to both research tools will find search results are quickly and easily exported from Dialog to RefWorks to create personal databases. The databases can then be used to manage, store, and share the information. Users who are creating reports can automatically insert references from their database, generating formatted bibliographies and manuscripts in seconds.

RefWorks and Dialog are both members of the ProQuest family of brands.

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Library software provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced that Monash University Library has chosen the Primo discovery and delivery solution, together with the Primo Central mega-aggregate of scholarly e-content, to provide users with a unified interface for the discovery and delivery of the library’s vast collections and global electronic resources. Monash University joins the rapidly expanding international Primo community, now over 270 strong and spanning 29 countries.

The library selected Primo and Primo Central to achieve a streamlined experience that would enable university students and faculty to search and access the university’s physical and electronic collections with ease. In recent years, the library catalogue at Monash has been supplemented by a host of other sources of information for library users. These changes resulted from the revolution in users’ expectations and behaviour, the increasing number of databases (surpassing 800) to which the library provides access; and the implementation of academic repositories such as the Australian Research Repository Online to the World (ARROW). Primo will enable library users at Monash to access the full breadth of the university’s collections via a single search interface.

Primo Central is a centralised index containing hundreds of millions of electronic resources of global and regional significance, which are obtained from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators. Users can simultaneously search locally managed collections and global e-content, and receive a single relevance-ranked list of results. Now undergoing beta testing by 14 partner libraries around the world, Primo Central will be available to the customer community later this year.

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Library software provider, Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced the general release of version 3.0 of the Primo discovery and delivery solution. The new version is projected to bring together a simplified, modernised user interface, enhanced search and display options, integration of OPAC functionality, and support for seamless searching in the Primo Central index of scholarly materials. Primo 3.0 is claimed to enable users to interact fully with the library through a single interface in a straightforward and engaging manner. Primo is reportedly used across 270 sites spanning 29 countries on six continents.

Due to the redesigned, simplified user interface, users can see all information related to an item on the result list page. Users can also obtain seamless access to Primo Central, a mega-aggregate of scholarly materials hosted by Ex Libris in a cloud computing environment. Following the integration of OPAC functionality, library services are now available through the Primo main window.

The integration of two recommender systems — the Ex Libris bX article recommender service and the University of Karlsruhe BibTip recommender for library catalogues — is projected to enable Primo to display the most relevant recommendations generated on the basis of researchers’ usage of scholarly materials.

Additionally, according to Ex Libris, the Primo search engine has been enhanced with a ‘starts with’ (left-anchor) search option and new sorting features, including out-of-the-box ascending and descending sort order and author and title sorting; locally defined fields for sorting; and a customisable sorting order for characters. Other enhancements offer libraries further control over relevance ranking and the grouping (FRBRizing) of search results.

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Internet search services provider Google, Inc., US, has reportedly won a legal victory in Germany on whether image search and showing thumbnails is tantamount to copyright law violation. According to the Google European Public Policy Blog, the German Supreme Court has ruled that Google Image Search does not infringe copyright. The case had been filed by an artist who had uploaded photos of her paintings on her website. She sued Google since the photos were displayed in the company’s image search results.

It is expected that the German ruling would be adopted by other European courts. Google has already successfully defended itself against similar claims in the US under the ‘fair use’ doctrine.

Additionally, Google has won a trademark case involving AdWords, brought to court by Rosetta Stone, an educational content provider. Rosetta Stone contended that the use of its trademarks as ‘keyword triggers’ was an infringement of trademark, and confused its consumers. The judge granted a summary judgment that ends a case before trial – an opinion is yet to be issued.

Earlier, in February 2010, Google came under fire for privacy violation in Italy. Media reports indicate that an Italian court sentenced Google's Chief Legal Officer, Chief Privacy Counsel and former Chief Financial Officer to six months in prison each for violating the nation’s privacy laws. The executives are not likely to serve prison time since Italian criminal laws allow suspension and commutation of short prison sentences for first-time offenders. However, Google has expressed plans to appeal the ruling which, according to observers, exemplifies the need for enterprises operating in Europe to conform to strict privacy laws. The court decision is also seen to raise questions on whether Internet service and content providers that allow third-party content on their sites should step up their monitoring process.

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Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, US, has announced an agreement with e-research and educational publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, US. Under the deal, a number of Gale’s academic databases can now be accessed directly via the Primo Central mega-aggregate of scholarly e-content.

The flagship full-text periodical databases Academic OneFile and General OneFile, together with the Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Sabin America resources, are now available via Primo Central. Gale is the latest of the rapidly expanding group of aggregators who have chosen to make their content accessible to library users via Primo Central, a centralised index comprising data harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators.

With Primo Central, users simultaneously search locally managed collections and global e-content and receive search results that are blended into a single relevance-ranked list. The service is currently undergoing beta testing by 14 Primo Central partner libraries around the world. It will be available later this year to over 270 customers of the Primo discovery and delivery solution and more than 1500 MetaLib customers.

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The Royal Society of Chemistry has announced that its ChemSpider platform has won a 2010 Bio-IT World Best Practices Award for Community Service. Dr Antony Williams, VP of Strategic Development and Valery Tkachenko, Chief Technology Officer for ChemSpider, received the award at the annual Bio-IT Awards Dinner.

ChemSpider is an online resource of chemistry-related data integrating millions of chemical compounds with hundreds of online resources. It currently hosts about 25 million chemical structures that link to additional online resources such as Google's Books, Patents and Scholar offerings and the RSC's archive of over half a million articles and chemical database records.

The award was announced April 21 at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston.

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Library technology solutions provider SirsiDynix, US, has announced the launch of SirsiDynix Enterprise 3.1. The new features provide libraries more tools to create an engaging environment for patrons as they explore library collections.

Enterprise 3.1 allows libraries to integrate Syndetics ICE (Indexed Content Enrichment) from Bowker, the leading source for bibliographic information. ICE content such as reviews, cover images, tables of content, awards data, fiction profiles, excerpts, summaries and author notes can be indexed and accessed through Enterprise searches, driving more search results and improved relevancy rankings.

New features in this release include social networking and review application integration capabilities; customisable, end-user help guides; and enhanced view of federated search results. Enterprise is available for libraries using either SirsiDynix Symphony or Horizon.

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Academic and reference books publisher Oxford University Press (OUP), US, has launched its first online only product, Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO).

OBO is a tool designed to help busy researchers find reliable sources of information in half the time by directing them to exactly the right chapter, book, website, archive, data set they need for their research. It goes beyond search algorithms to present bibliographies in several disciplines selected by leading subject experts and examined by the highest professional standards.

The product is the result of extensive interviews with librarians, numerous focus groups and market research. It seeks to support excellence in research, scholarship and education. It is expected that OBO will help scholars increase productivity, save time and elevate the quality of their work, while enabling them to more efficiently engage with platforms like Google Books.

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UBM Medica, part of United Business Media Plc, US, has launched an iPhone Application for SearchMedica, a search engine designed for medical professionals.

With the SearchMedica application, users can expect to access the most recent, relevant and authoritative information, approved by a board of specialist physicians, in any of 11 specialty channels. According to the company, users can also target searches to journal articles, evidence-based content, guidelines, trials or patient information and locate frequently searched topics with the Recent Searches option. Additionally, they can expect to quickly load content in a format designed specifically for the iPhone, and easily view search results with automatic rotation to landscape and portrait viewing.

SearchMedica.com indexes only authoritative medical information, approved for inclusion by medical editors and physician editorial board. Medical professionals are claimed to receive more relevant, smaller set of search results from SearchMedica than mainstream engines, which are said to contain consumer-oriented, paid testimonial and other types of unreliable information. Since SearchMedica is advertiser supported, medical professionals pay nothing to use the specialty search engine. The results are claimed to be independent and unbiased, containing well-known, credible journals, peer-reviewed research, and evidence-based articles written for practicing healthcare professionals. The SearchMedica iPhone app is available at http://www.searchmedica.com/tools/iphone.html.

The use of handheld devices such as the iPhone is seen to be booming among practice clinicians and medical students. Nearly two-thirds of physicians currently use smartphones and that number is projected to increase to 81 percent by 2012, according to a recent report by Manhattan Research (2010 ‘Future of Physician Media’). Additionally, 95 percent of physicians using smartphones download medical reference applications and access reference materials from their mobile devices more frequently than those using desktops or laptops (2010 Mobile & Social Media Study: Physicians' View of Emerging Technologies).

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced a new partnership with British Library to add the latter’s Electronic Table of Contents File (ETOC) to EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS). ETOC was created to identify journal articles and conference papers from the British Library’s Document Supply collections. It includes more than 36.5 million records providing broad subject coverage across all academic disciplines with 2.5 million articles being added each year.

ETOC combines article-level access to the top 20,000 research journals requested from the British Library along with papers from 16,000 annual conference proceedings - totaling nearly 40 million records. ETOC is updated daily, and content goes back to 1993. With the addition of ETOC to EBSCO Discovery Service, EDS customers now have an added resource to augment the deep, broad indexing and the complexity of subjects already available from the vast and growing discovery service from EBSCO.

EDS is part of EBSCO’s Complete Discovery Solution combining the core discovery layer/index with the federated search capabilities of EBSCOhost Integrated Search and the familiar, powerful EBSCOhost search experience. The service creates a unified, customised index of an institution’s information resources and provides access via a single search box. Metadata is harvested from both internal (library) and external (vendors) sources, creating a pre-indexed service of significant size and speed.

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Knovel, a web-based application integrating technical information with analytical and search tools, has announced a re-designed user interface for members of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). AIChE members now have the ability to save and organise frequent searches, titles and content. Engineers who join AIChE receive access to a select collection of Knovel’s content and interactive tools through AIChE’s e-library.

AIChE is a leading organisation for chemical engineers with more than 40,000 members from 93 countries. Members of AIChE can take advantage of Knovel's interactive tools to analyse data, including the properties of specific compounds, and incorporate results directly into their work. AIChE has offered earlier versions of Knovel, via its e-library, since 2006.

In a 2009 survey of its members, AIChE found that 92 percent of respondents indicated the time it takes to complete their work would increase by at least 10 percent without access to Knovel. Knovel offers validated engineering content, selected from the most trusted sources and delivered to engineers quickly and with precision. More than 600 major corporations and academic institutions turn to Knovel to search the Company’s validated content.

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Digital content products and technologies provider ebrary, US, has announced the availability of Software as a Service (SaaS) for governments that make information much more discoverable. With ebrary’s SaaS, agencies, institutes, and centers can transform any PDF documents into searchable, highly interactive databases that can be integrated into master sites, providing a seamless way for end-users to find the important information they need online.

Key features and benefits of ebrary’s SaaS for government documents include ability to seamlessly integrate multiple databases. Each department can maintain its identity and integrate information from other relevant sources. The new service is capable of processing thousands of documents a day. Multiple options for searching, navigating, and browsing are also available. Additionally, ebrary InfoTools turns every word into a portal to additional information on the web.

ebrary will be debuting its new SaaS for government documents at Computers in Libraries, April 12-14, 2010 in Arlington, VA (booth #817). To see how ebrary’s technology works, interested parties can visit ebrary’s complimentary Natural Disaster and Extreme Weather Searchable Information Center, which contains hundreds of government documents, at http://disaster.ebrary.com and ebrary’s H1N1 Searchable Information Center at http://h1n1.ebrary.com.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced that it is adding records to WorldCat that represent digitised books from the Google Books Library Project and the HathiTrust Digital Library to provide greater access to and increased visibility of these digitised collections.

OCLC is working with libraries, Google and the HathiTrust to derive new MARC records that represent these digital collections based on the rich collection of print records contributed to WorldCat by the OCLC membership over the last 40 years. Searchers will begin seeing these records in WorldCat immediately. OCLC will continue to add records for these collections to WorldCat on an ongoing basis. WorldCat searchers will be able to locate digitised books from these collections and link to the associated book landing page. Also, in some cases, searchers will be able to access the full text of eBooks available through these initiatives.

HathiTrust was conceived as a collaboration of the 13 universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitised collections. OCLC and the HathiTrust are working together to implement a public interface for the HathiTrust catalogue through a WorldCat Local interface, to be introduced later this year.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced that library listings from WorldCat have been added to pic2shop iPhone application. iPhone users can now download the free pic2shop application to scan book barcodes and find local libraries who have them through WorldCat.

The pic2shop mobile application is designed for consumers who like to comparison shop. Users scan a book barcode with their iPhone, and can compare costs to get the book at various retailers or now a local library. The application uses the WorldCat Search API and WorldCat Registry APIs to deliver results for libraries nearby who hold the item in WorldCat, one of the world’s largest library catalogues. Location and mapping information is also available.

Developed by Vision Smarts, a technology company based in Belgium, pic2shop was the first iPhone application that could read UPCs and EANs. It broadens the availability for book barcode-scanning functionality, as it offers a free download and works on all available iPhones - even first generation models. In addition, pic2shop works in all countries, although not all users may have nearby libraries with up-to-date holdings in WorldCat. Vision Smarts is also developing pic2shop applications for additional platforms beyond the iPhone.

The pic2shop iPhone application is one of several mobile applications designed for users to access library information from WorldCat. In addition to applications such as RedLaser for iPhone and Compare Everywhere for Android, the WorldCat Mobile pilot application is available for download on all Web-enabled phones in the UK, US, Netherlands, Germany, France and Canada at www.worldcat.org/mobile.

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Federated search services provider Deep Web Technologies, US, has announced that its Explorit Research Accelerator technology is powering a new alerts service for science researchers via the DOE Science Accelerator. With the new service, researchers can expect to receive information about new DOE resources relevant to them.

Users of the free service create a personalised profile of searches related to their areas of interest. The service performs these searches on users' behalf every week and e-mails the users notifications of newly published results.

Science Accelerator is projected as a gateway to DOE-related science information, including R&D results, project descriptions, accomplishments and other authoritative information, via resources made available by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). The service searches 10 major DOE databases and portals, including hundreds of thousands of full-text documents going back to 1991 and many more citations going back to the Manhattan Project era. Science Accelerator resources are incorporated into Science.gov, also hosted by OSTI. Science.gov is incorporated into another product maintained by OSTI, WorldWideScience.org. This is expected to expose Science Accelerator resources to a global audience.

OSTI created Science Accelerator and introduced it to the public in April 2007. Explorit, Deep Web Technologies' federated search system, allows Science Accelerator users to search the 10 databases simultaneously in real-time and from a single search box. Relevant results from all sources are compared against one another, ranked for relevance, and displayed in a single search results page.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced that the University of Alberta, Red Deer College, Lakeland College and Concordia University College of Alberta are the first among NEOS member libraries to implement WorldCat Local. WorldCat Local is the service that delivers resources of local libraries and libraries around the world through a single search box.

All members of NEOS, a cooperative library consortium that comprises 18 government, hospital, college and university libraries throughout central and northern Alberta, have been given the option to implement OCLC’s WorldCat Local service. The University of Alberta, Red Deer College, Lakeland College, and Concordia University College of Alberta will complete their implementations by March 31, 2010, with more NEOS member libraries to follow in the coming months.

WorldCat Local is a rich discovery environment that presents local library search results most relevant to the library user, followed by materials available through consortia, as well as allowing the user to search the entire WorldCat database of more than 170 million records. WorldCat Local provides single-search access to discover all types of library materials - physical, electronic and digital. WorldCat Local will interoperate with NEOS members’ existing interlibrary loan management systems and help to streamline circulation among NEOS member libraries, while maintaining each member library’s localised branding.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has updated, enhanced and released a new SaaS version (Software as a Service) of AquaBrowser. The new AquaBrowser seeks to provide a fresh, modern interface for library collections, enabling library customers to use and find library resources independently. However, as a hosted service, it is now accessible to more libraries, with set-up, implementation and consistent updates that have little impact on library resources.

The SaaS model allows AquaBrowser customers to keep pace with rapid technological advancement with no intervention from their staff. Upgrades will be rolled out consistently and automatically via Serials Solutions. Set up and implementation are also streamlined through the SaaS model, making upgraded service to the community a turn-key operation. Further, AquaBrowser easily integrates with the library’s existing ILS system so that existing circulation information can be leveraged.

AquaBrowser’s interface is simple and intuitive, enabling customers to easily search the library’s catalogue and local collections immediately and independently. Libraries that want to expand the interface to include their subscribed electronic content have the option of integrating AquaBrowser with a federated search product. Faceted searching allows users to start with a broad term and then hone to precisely the information they want. AquaBrowser also includes Web 2.0 features in MyDiscoveries,’ a community-building function that enables users to interact with content and each other, making the library a central portal for information exchange.

Accessible via mobile devices, AquaBrowser is designed to increase customer independence and success, freeing staff to engage with customers in new ways, taking customer service to new level.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced that its Summon web-scale discovery service has pioneered a new feature that expands exploration of library collections even further. The Summon service’s new Database Recommender points users to not only the indexed content in a library’s collection, but also to valuable, targeted research tools – all within the context of a single search. A user’s Summon search will now return the specific books and articles that are relevant along with a list of recommended databases to consult for additional pertinent information.

Through the Summon service, users can use a single entrance to the library’s collections, searching all formats in one integrated and instant search. Search results are returned in less than a second and now include not only indexed content, but advice on databases held by the library that are particularly pertinent to their research. This latest feature of the Summon service showcases sources that don’t lend themselves to be indexed by any service such as dynamic or statistical databases. In keeping with the Summon service’s uncomplicated interface, recommendations are integrated in the results screen and a mouse click takes users to the resource’s home page.

Database Recommender is the latest innovation to the service libraries are embracing as their path to bring students and faculty back to the library as the starting point for research. The Summon service was built from scratch using an entirely new technology architecture that delivers a search experience rivaling those found on the Open Web. Rather than federated search, it is powered by a single index that enables sub-second searches and completely unbiased results.

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Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced that additional libraries from around the world have selected the Primo discovery and delivery solution as a unified gateway to their library collections. These libraries will join the international Primo community and will benefit from the Primo Central mega-aggregate of scholarly e-content, scheduled for release in mid 2010.

Among the newest members to the Primo community, which now totals 260 institutions spanning 29 countries, are: Linda Hall Library (United States); Austrian National Library; Vienna University of Economics and Business (Austria); Universite Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle (France); Paris-Dauphine University (France); Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (New Zealand); Saxony State Library – Dresden Technical University (Germany); University and State Library of Munster (Germany); Hungarian National Assembly; Consortium of Icelandic Libraries; Cape Peninsula University of Technology (South Africa); University of the Western Cape (South Africa); and Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.

Primo claims to be a one-stop solution for the discovery and delivery of local and remote resources, such as books, journal articles and digital objects. It assists libraries in fully utilising their collections and offering users an up-to-date discovery and delivery experience. Primo services can be embedded in commonly used applications such as course management systems and institutional portals, helping library serve users wherever they are.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, and e-research and educational publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, US, have signed an agreement to index the latter's flagship full-text periodical databases in WorldCat Local. WorldCat Local is the service that combines the cooperative power of OCLC member libraries worldwide with the ability to use WorldCat.org as a solution for local discovery and delivery services. With this new initiative, both parties seek to provide single-search access to users that subscribe to both services.

The agreement calls for OCLC to centrally index the metadata of Gale's Academic OneFile and General OneFile databases to provide WorldCat Local users a direct link to the abstracts and articles in these authoritative resources. The two databases contain about 100 million records each that connect to millions of full-text articles in both HTML and PDF from peer-reviewed journals, newspapers and magazines, as well as thousands of podcasts and transcripts.

Gale joins a growing list of OCLC eContent partners that have agreed to have their databases indexed in WorldCat Local. These institutions are collaborating on a global scale to ensure that library users can find and access the content in their local libraries, in regional libraries and through the OCLC network of WorldCat libraries worldwide. Currently, more than 100 databases, 420 million article records, and numerous digital library collections, including Google Book Search and HathiTrust, are combined with the 170 million items catalogued in WorldCat to provide libraries using WorldCat Local a rich and growing index that represents the combined print, electronic and digital collections of the OCLC membership.

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Software solutions provider Mark Logic Corporation, US, has announced that scientific publisher RSC Publishing has launched a new beta publications platform built on MarkLogic Server. For the first time, more than 165 years of Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) content will now be searchable and accessible to the chemical science research community through a single search interface.

This new integrated platform, now available online at www.rsc.org/publishingbeta, allows RSC authors, readers, and customers to search across approximately 20,000 book chapters, 300,000 journal articles, and nearly 500,000 database records. The site has faceted browsing that allows for rapid filtering of results and the ability to simultaneously discover related content. Furthermore, RSC Publishing’s unique design allows users to intuitively navigate the site and find relevant journal, book, and database content quickly.

The RSC Publishing platform has been released as an open beta so that users can help define how the platform evolves.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced that East View Information Services is the latest content player to sign with the Summon web-scale discovery service. With the Summon service, East View will provide content on its Universal Database platform, a key source for newspapers, scholarly journals, government publications, archival content and business periodicals from Russia, China and across Eurasia. The company will provide full text directly to Serials Solutions for inclusion in the service's massive unified index.

East View content includes hundreds of mass media publications covering Russia and the countries of the Former Soviet Union, Chinese content such as the Jiefangjun Bao, demographic, bibliographic, and statistical resources, as well as leading scholarly journals from the Russian Academy of Sciences and other preeminent publishers in the humanities, sciences, and medical fields. The resources of East View, now discoverable within Summon, include English-language publications, as well as content in Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, and an expanding variety of local languages.

The Summon service is built specifically to revolutionise libraries, enabling them to meet the expectations of net-gen users who find library searching complicated.

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US-based software vendor Microsoft Corporation and Internet search services provider Yahoo! Inc. have announced that they have received clearance for their search agreement without restrictions. The clearance has been granted by both the US Department of Justice and the European Commission. The two firms will now turn their attention to beginning the process of implementing the deal.

Implementation will involve transitioning Yahoo!’s algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo! becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally. Once the transition is completed, the companies’ unified search marketplace is expected to deliver improved innovation for consumers; better volume and efficiency for advertisers; and better monetisation opportunities for web publishers through a platform that contains a larger pool of search queries.

Under the terms of the agreement, which was announced in late July 2009, Microsoft will provide Yahoo! with the same search result listings available through Bing. Yahoo! will innovate around those listings by integrating Yahoo! content, enhanced listings with conveniently organised information about key topics, and tools to tailor the experience for Yahoo! users.

Yahoo! will reportedly focus on providing a compelling and innovative search experience that allows people to find and explore the things, people and sites that matter most to them. While Microsoft will provide the underlying platform, both companies will continue to create different experiences, competing for audience, engagement and clicks.

Yahoo! and Microsoft will work with advertisers, publishers and developers on a customised plan designed to make the transition as efficient and seamless as possible. Both companies will begin working closely with most partners well in advance of their planned transition to the Microsoft platform. They will also communicate important information to partners about the transition periodically via phone, email, webinars and a newly created website at www.searchalliance.com.

The companies will begin the transition of algorithmic search and have set a goal of completing that effort in at least the US by the end of 2010. They also hope to make significant progress transitioning US advertisers and publishers prior to the 2010 holiday season, but may wait until 2011 if they determine that the transition will be more effective after the holiday season. All global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.

Although the transaction previously was cleared by regulators in Australia, Brazil and Canada, the terms of the agreement required clearance by US and European regulators before it could commence. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Yahoo! continue to work with regulators in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan to ensure that they have all relevant information necessary to evaluate the transaction before the deal commences in those specific jurisdictions.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced a partnership with information services company Baker & Taylor, Inc., US. The new partnership will make rich book and multimedia data from Baker & Taylor available as part of EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS).

EBSCO’s discovery solution is designed to provide a single entry point and fast access to a library’s entire collection - including local loading of the OPAC. The service seeks to create a unified, customised index of an institution’s information resources and provides access via a single search box. Metadata is harvested from both internal (library) and external (vendors) sources, creating a pre-indexed service of significant size and speed.

EBSCO Discovery Service conducts real-time availability checks, so that patrons have up-to-the-minute status and availability of catalogue items. Customers who wish to further enhance applicable records within the EDS experience can elect to include additional data from Baker & Taylor, including subject descriptors, professionally-written summaries, book excerpts (first chapters), author biographies, awards information, review citations, additional bibliographies, options for a results limiting to include Baker & Taylor data and ability to include patron-driven wish lists/purchase options (if desired by library)

EDS is part of EBSCO’s Complete Discovery Solution combining the core discovery layer/index with the federated search capabilities of EBSCOhost Integrated Search and the familiar, powerful EBSCOhost search experience. The content partnership with Baker & Taylor is the latest addition to the growing service. Baker & Taylor joins NewsBank, Readex, LexisNexis, Alexander Street Press and many others who have partnered with EBSCO for the service.

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Biomedical search engine Quertle has expanded the content covered by its innovative, free website, www.quertle.info, for searching the biomedical, life science, and chemical literature. With this release, Quertle adds full-text scientific whitepapers and research posters to the PubMed and full-text journals already in place.

In addition, through a partnership with FierceMarkets - the publisher of FierceBiotech, FiercePharma, and FierceBiotech Research - Quertle has incorporated current news articles to enable researchers to find announcements of critical discoveries and industry activities in advance of published results. FierceMarkets provides information and marketing services in the Telecommunications, Life Sciences, Healthcare, IT, and Finance industries through its portfolio of e-mail newsletters, Web sites, webinars, and live events. The company’s wide array of publications reaches more than 800,000 executives in over 100 countries.

Quertle uses advanced linguistic methods to find critical assertions within the literature, thereby focusing search results on the most meaningful documents. This relationship-driven searching, coupled with an easy to use interface - including filtering by automatically extracted key concepts- has made Quertle an important tool for biomedical researchers.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, celebrated the first anniversary of its Summon web-scale discovery service market launch by announcing the latest in a series of new features being added over recent months. New local language interfaces now support Japanese, Chinese and Western European languages and are expected to fuel further international growth. Also, users will get even more research help in their results set with database recommendations and ‘cited by’ counts from ISI Web of Science.

The Summon service captured the library market’s attention when it announced that it could create a simple entry to the breadth of a library’s collection. Integrating all formats – including e-resources at the article level – in a single search box, the service creates a search experience with the familiarity of those found on the Open Web. Now in use at dozens of universities across three continents, the Summon service continues to be the only available web-scale discovery service, according to the company. Built from the ground-up and based on extensive end-user research, the service’s every element was designed to bring students and faculty back to the library as the starting point for research, rather than the Open Web.

At the core of the Summon service is a mega-index that pre-harvests content in a rapid, multi-threaded ingest process. Launched with key partners ProQuest, Gale and 40 other publishers, the service’s content providers list now exceeds 6,000 and includes Ingram Digital, LexisNexis, IngentaConnect, ThomsonReuters, ABC-CLIO, Springer, Taylor& Francis, MLA, SAGE and thousands of others. Half a billion records have been indexed from nearly 100,000 journals.

The Summon service’s comprehensive coverage has been a key consideration for libraries evaluating the service. Grand Valley State University, the first Summon site to go live – compared the Summon list of covered titles with actual usage of the library’s subscribed content. Results revealed an average of more than 99 percent coverage.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced the release of ERM Essentials, an electronic resource management (ERM) solution that seeks to help libraries manage e-resources.

According to the company, the system features auto-population of holdings and data, making a highly effective ERM solution. The Digital Library Federation’s Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) has reportedly influenced the development of ERM Essentials. However, EBSCO has stated that its role as part of the “e� supply chain would allow ERM Essentials to go beyond the offerings of other ERM systems.

EBSCO claims to provide all the features one would expect from a comprehensive ERM system in a single, centralised source where data is readily available for complete e-collections management. This includes key services like simple searching and browsing of the library’s e-collection and orders, workflow management via reminders and tasks, management of trials and renewals, and the ability to gather data for analysing and evaluating holdings.

According to the company, ERM Essentials differs from other ERM systems due to its integration with EBSCO’s subscription management tools and services. The combination is projected to result in a powerful e-resource solution for libraries. ERM Essentials can automatically update holdings and coverage for a library’s e-resources plus auto-populate approximately 100 data elements pertaining to a library’s e-journals and e-packages. This in turn is expected to simplify the management of licence details, access information and other order-specific information.

ERM Essentials is designed to work directly ‘out of the box’ with very little start-up effort. It is claimed to offer true integration, sharing the EBSCO Integrated Knowledge Base with EBSCONET, EBSCO A-to-Z, LinkSource, EBSCOhost Integrated Search (EHIS) and EBSCOhost databases with SmartLinks linking technology. Resources that are purchased through EBSCO are automatically updated in the EBSCO Integrated Knowledge Base, which means multiple systems are updated once, saving time and resources on the library end.

The new product is expected to evolve with libraries’ evolving needs for e-resource management. A usage consolidation module is in development and additional releases to ERM Essentials are planned for enhanced workflow management and consortia management.

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Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced the launch of Primo Central for beta testing at 14 partner institutions. When searching in their institution’s Primo interface, users in partner libraries will have seamless access to the Primo Central mega-aggregate of scholarly e-content.

Primo Central is a centralised index consisting of data harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators. With Primo Central, users simultaneously search locally managed collections and global e-content and receive search results that are blended into a single relevance-ranked list. Libraries can tailor the relevance ranking to ensure appropriate emphasis on their local collections. Ex Libris provides Primo Central as a service, in a cloud computing environment.

With Primo, libraries can choose to independently harvest licensed resources and add the harvested data to their local Primo index. The product relieves libraries of this task. The power of Primo Central, with its millions of scholarly resources, is available to all Primo users.

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Enterprise software vendor RSuite, US, has announced that CQ Press, a division of academic publisher SAGE, has successfully implemented RSuite to manage the latter’s complex staff directories content.

Over the years, CQ Press has added new content to its directories products, acquired other directory publications, and identified the need to shift from a product-based to a topic-based editorial and publishing format. RSuite was selected to manage CQ Press’ XML and related assets and become the company’s single repository for all directory content. Initial testing began with three titles in February 2009. At present, additional titles and 18 users (internal and external) interact with the system and the content feeds CQ Press’ web and many online products.

RSuite is a browser-based content management system that facilitates the creation, management, re-use, and distribution of XML, media files, and other document formats (Word, PDF, InDesign, etc). Powered by MarkLogic Server, it provides native support for XML content storage services, full text search in combination with XQuery, a full suite of editorial capabilities for XML and other content formats, content re-use at many levels, and editorial workflow tools.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced the release of EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS). The service seeks to create a unified, customised index of an institution’s information resources and provides access via a single search box. Metadata is harvested from both internal (library) and external (vendors) sources, creating a pre-indexed service of significant size and speed.

EDS is indexed directly on EBSCO servers in a bid to allow for fast search response times. This is projected to offer researchers a single interface for the discovery of a library’s entire collection and features that heighten the research experience.

EDS seeks to provide deep indexing as well as access to all of the library’s full-text content (both electronic and print resources)—an integrated one-stop search experience for a library’s journals, magazines, books, special collections and OPAC.

In addition to a comprehensive and robust collection of metadata from various content sources, EDS is also claimed to provide full indexing from EBSCOhost database subscriptions, as well as many non-EBSCOhost partners. These include NewsBank, Readex, LexisNexis and Alexander Street Press. Superior relationships and licences with academic publishers are seen to make EDS a key service for searching the complete full text of journal articles and other sources. Nearly every major academic publisher is included in EDS, according to EBSCO.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has enhanced the 360 services to improve e-resource access and management at medical libraries. Users can now browse and find resources using the 2009 Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) through the 360 Core E-Journal portal.

This enhancement supplements recent medical-focused features. In 2009, Serials Solutions added 1.2 million National Library of Medicine eBook MARC records and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) data to KnowledgeWorks. Also, it integrated the PubMed LinkOut service with the 360 Link OpenURLlink resolver.

In 2010 Serials Solutions plans to update the current MeSH vocabulary in KnowledgeWorks with 2010 descriptor data and to enhance the Serials Solutions 360 management tools for MeSH data.

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Print and digital information services provider Cengage Learning, US, has announced that it was named to EContent magazine's list of 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry. Companies named to the EContent 100 List are chosen for their continued leadership in the content industry and their forward-looking solutions in the digital space.

Cengage Learning was selected for the fee-based information services provided by Gale, a leader in authoritative reference content and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses, and part of Cengage Learning. Gale offers next generation of research and discovery tools to users, with a new class of products that are Web-like, interactive and user-friendly.

Gale has over 600 subscription-based resources available to customers. Key recent product launches include Career Transitions; Grzimek's Animal Life, a media-rich, knowledge portal including more than 4,000 species and continuous updates; GREENR(Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources); and Global Issues in Context, an intuitive interface providing global news and perspectives on issues and events of international importance.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced the launch of the new and improved 360 Search federated search service. The new service combines the best features of the Serials Solutions 360 Search and WebFeat platforms with new and improved capabilities that give users the power to control their search and librarians the power to deliver the best results.

The new 360 Search contains tools that make it easy to search and quickly find the most relevant and useful content. A streamlined administration console enables simplified branding and resource sharing for library groups. The simple search interface unifies results for e-journals, eBooks, and local holdings. It then sorts thousands of results into clusters and facets that make it easy to cut through clutter and find meaningful content.

The new and improved 360 Search includes 360 Core and is managed through the Serials Solutions Client Center, the central location for easy administration of all Serials Solutions 360 services and access-point for the Serials Solutions Support Center and User Community. The service now provides access to over 4,600 databases worldwide through more than 2300 of the most accurate connections available. It also supports localisation in over twenty languages, with the ability for users to change interface language on the fly.

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Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Germany, has announced that the National Academic Library Information System (NALIS) in Bulgaria has chosen a number of Ex Libris solutions to form a unified backbone and gateway to the library’s services. Following a rigorous evaluation process, NALIS selected the Primo discovery and delivery solution, the Aleph integrated library system (ILS), the SFX OpenURL link resolver, the MetaLib gateway and metasearch solution and the DigiTool digital asset management system. Two founding members of the NALIS foundation — the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Sofia University — have been running Aleph for over 10 years.

NALIS chose Primo for its emphasis on the user experience and streamlined access to information. The solution is expected to give NALIS users the combined benefits of a unified interface, a simple yet powerful search capability, and rapid access to resources, which they have come to expect in the era of Google and Web 2.0 technologies. Integrated with the Aleph, DigiTool, MetaLib and SFX solutions, Primo will ensure that users gain seamless access to the diverse collections of NALIS member organisations.

The Ex Libris Group provides automation solutions for academic, national, and research libraries. The company maintains an impressive customer base consisting of thousands of sites in more than 70 countries on six continents. Dedicated to developing creative solutions in close collaboration with its customers, Ex Libris enables academic, national, and research libraries to maximise productivity and efficiency and, at the same time, greatly enhance the user experience. By empowering users to discover and obtain the information they need, libraries ensure their position as the bridge to knowledge.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced new Japanese-language enhancements for the Serials Solutions 360 services. These developments feature improved search results through enabling alternate kanji character matching in Japanese-language title searches; added support for many new databases unique to the Asia-Pacific region; and Japanese-language localisation for the New Serials Solutions 360 Search federated search service.

These enhancements add to a series of 2009 developments within the 360 e-resource access and management services that provide greater support for Japanese libraries. Previous enhancements include language localisation in the 360 Link OpenURL link resolver service and enhanced Japanese language title sorting in 360 Core and the Library Managed Holdings interface.

Subscribers can now customise Japanese-language sorting and alphabetisation options for tracked resources in both patron and client-facing interfaces. Also, they can provide their discovery interfaces in Japanese, facilitate accurate kanji searches and enable access to a large repository of Japanese-language databases.

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The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has announced that funding to the Intute service will cease in its current form from August 1, 2010. JISC and Intute are considering whether limited aspects of the current content could be sustained through different routes perhaps using social networking channels.

JISC regularly reviews the services that it funds, to ensure they deliver value for money, quality products and to test their sustainability for the future. A services portfolio review takes place annually and in May 2009 the future funding of JISC services, including Intute, was considered in order to identify the funding priorities for the academic year 2010/11.

Intute started in 1996 as the Resource Discovery Network, an approach at the time to help librarians bring together quality resources online. The service was seen to have pioneered one of the first online searchable catalogues for academic information and virtual training resources. In 2006, Intute launched as a service.

As JISC services reach the end of their existing funding cycle it is always intended, wherever possible, that they move from being fully funded to being part-funded or fully sustained by other sources. In 2007, Intute’s funding was renewed and the service was given five years to establish funding from alternative sources. However, without a clearly identified alternative funding stream the continuation of Intute in its current form is not considered viable beyond July 2010.

The review process involves researchers, academics, information professionals and senior policy makers from across education and research. Through this process the committee members concluded that the current Intute model is too complicated and costly.

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Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced that eight academic institutions have collaborated with the company as partners for the Primo Central index of scholarly materials.

The institutions are the first ones to become partners in this initiative. These include: Brigham Young University (US); Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg—KOBV Consortium: Humboldt University, Free University of Berlin, Mannheim University, and the Technological University, Berlin (Germany); Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium); Michiana Academic Library Consortium institutions: University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary's College, Holy Cross College and Bethel College (US); Oxford University (UK); University of New South Wales (Australia); Vanderbilt University (US); and Yonsei University (South Korea). These partner libraries will start using the Primo Central service following the beta release at the end of December 2009. The general release is targeted for mid-2010.

More than 250 academic and research institutions in 28 countries are already using the Primo discovery and delivery solution, installed locally or managed by Ex Libris as a service. Primo Central, a new component in the Primo search environment, is projected as a centralised index comprising data harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators. By incorporating the Primo Central index, a library can expect to offer one search interface and a single, relevance-ranked result list, regardless of the origin of the information — be it local, institutional collections or global collections of electronic journals, e-books and other scholarly materials. Ex Libris provides Primo Central as a service in a cloud environment.

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Symyx Technologies, Inc., a US-based provider of information management systems, and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) have announced the launch of a collaborative partnership designed to enhance the usability and accessibility of public scientific databases. The first joint project links related chemical structures between two information sources, ChemSpider (from RSC) and DiscoveryGate (from Symyx), enabling scientists to quickly retrieve more complete and comprehensive information.

ChemSpider is a free-access chemistry search engine that aggregates and indexes chemical structures and their associated information into a single searchable repository. DiscoveryGate provides online access to chemical sourcing, organic synthesis and reaction planning, metabolism, toxicity and pharmacological information, integrating information based on the occurrence of common chemical structures. Interlinking the two products will enable scientists to browse chemical information on ChemSpider while simultaneously searching synthetic reactions, bioavailability information and up-to-date compound availability information from over 860 suppliers on DiscoveryGate.

Previous collaborations between Symyx and the RSC include the development of the ChemMobi chemistry application, which is projected to have become one of the most popular smart phone applications for chemist and chemistry student.

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Text analytics solutions provider TEMIS, US, has announced the launch of Luxid Content Pipeline, a new content collection module integrated within the latest version of its flagship content discovery solution, Luxid 5.1.

Luxid Content Pipeline is a breakthrough component that broadens the scope of services available in Luxid 5.1. This easy-to-manage platform efficiently collects contents from a full range of information sources and feeds them into Luxid. After annotating content with relevant metadata, Luxid then applies search, discovery and sharing tools to the enriched content and provides users with real-time content analytics and knowledge discovery. This innovation positions Luxid at the heart of the organisation, relevant both for timely updates of on-going discovery processes as well as for situations when current events require immediate action.

Luxid Content Pipeline accesses content by three different methods. Structured Access connects and automates the collection of documents from leading structured content sources such as Dialog, DataStar, ISI Web of KnowledgeSM, Ovid, STN, Questel, EBSCOhost, Factiva, LexisNexis, MicroPatent, Scopus, ScienceDirect, Minesoft, Esp@cenet, PubMed. Web Access tracks corporate websites, blogs and social networks. It then downloads their content with the help of a powerful web crawling tool available to customers ‘As a Service’. Enterprise Content Management Access connects to corporate knowledge repositories such as EMC Documentum, EMC Documentum CenterStage and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. The product also natively supports the integration of UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) collection readers, enabling the connection to these sources using UIMA standard protocol and format conversion.

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Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, US, has announced that it will be showcasing recent enhancements to Ovid Universal Search, its cross-platform search solution, at the ongoing Online Information conference. It also plans to showcase the implementation of a new psychology lexicon based on the American Psychological Association (APA)’s Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms.

Ovid Universal Search seeks to enable users to search all of their institution’s subscribed content, regardless of whether that content is available via OvidSP or other content aggregators. Users can retrieve and manage their OvidSP and non-OvidSP (Universal Search) results within the OvidSP interface. The latest enhancements are designed to improve navigation and customisation of Universal Search results, and enable users to view all retrieved Universal Search records in one consolidated results set; de-duplicate Universal Search results; easily identify duplicates to view their research trail; link to full text from Universal Search results (when available); use Search Aid functionality for Universal Search results; and request additional Universal Search results beyond those already retrieved in the initial set.

Ovid’s new proprietary Psychology lexicon is projected to combine the APA’s Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms with the Natural Language Processing (NLP) feature of OvidSP’s Basic Search. NLP’s term expansion functionality broadens a user’s search query when searching the APA databases of PsycINFO, PsycCRITIQUES, PsycBOOKS, PsycARTICLES and PsycEXTRA to include related terms and synonyms, in a bid to deliver a comprehensive set of results.

Attendees are invited to attend 15-minute presentations in Ovid’s Booth (#512) on Ovid Universal Search and the new Psychology lexicon. A third in-booth presentation updating attendees on Nursing@Ovid, the company’s nursing and allied health portal, is also scheduled. Ovid representatives will also be on hand to discuss the latest content acquisitions, including e-books from the Royal Society of Chemistry, Oxford University Press, and Ovid’s sister company Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, as well as journals from CIG Media, AHC Media and Springer Publishing.

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Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, US, has announced an agreement with Neural Regeneration Research (NRR), an English-language monthly medical journal, published in China. The agreement is part of Ovid’s ongoing efforts to strengthen its presence in China’s healthcare information market.

NRR is published by the publishing house of Neural Regeneration Research and China Science Press. The journal is sponsored by the Chinese Rehabilitation Medical Association and supervised by China’s Ministry of Health. Under the new deal, NRR will be available exclusively on OvidSP, via the OvidSP electronic search and discovery platform, to all Ovid customers globally.

Neural Regeneration Research (NRR) publishes original research and developments in the field of neuroregeneration, with contributions from experts in neuroanatomy, pathology, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, immunology and auxanology. Topics include the influences of neural stem cells, neuroengineering, neurodegeneration and traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture intervention. The journal focusses on publishing meta-analysis articles with Chinese characteristics; evidence-based case clinical research articles; analysis of gene polymorphism related to region, nationality, and demography; review articles regarding new technology and new therapy; multi-center, large-sample, randomised, and controlled articles and reports; and more.

NRR will be accessible on OvidSP’s Journals@Ovid portal, which offers quick, easy access to about 1,200 premium and largely peer-reviewed journals in medicine and science—virtually none of which are embargoed. Users can search full-text articles via Journals@Ovid simultaneously with other e-resources for a streamlined, comprehensive search experience.

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E-resource access and management solutions provider TDNet, Inc., US, recently launched the TDNet Database Manager, providing tools for accessing and managing electronic databases and collections. The Database Manager is projected as a complementary module to the Journal Manager and eBook Manager. Users can search and access databases and electronic collections as standalone content, or they can combine searches with available e-books and journals, including free resources and local repositories.

The Database Manager features a customisable interface that offers A-Z listings of electronic collections and databases. In addition to title searching and browsing, users can search by subject headings as determined by the library.

Additionally, TDNet has also announced forthcoming enhancements to its eBook Manager. The tool currently contains content from various publishers and aggregators. Free e-books are also represented in the eBook Manager knowledgebase.

As a standalone service, the eBook Manager features a customisable A to Z interface that allows users to search and access e-book holdings. When integrated with TDNet’s Journal and Database Managers, users can perform simultaneous searches for journals, e-books and databases. Also, users can resolve book citations and link to full-text content at the book, chapter or page level, when available, using TDNet’s OpenURL link resolver service. The TDNet eBook Manager supports various searching options and users can perform rapid searches for specific e-book content using book title, ISBN, volume, issue, edition, year, book author, editor, publisher or vendor.

Forthcoming enhancements to the eBook Manager include usage statistics, overlap and COUNTER reports, online holdings updates, interface customisation, proxy setup, general notes and information about print access. Acquisitions and licence management for e-books will also be available shortly.

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Publishing-specific software solutions provider Publishing Technology plc, UK, has announced the latest release of its flagship research platform, IngentaConnect. The release integrates a number of site enhancements to improve user experience and offer greater discoverability of its content.

IngentaConnect users can now benefit from improved content discoverability through the Summon service, driving user traffic to IngentaConnect via a trusted partner for access to reliable and credible content with increased efficiency. The release also marks the introduction of WorldPay e-commerce, enabling wider methods of payment, including PayPal. IngentaConnect now has improved and expanded social bookmarking, to allow its users to bookmark content and recommend and share articles with peers even more easily. With 14 popular social bookmarking sites supporting the site, IngentaConnect is now able to offer even greater social networking flexibility to its 4.5 million unique visitors every month.

Earlier this year, Publishing Technology announced the integration of Rightsconnect licensing functionality with the scholarly hosting platform, working in conjunction with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). Publishers with Rightsconnect licensing on their content can offer their users instant permission to license and reuse their content right where they view it. Rightsconnect will be implemented on content from a broad number of publishers by the end of the year. Rightslink, a further enhanced and advanced version of the software, is also now available.

Publishing Technology has also announced that five new clients have selected its online publishing package. Content from Firenze University Press, Warburg Institute, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, the American Association for Respiratory Care and City University of New York all now feature on IngentaConnect.

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Software vendor Microsoft Corporation, US, has reportedly held talks with media group News Corp. for a possible agreement. The deal would involve paying the latter to remove its news content from Internet search engine Google. News Corp, which owns newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and The Sun, initiated the discussion, which is reportedly at an early stage.

Such an arrangement could set off a fierce debate over the future of online content. A deal on a large scale can create new set of difficulties for users to navigate, and would represent a huge risk for News Corporation or any other news site. According to ComScore, a digital marketing intelligence platform, more than 65 percent of all search queries in the US are made on Google, while Bing handles only 9.9 percent of domestic searches. Removing links from Google would thereby lead to a drastic drop in traffic.

Rupert Murdoch, Chief Executive of News Corp, has been considering charging for access to online content. Other publishers including The New York Times are also looking for ways to charge for news online.

Microsoft, which relaunched its search engine as Bing earlier this year, has been scouting for ways to challenge market leader Google. According to media reports, the company has also approached other big online publishers to convince them to remove their sites from Google's search engine.

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EU-funded researchers have developed an integrated platform for the Internet by combining advanced semantic search technologies and the required tools. The MESH (Multimedia semantic syndication for enhanced news services) project received €7.4 million in grant under the Information Society Technologies (IST) Thematic area of the Sixth Framework Programme.

According to MESH partners, searching fuels activity on the Internet and reduces the confusion that people feel when surfing the web. They have established a working platform for a semantic search that generates results based on content and context of film and audio files, and text.

Existing search engines provide answers for individual keywords introduced. MESH is claimed to be unique in that it initially evaluates the query and then provides results for the actual meaning of the query. MESH partner Deutsche Welle of Germany has also developed 'Full Story', a dossier-developing tool that supports editors in linking to audio, video and text that are related to specific topics.

The results obtained in the MESH project could also benefit user-generated content in the short-to-medium term. Experts say user-generated content plays a central role in Web 2.0 applications, which is the material used for networking sites including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Participating in MESH are 12 partners from seven EU member states including Greece, Cyprus, the Netherlands and the UK.

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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), US, has announced the launch of its first mobile version of the IEEE Xplore digital library. More than two million documents can now be searched via any mobile device with Internet access.

Using IEEE Xplore Mobile Beta, users can conduct basic search, display the top 10 results by relevancy, and view abstracts and citations. To view the full-text of an article, the user can email the link to any email address and, if they are a subscriber, view the article directly from the main IEEE Xplore Web site on their personal computer. Non-subscribers can purchase the article or subscribe to the IEEE Xplore digital library.

According to IEEE, IEEE Xplore users conduct an average of 200,000 searches a day, and in 2008 made an average of seven million downloads a month or 230,000 a day – up 60 percent from 2004. The growing popularity of using mobile devices for Internet access was a key motivation driving the development of the mobile version. Another impetus for the mobile search option was the popularity of IEEE content. In recent studies by 1790 Analytics LLC, IEEE journals and conference proceedings received more than 117,000 patent citations — nearly 3.5 times the number of citations of any other publisher.

Two million engineers, scientists, students and other technology professionals worldwide have access to IEEE’s 144 journals, transactions, and magazines through individual and institutional subscriptions. In 2008, a record number of authors contributed 171,000 articles – 82 percent more than in 2004. There are also more than 4,300 customer sites, worldwide, accessing IEEE electronic subscription packages.

IEEE is inviting users to send their feedback on this new Beta service. Other enhancements will debut in 2010 based on feedback from Beta users.

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The HathiTrust Digital Library, a partnership among some of the US's largest academic research libraries, has announced a service that is expected to transform how researchers use the more than 1.6 billion pages (4.6 million volumes) in its collections.

The service allows for full-text searching capabilities across the entire library. Researchers can now search public domain and in-copyright works by keyword or phrase. Based on open source Solr/Lucene technology, the service expands on an experimental search of public domain volumes, introduced in November 2008. Full-text search will continue to be supported across the repository as it grows at a rate of hundreds of thousands of volumes every month.

In combination with the HathiTrust Digital Library's carefully curated bibliographic data, the new functionality allows researchers to more efficiently locate items relevant to their research. It also lays the foundation for future services such as full-text search with faceted browsing, advanced search, ‘more like this’ options, and tools that can be used in computational research.

HathiTrust (http://www.hathitrust.org) is a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the University of California system, and the University of Virginia. It currently includes digitised volumes from the University of Michigan, University of California, Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin. The HathiTrust partners seek to develop the repository and its services to meet the long-term needs of their academic communities, and offer a unique resource on the Web for scholarship and research.

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Cornell University's arXiv project, which includes an e-print archive of scientific papers, is looking to covert the existing simple database to a more interactive one. It is being projected as a place where authors, articles, databases and readers talk to each other to help users identify a work's main concepts, see research reports in context and easily find related work. The project is funded by a three-year $883,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, with federal stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

The arXiv currently contains close to 600,000 papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics, with some 5,000 new papers submitted each month. Researchers submit their work as ‘preprints’ before formal publication. New tools will link papers by concepts, not just by the citations they contain. This is expected to help users without advanced expertise including some outside the scientific community - understand the significance of new research. The system will also identify related databases and commentaries.

Computers usually search documents by looking for specific words or phrases, but concepts are not always described with the same exact words, and some words mean different things in different places. New algorithms will use a ‘fuzzier’ approach, inferring concepts by the ways terms are used, and will track related documents over a five- or 10-year time scale. Users will therefore be able to see the ‘genealogy’ of ideas. New documents will be linked to such data as definitions and rules for reasoning about it, which enables machines to infer relationships.

Other enhancements will provide interoperability with such research sites as PubMedCentral and provisions to allow scientists to contribute in newer, more flexible text formats.

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Technology search service provider TechXtra, UK, has launched a new service, TechJournalContents. The service allows users to search across the current issues of more than 4,500 scholarly technology journals from multiple publishers, in order to find the latest research articles.

TechJournalContents is expected to be of interest to researchers and others who want to keep up-to-date. A number of the journals searched are freely available on Open Access. For others, access to the full text of search results will depend on institutional or personal subscriptions. The service ingests Tables of Contents RSS feeds provided by numerous journal publishers such as Springer, Emerald, Inderscience, Wiley Interscience, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, IEEE, Sage, AIP, IMechE and more. It then uses the journalTOCs API, produced by the journalTOCs Project, to deliver results to the TechJournalContents service.

An initiative of the Institute for Computer Based Learning (ICBL) and the library at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, TechXtra is an independent service and free source of information in engineering, mathematics, and computing. The service cross-searches 31 different collections relevant to engineering, mathematics and computing, including content from over 50 publishers and providers.

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Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced a partnership with Quertle LLC to add over 60,000 published articles into the latest version of Quertle’s online biomedical search tool. Quertle is projected as a query site for more effective searching of scientific literature. Its semantic search approach is claimed to help researchers find the most relevant documents.

According to Quertle, its search tool goes beyond simple term matching to identify the most salient information in the literature. Using a combination of linguistic methods, Quertle seeks to find facts defined within documents, creating its own database of nearly 200 million relationships, and is able to report the ones that are relevant to the user’s query.

Quertle's approach is stated to be based on a thorough understanding of biology and chemistry, and built from the ground up to address the needs of researchers who depend upon this technical literature.

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Social publishing company Scribd, US, has announced an agreement with academic dissertations and theses publisher ProQuest to make selected graduate dissertations and theses available for purchase on Scribd (www.scribd.com/ProQuestUMI). The agreement will provide Scribd readers access to tens of thousands of original research and papers from leading academic institutions.

ProQuest UMI has over 2 million doctoral dissertations and master's theses in its library with more than 700 active university partners and over 70,000 new graduate works published each year.

Scribd seeks to make written works available for people to read and interact with, any time and on any device. Its document reader technology enables anyone to easily upload their files - including PDF, Word, PowerPoint and other document types - and share on Scribd.com or embed on thousands of other websites. Research organisations already publishing on Scribd include the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Harvard University Press, Institute for Public Policy Research (UK), The MIT Press, World Bank and World Economic Forum.

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Life sciences software provider CambridgeSoft Corporation, US, has announced that it has completed a private equity investment by Health Evolution Partners and a follow-on investment by Goldman Sachs. In connection with the investment, Adam Grossman will represent Health Evolution Partners on the CambridgeSoft Board of Directors. Raheel Zia, vice president of Goldman Sachs, will continue serving on the Board, based upon Goldman Sachs’ original investment in 2008.

CambridgeSoft noted that its software as a service (SaaS) cloud computing offerings have continued to gain broad customer acceptance, beyond their initial launch almost five years ago. Users of CambridgeSoft’s ChemBioOffice Cloud benefit by joining a growing community of customers who share infrastructure and IT costs, resulting in lower management overhead, little up-front investment and immediate access to the full range of the latest, scientist-tested ChemBioOffice Enterprise applications.

CambridgeSoft is a supplier of discovery, collaboration, and knowledge management research IT enterprise solutions, desktop software, scientific databases and consulting services for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and chemical industries. Its integrated product suite seeks to improve the productivity of researchers in the discovery, development and commercialisation of chemical and biological compounds. Products include Cloud, Enterprise, Workgroup and Desktop versions of Chem & Bio Office, including Chem & Bio Draw and E-Notebook, providing knowledge management, chemical and biological informatics, and scientific database solutions.

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E-resource access and management solutions provider TDNet Ltd., US, recently announced a new ‘discovery to delivery’ platform for corporate libraries and information centres. The TDOne TDNet platform is projected to integrate access to all of the internal and external information resources available across the enterprise using TDNet's search and browse technology.

Incorporated directly onto the organisation's Internet homepage or web portal, the search solution seeks to allow end users worldwide to easily discover and access content from their local library, information repositories, external e-resources, journal and book collections.

TDNet offers a full suite of customised e-resource library search management and access options to maximise the growing investment in electronic and other information resources while containing staff and administrative costs.

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STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced that research tool ‘Reflect’, winner of Elsevier’s Grand Challenge 2009, will be piloted on the research articles in the November 12th issue of journal Cell. The Cell-Reflect pilot is the next step in Elsevier’s ongoing Content Innovation effort with the scientific community to determine how a scientific article is best presented online. This follows Elsevier’s recent launch of an initial ‘Article of the Future’ prototype with Cell, where the traditional linear journal article is displayed in a much more useful format for life scientists.

Developed and maintained at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany, and at the NNF Center for Protein Research, Copenhagen, Denmark, Reflect is a free service that can tag scientific terms in any web-page without affecting document layout. The tool is fast and easy-to-use. End-users can install Reflect as a plug-in for Firefox or Internet Explorer; publishers and content providers can access Reflect programmatically to create tagged versions of their content. The tool identifies the proteins, genes and small molecules mentioned in the Cell articles, and generates pop-up windows containing relevant contextual information, with additional links, about those entities.

Inside an article, ‘Reflect’ tags and colours gene, protein, or small molecule names on any web page, usually within seconds, without affecting the article itself or its web page layout. Clicking on a tagged or coloured item opens a popup, showing a concise summary of contextually important features, such as sequence (for proteins) or 2D structure (for small molecules).

The Cell-Reflect pilot can be viewed at http://beta.cell.com/index.php/2009/11/reflect/. Elsevier and Cell Press are inviting feedback from the scientific community on the concept and implementation. User feedback will be collected through user interviews and a survey on the Cell web site. The nature of this feedback will ultimately determine whether and when ‘Reflect’ will be rolled-out across Elsevier’s portfolio of life sciences journals on cell.com and ScienceDirect.

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Symyx Technologies, Inc., a US-based provider of information management systems, has announced the release of the Symyx Direct 6.3 chemistry data cartridge. The product is projected to feature new capabilities in the handling of non-specific Markush chemical structures. Symyx Direct enables researchers to register, search and retrieve molecular structures and reactions stored in Oracle relational databases. Claimed to be used by more than 80 percent of life sciences organisations worldwide, the cartridge offers performance with databases containing over 17 million reactions and over 30 million structures.

The new Markush functionality in Symyx Direct seeks to support combinatorial library design and patent claim analysis in drug discovery by greatly expanding the techniques available for managing and exploring large numbers of related chemical substructures. A Markush structure represents a large number of compounds as a single, generic entry by identifying a core structure and listing all possible variants or substitutes using Rgroup notations and substituent lists. Markush structures make it possible to generate and index all possible permutations of a specific chemical entity without creating an unmanageable information repository.

The Symyx Direct chemistry cartridge is positioned as a central component of the chemistry engine underlying Symyx Notebook, Symyx Isentris and related scientific workflow applications including Symyx Registration software. It supports Rgroup, Sgroup, flexmatch, 2-D and 3-D exact and molecule substructure searching; structure similarity searching; reaction similarity searching; searching of tetrahedral stereoisomers and non-tetrahedral stereoisomers; storage and retrieval of sequences including peptides, oligonucleotides and oligosaccharides—and now Markush structure storage, searching and retrieval.

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India is in talks with the US and various other countries to grant access to its database of Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), media reports have indicated. The aim is to curb bio-piracy – the granting of ‘wrong’ patents – of Indian medicinal plants across the world. In February 2009, India had opened up TKDL to the European Patent Office (EPO) so that existing indigenous knowledge is not patented elsewhere.

Negotiations with the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) are in the final stages. Other nations including China and Japan are also holding talks, the reports state quoting sources in the National Institute of Science Communication and Informative Resources (NISCAIR).

It has been observed that the setting up of the TKDL has effectively curbed the grant of wrong patents. A 2000 study by the TKDL task force had found that nearly 4,896 patent references were made on medicinal plants at a global level. This number had shot up to 15,000 in 2003 and more than 35,000 in 2005. India successfully fought wrong patents granted on turmeric and basmati rice by the PTO as well as on neem by the EPO. However, as this was found to be time-consuming and expensive, the TKDL was created.

TDKL, a joint venture between NISCAIR and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, covers prior art for about 204,000 formulations, and these are further transcribed in five international languages. The database covers about 54 textbooks on Ayurvedic medicine and around 150,000 Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha formulations. Over 1,500 physical exercises and yoga postures – nearly 5,000 years old – are also covered.

Various other nations are also compiling similar databases and sharing them to prevent bio-piracy. Last year, China allowed the EPO access to its database on traditional medicine which contains nearly 32,000 entries.

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The Miami-Dade Public Library System has announced that it has chosen AquaBrowser Library, a discovery tool offering visual, faceted searching that connects to any data source. AquaBrowser is projected to help the library’s members easily and fully explore its vast collection. Existing users of the search tool include over 700 libraries.

AquaBrowser seeks to offer users a familiar web-like experience, with the precision needed for discovery, without any disruption to the library’s backroom and staff activities. Its technology is seen to provide users with an intuitive and attractive interface on top of an existing catalogue. The library internally keeps working the way it always has, but customers get the kind of search and Web 2.0 experience they have come to expect on the Internet, according to the company.

The tool is designed to utilise common search behaviours to deliver immediate results and relevant content from a variety of sources. Its “search, discover, refine� methodology is seen to provide visualisation and faceting features that help users quickly and easily uncover relevant results and inspire them to explore more of a library’s resources.

SerialsSolutions is the exclusive provider of AquaBrowser Library to academic and special libraries in North America. AquaBrowser North America provides the service to public libraries. The tool was developed by Medialab Solutions, a US-based provider of library software. Medialab had announced in July 2009 that, in a single year, more than 400 libraries had chosen AquaBrowser Library. In August, the eiNetwork,a collaboration of the Allegheny County Library Association and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, had announced the adoption of AquaBrowser to provide its 44 member libraries with an independent discovery layer.

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Publishing-specific software solutions provider Publishing Technology plc, UK, has announced the appointment of Anna Lister Cheese (UK) and Martin Borbone (US) to the Client Management Group. Both Cheese and Borbone bring with them a wealth of experience from previous roles in client management and business development.

Cheese joins Publishing Technology from LexisNexis with 15 years industry experience. In her new role, Cheese will assume responsibility for UK Client Management activities within the Scholarly Division. She previously held client relations and business development positions with Swets and the World Advertising Research Center and brings a wealth of supply chain knowledge to her new role.

Publishing Technology has also announced the reappointment of Martin Borbone to the position of Client Manager. Borbone formerly worked for the company out of Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA offices. He will be responsible for handling business and operational relationships between Publishing Technology and a range of prestigious publishers for IngentaConnect and pub2web services. Prior to this, Borbone has worked in various client management and sales positions at Blackwell, Cengage Gale, Thomson Scientific, and Her Majesty's Stationery Office.

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Reed Technology and Information Services Inc., a LexisNexis business, has announced the introduction of LabelDataPlus – a drug label database available on the web for both industry and consumer use. LabelDataPlus offers more than 5,000 current and archived FDA-approved drug labels with search features that seek to unlock the information contained in the labels (package inserts). This data is typically found on the National Library of Medicine’s DailyMed website.

According to the company, for the first time, users can search across a broad range of data using LabelDataPlus to identify drug information that meets one or multiple criteria for both prescription and over-the-counter medications. The ability to identify drug information by multiple criteria is seen to represent an important breakthrough for professionals in the life sciences, pharmaceutical, medical and health information industries, as well as for consumers.

Highlights of LabelDataPlus include the ability to perform full-text searching across all label content, not just by brand or generic drug names; search current and archived versions of drug labels and quickly see results with user search term(s) highlighted; focus searches on specific label sections, such as sponsor, active and inactive ingredients, indications and usage, and contraindications; perform complex searches with the flexibility to use multiple search criteria; and identify a pill based on its physical characteristics.

Reed Technology seeks to provide a broad range of digital asset management services for both commercial and government clients. For pharmaceutical and other life sciences manufacturers, it provides fully validated Structured Product Labeling (SPL) and Product Information Management (PIM) conversions and related content management services. In addition, the company offers downstream manufacturing and marketing publishing composition services directly from the SPL XML. For the US Patent and Trademark Office, Reed Tech processes all patent applications filed each year.

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Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, has announced a new licensing agreement with the Royal Society of Chemistry, a UK-based professional association and publisher of books, journals, and databases in the chemical sciences. Under the deal, Ovid will provide seamless online access to 46 of its ebooks on the OvidSP platform. As a leading aggregator of online scientific information, Ovid works with more than 150 international and society publishers.

All 46 books are the latest editions and have been published between 2006 and 2008. They will be available as annual subscriptions or as one-time purchases for perpetual access on Books@Ovid, OvidSP’s leading ebooks platform. All books are scheduled to be available on OvidSP by the end of October. The inclusion of these titles further strengthens Ovid’s offerings in biological chemistry, drug discovery, toxicology, food science, and energy and environmental science.

Books@Ovid offers a streamlined, efficient ebook search experience for novice and experienced online scholarly searchers. Users can search books simultaneously with their other online resources, and flexible search, results management, and workflow tools make online research fast and easy. With the addition of books from the Royal Society of Chemistry, Books@Ovid now offers access to over 2,500 books from the world’s premium publishers. In addition to the Royal Society of Chemistry, Ovid’s portfolio of ebooks publishing partners now totals ten. Additional partners include Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (Ovid’s sister company within Wolters Kluwer Health), Oxford University Press, Springer Science + Business Media, McGraw-Hill, and Jones & Bartlett.

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Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, has announced that it now offers remote searching of the nature.com platform via nature.com OpenSearch. The new service allows application software to query nature.com, and returns results in a machine-readable format that can be reused and redisplayed.

OpenSearch is projected as the latest example of NPG's drive to improve availability of article metadata on the nature.com platform, maximising usability for the research and information communities. As a demonstration of the new OpenSearch service NPG has developed nature.com search desktop widgets. Available for both Mac and PC, the widgets allow users to search nature.com without visiting the website. Searches are put together and sent by the widget, and results can be browsed with links back to the relevant article on nature.com. The widgets are available for download at Apple Downloads and Yahoo! Widgets Gallery.

Nature.com OpenSearch is claimed to take advantage of public protocols, using the emergent Search and Retrieve via URL (SRU) protocol and supporting the industry-standard OpenSearch conventions for accessing search engines. Federated searching, which enables the search of numerous resources via a single search interface, is now fully supported. Queries can be sent as a simple keyword list or as more complex descriptions, and the results returned in a machine-readable list-based format for easy integration.

NPG has recently made a number of improvements to nature.com infrastructure and services. The OpenSearch service follows the introduction earlier this year of support for the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), making metadata for all articles published on nature.com available via its OAI-PMH service.

The implementation of MarkLogic Server as the XML repository for nature.com is seen to have improved article indexing, making better metadata available for search. Author, title, journal name, DOI and keywords are automatically extracted from articles and indexed in the XML repository.

In December 2008, NPG began marking-up research article PDFs using Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) technology - making article metadata machine-readable. XMP PDFs of research articles are now available in the majority of NPG's journals.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced that US-based digital content services provider Ingram Digital is the latest content player to sign with the Summon web-scale discovery service. The Summon service provides instant searching of library collections – from books and videos to e-resources at the article level, integrated and accessible from a single search box.

With the Summon service, Ingram Digital will provide metadata for all the titles in its MyiLibrary e-Book platform. MyiLibrary is a comprehensive online e-content solution that currently includes more than 185,000 titles, covering all major disciplines, with an additional 5,000 titles being added each month. Ingram Digital is part of a burgeoning movement of publishers and aggregators who are choosing to make their content more discoverable to students and faculty via this service.

The Summon service launched worldwide beta testing in January with key content providers ProQuest and Gale, plus other contributors such as Springer, Taylor& Francis, and SAGE. Since then, the programme has continued to accelerate with major publishing additions such as LexisNexis; Publishing Technology; ThomsonReuters ISI Web of Science; ABC-CLIO; IEEE; Emerald; Scitation publishers; the Royal Society; and more. The service is now available commercially and has been adopted by universities on three continents.

The Summon service is built with all-new technology aimed at addressing a fundamental barrier between libraries and users: the lack of a simple, obvious starting point for library research. This web-scale discovery service overcomes that obstacle, by allowing users to enter a search term in a library-branded search box, triggering an instant single search against its massive content store and the library’s local catalog. It then rapidly delivers relevancy-ranked results in one integrated list.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, and Northern Light, US, have announced a partnership to allow mutual customers directly search and access over 4,000 bio-pharmaceutical, health sciences and general business magazines, journals and other news sources through Northern Light SinglePoint strategic research portals. SinglePoint users who also subscribe to EBSCO’s Biomedical Reference Collection and Business Source Corporate may now opt to have that content integrated with their organisation’s strategic research portal. Northern Light provides strategic research portals for market research, competitive intelligence, business analysis, product development, and technology research.

SinglePoint is an enterprise search application that provides centralised search, analysis, and access for diverse sources of internal, external, and licensed market intelligence. Offered in a secure, hosted, user self-service portal environment, SinglePoint is customised to the precise market research and competitive intelligence purposes of each of Northern Light’s enterprise clients.

Biomedical Reference Collection provides managers and clinical researchers in industries such as bio-pharmaceutical, medical device manufacturing, biogenetics and public health with full-text access to more than 1,000 journals covering disciplines from biomedicine and health sciences to the health care system and pre-clinical sciences. Business Source Corporate is designed to meet the diverse information needs of corporations. The database contains full text from nearly 3,000 quality magazines and journals, including general business periodicals, trade publications and top management journals. In addition, it provides access to periodicals, country economic reports, company profiles, and industry reports. For mutual subscribers, Business Source Corporate pairs nicely with the thousands of business-oriented media sources and industry-authority blogs contained in Northern Light Business News.

Beyond providing a unified search index of all content contained in the portal, SinglePoint also offers an automated ‘meaning extraction’ application designed specifically for market intelligence, business analysis, product research, and market research. It identifies meaning-loaded business concepts in a results list – business issues, strategic scenarios, companies, venture-funded companies, technologies, markets, job titles, government agencies, identified phrases, and research sources – to help researchers quickly identify and drill down into the most relevant documents for purposes of their specific inquiry.

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Medical information provider Wolters Kluwer Health (WK Health), US, has announced that Ovid and Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW) journals, part of its Medical Research business unit, are exhibiting at the ongoing Frankfurt Book Fair. Representatives from Ovid, an aggregator of online information for medical and scientific research, will be announcing a new Chinese-language interface for the OvidSP search and discovery platform. They will also be highlighting Ovid’s new publishing partnerships and recent OvidSP functionality enhancements.

OvidSP’s Chinese-language interface (offered in both traditional and simplified Chinese) is scheduled for deployment later this year. Sample screenshots will be available in the Wolters Kluwer booth. Currently, OvidSP supports interfaces in French, German and Spanish, in addition to English. Attendees can also learn about recent enhancements to OvidSP’s online journal browsing and display functionality. Ovid continues to expand its e-book and journal content offerings with recently announced partnerships with premier publishers, including Oxford University Press, as well as the Royal Society of Chemistry, AHC Media, Springer Publishing and CIG Media.

LWW, an international publisher for healthcare professionals and students, is showcasing its flexible and customisable online journal platform for its society partners. This guide seeks to give readers an informative understanding of the number of complicated financial products in this $531 trillion market. It also looks to guide them through the patchwork of regulation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and contractual standards established by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.

LWW representatives will be on hand to discuss key titles covering a range of medical and nursing specialties, including new journals for 2009. The company will also be featuring its capabilities to help societies innovate and extend their online content strategies through customisable journal websites, which are designed to enrich the journal experience for society members and subscribers.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced a new service that provides added value to libraries and publishers by enhancing and delivering data that can work in multiple contexts and systems. The new service, Metadata Services for Publishers, takes publishers' ONIX title metadata, enriches it using WorldCat mining and mapping techniques, and delivers the enhanced ONIX metadata back to the publishers for use in their systems. The publishers' enhanced metadata is then made available early in the data creation process to libraries for use in selection, acquisition and technical services workflows. Information seekers also benefit from web discovery of this metadata via WorldCat.org, the Web destination for discovery of library resources.

OCLC's Metadata Services for Publishers is the result of a pilot project that explored the viability and efficiency of capturing metadata from publishers and vendors upstream and enhancing that metadata in WorldCat. The pilot followed release of the 2007 ‘Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control’ by the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, formed by the Library of Congress to address changes in how libraries must do their work in the digital information era. The ability to leverage upstream publisher data effectively was central to the Working Group's recommendations.

OCLC enrichment of title metadata saves publishers time and resources by streamlining internal workflows, and reducing in-house intellectual work and manipulation of title metadata. The organisation also provides validation, authentication and standardisation of publisher data for use by various partners (vendors, aggregators, booksellers) to increase the marketability of publisher ONIX title metadata throughout the publisher supply chain. OCLC Contract Cataloging for Publishers is another service that creates MARC records using publishers' electronic title data as a starting point. OCLC offers cataloging solutions for publishers and vendors that need to provide MARC records to libraries.

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Chemical information provider FIZ Chemie, Germany, has announced plans to present its new eBook Guide and its Infotherm thermophysical facts database at the 11th Interlending and Document Supply Conference (ILDS) from October 20 – 22, 2009. On the 50th anniversary of the Hanover Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), the German National Library of Science and Technology, this international library conference will be taking place in the state capital of Lower Saxony.

The new FIZ Chemie eBook Guide provides a full text search of e-publications across different publishers for anyone who is searching for scientific, medical or technical literature. Libraries can integrate the search engine in their library catalogue (OPAC) and set up the software so that users are only shown e-book titles to which the library subscribes or to which the library is licensed by the publisher. The eBook Guide provides immediate evidence of about 10,000 indexed e-books, including the DOI (digital object identifier). Currently the vast majority are Springer eBooks. A contract with the de Gruyter publishing house and ongoing negotiations with numerous other STM publishing houses are expected to guarantee continuous expansion of the data source.

The Infotherm database has been expanded to include various search functions. It is projected to cover about 95 percent of all values relevant for thermophysical processes and procedures which have been published around the world in specialist literature. In its new form, it is expected to save chemical engineers and process engineers from time-consuming, manual searches through endless hit lists. In addition, it also allows open search enquiries for the first time. Searchers are no longer tied to entering the concrete name of a compound.

The open query uses a new filter option by about 500 families of compounds. With this function about four million datasets on about 39,000 substance mixtures and approximately 21,000 pure substances can be explored without any redundancy. Also new is the XML-based IUPAC data exchange format in Infotherm, which guarantees fault-free and complete recording of thermophysical data from e-journals. It is also possible to export all Infotherm data in the IUPAC standard.

The ILDS 2009 is preceded by the free forum ‘Rethinking Resource Sharing in Europe’, which takes place on October 19 at the Bonatz Hall of the Hanover Conference Centre. At this forum, the initiative Resource Sharing will be presenting ideas on how knowledge resources can be made more accessible to the public through libraries. This is sponsored by the OCLC, and library software suppliers BCR and relais international.

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Information solutions provider LexisNexis, US, has announced the availability of transparent semantic search technology for its full range of intellectual property (IP) research products. This is projected to enable users to find precise and relevant patent search results.

Through a development alliance with US-based Pure Discovery, LexisNexis claims to have become the first provider of legal information services to integrate semantic search technology with familiar Boolean search technology. This is expected to give users greater control over the patent research process via a simple, streamlined user interface that matches their typical daily workflow.

Semantic search uses the science of meaning in language (‘semantics’) to produce highly relevant search results. While semantic search engines are not uncommon, most contain limitations - including lack of transparency and user control - which can ultimately undermine the overall value of results. The new semantic search solution from LexisNexis and Pure Discovery, however, expects to overcome such challenges to accomplish four breakthrough objectives in online search – transparency, increased control, fully federated and scalability.

The new technology is now available through the patent research and retrieval service, LexisNexis TotalPatent, and the automated patent application and analysis product, LexisNexis PatentOptimizer. In addition, the functionality is also available through lexis.com, the flagship online legal research service from LexisNexis, for full-text non-patent prior art and other patent-related content.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, and the South West Regional Library Service (SWRLS) have announced a collaboration. The initiative will initially see seven public library authorities in the South West of England using WorldCat Local as their shared end user discovery service in 2010.

Library authorities in Bournemouth, Bath & NE Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset, Somerset, South Gloucestershire and Plymouth are working with OCLC to implement a discovery interface. The interface will enable users to search and place reservations on materials held across the South West region. The service is a replacement for Wisdom, formerly supplied by DS Ltd, now part of the Axiell Group. By adopting this approach, the libraries expect to also raise their profile on the web by becoming visible in WorldCat.org, a web destination for the discovery of library resources.

The libraries, through their participation in UnityUK, are already regularly updating their bibliographic and holdings information, which OCLC then uploads to WorldCat. This facilitated records transfer is seen to have opened up the potential for them to utilise services built on the WorldCat platform, including WorldCat Local. The seven SWRLS libraries will have their own individualised web discovery interface reflecting their libraries’ branding and holdings switched on. Each interface will also present real-time holdings information from the other participating libraries to quicken the time it takes for users to locate items of interest.

The decision by libraries in the South West to adopt WorldCat Local as a shared service comes at a time when public libraries across the country are joining up service provision. In September, the Society of Chief Librarians announced an initiative to allow members of a library to borrow books from any of 4,000 libraries in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. And, as has been widely reported, the UK government is planning a national request service backed up by home delivery in an attempt to reinvigorate the public’s perception of libraries.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has announced improved search and new online features for its flagship publication Research Library Issues: A Bimonthly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC (RLI). A freely available online-only publication, RLI includes articles on the major issues that research libraries face in meeting the academic and research needs of the diverse communities they serve.

Recent issues of RLI are now available on a test basis through Tizra Publisher, a Web-based publishing platform. The system’s features include full-text search; page-at-a-time linking; and compatibility with mobile devices. The software also allows readers to zoom in if text is too small, and download full articles for printing or offline viewing via links available on every page. The new Test Site for Research Library Issues is freely available at http://publications.arl.org.

This service is introduced by ARL as a test to gauge user response and determine if such a platform could be used to distribute other ARL publications. Comments on the new platform should be directed to pubs@arl.org.

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Text analytics solutions provider TEMIS, US, has announced the appointment of two key executives in New York to further expand the Company's US footprint. Guillaume Mazieres has joined the company as Executive Vice President for North America, and Jim Hohman, a respected industry veteran, as Vice President of Sales, based in the New York office.

Founded in 2000, TEMIS is a leading provider of corporate text mining and text analytics software solutions for the enterprise. The company markets Luxid, a collaborative corporate solution for analysing and discovering strategic information.

This Luxid platform gives immediate access to non-obvious information and delivers industry-specific knowledge from internal and external data sources. It brings long-awaited answers to the challenge of information discovery and knowledge extraction from unstructured data which represent 80 percent of all data available in the Enterprise for decision-making processes.

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Information services provider Thomson Reuters, US, has announced a new partnership with GenomeQuest, Inc., a US-based provider of biological sequence search, content and analysis services. Under the deal, Thomson Reuters patent sequence data in GENESEQ will be integrated with the GenomeQuest IP discovery tools.

The product combination seeks to provide intellectual property professionals and scientists with online, interactive access to an up-to-date, comprehensive source of biological sequence information.

GENESEQ is a database from Thomson Reuters containing more than 29 million patented biological sequences, from over 150,000 unique patents across the global patent issuing authorities. In addition to text file FTP access, GENESEQ can be accessed alongside GenomeQuest GQ-Pat, a complementary source of patented sequences, to offer an extensive repository for patent sequence information. This information, delivered through GenomeQuest’s secure internet subscription service, offers users the potential to quickly and accurately discover comprehensive biological sequence information incorporated in patents and make faster and more reliable business decisions.

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STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced the launch of SciVal Funding, a comprehensive funding intelligence solution for US research institutions. The platform helps researchers locate the most appropriate grant opportunities in order to maximise their potential to receive funding.

SciVal Funding is designed to optimise the pre-award stages of the process, leading researchers and research administrators to grants with the greatest potential for success by integrating current funding opportunities with publication information and historical award data. The solution allows users to routinely search over 5,000 grant sources, including federal funding bodies and private foundations. Updated daily, funding opportunities can be explored by subject area, award type, deadline or amount. In addition, by fully cataloguing limited submission programmes, research administrators may set up necessary internal review mechanisms in a timely way.

Moreover, the solution provides customised recommendations and alerts by matching funding opportunity data to pre-populated research profiles that are continuously updated. This eliminates the need to create a summary of each investigator’s body of work and allows users to run searches on their own as well as other researchers’ profiles. These recommendations can also serve as guideposts to junior faculty regarding which funding sources to pursue, particularly as the early grants in a young researcher’s career are critical to building a solid track record.

Another advantage of the solution is the integrated funding award information. The historical data on what grants were awarded to which researcher and at which specific institution, provides vital insight into the funding environment. This intelligence enables researchers to more accurately estimate their award chances, tailor their proposal, find collaborators and ultimately better compete for grants. Research administrators may also use this award information for performance measurement, evaluation and strategic planning purposes.

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The Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, Inc. (SPIE) has announced that SPIE Press Field Guides, handbooks, monographs and tutorial texts are now available in the SPIE Digital Library with the recent beta launch of SPIE eBooks. By year-end 2010 SPIE eBooks will include about 140 titles covering key topics in optics, photonics and imaging.

SPIE eBooks are fully integrated into the SPIE Digital Library, enabling researchers and students to cross-search and access journals, proceedings and books on a single site. Institutions may purchase collections of SPIE eBooks. As with technical articles, eBook chapters are also available for individual purchase. Selected chapters are open-access in order to enable free exploration of the site. New titles will be available online ahead of print.

The SPIE Digital Library is hosted on the American Institute of Physics’ Scitation3 platform. It is claimed to comprise the world's largest resource for optics and photonics research with nearly 285,000 journal and proceedings articles from 1990 to the present. Topics span the broad interdisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging, with applications spanning biomedicine, communications, energy, aerospace, defense, manufacturing, computing, entertainment and electronics.

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NextBio, a US-based provider of life sciences software, has announced that it has closed an $8 million Series C round of financing led by existing investor Newbury Ventures. Various other private investors participated in the round. Nextbio offers a platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover and share knowledge from public and proprietary data.

The company will use the capital to expand sales reach and channels, global operations, and in technology. Since its launch, NextBio's research platform has been adopted for use by researchers at many of the world's top commercial and academic institutions, according to the company. It recently partnered with STM publisher Elsevier to offer NextBio to subscribers of ScienceDirect.

NextBio's platform is claimed to seamlessly combine powerful tools with correlated content to transform information into knowledge, providing the foundation for new scientific discoveries. It is delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, resulting in quick deployment and rapid return on investment.

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Text Analytics solutions provider TEMIS, US, has announced that its Information Intelligence solution Luxid has captured its second major industry award of 2009. KMWorld Magazine, premier publisher of the content, document and knowledge management markets, has designated TEMIS’s flagship software solution Luxid the prestigious award ‘Trend-Setting Product’ of 2009.

The KMWorld award is granted to software and systems innovations that have expanded the reach and effectiveness of information management. KMWorld’s Trend-Setting Products awards began in 2003. This year, more than 800 products were assessed by the judging panel which consists of KMWorld expert editors, analysts, system integrators, vendors themselves, line-of-business managers and end-users.

Luxid is a collaborative corporate solution for analyzing and discovering strategic Information. This scalable platform gives immediate access to non obvious information and delivers industry-specific knowledge from internal and external data sources. It brings long-awaited answers to the challenge of information discovery and knowledge extraction from unstructured data, which represent 80% of all data available in the Enterprise for decision-making processes.

In June, Luxid as awarded with the most innovative Software award at the iExpo/KM Forum 2009 in Paris. This award is organized by GFII (Association for Professionals of the Information Industry) and recognises leading software vendor of the information industry for its innovative capabilities and user interfaces.

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Federated search services provider Deep Web Technologies, US, has announced the appointment of Andy Alsop as Vice President of Business Development. Alsop joins Deep Web Technologies with 20 years of experience in information technology.

In his new position, Alsop will drive the adoption of Deep Web Technologies’ Explorit Research Accelerator through strategic partnerships with companies that want to embrace the power of federated search. Prior to this, he served as CEO of Packet Analytics Corporation, a venture-backed Los Alamos National Laboratory spinout that focused on network forensic search of high-volume network data. His expertise fuses tactical mastery, technological proficiency, operating know-how and an ability to develop strong corporate relationships to help drive the growth of young technology companies.

Deep Web Technologies creates custom, sophisticated federated search solutions for clients who demand precise, accurate results. The tool of choice when needing to access the deep web, federated search performs real-time, parallel searches of multiple information sources, merging the results into one page. Serving Fortune 500 companies, a number of leading federal government organizations, and a variety of other customers and partners, Deep Web Technologies has built a reputation as the ‘researcher’s choice’ for its advanced, agile information discovery tools.

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STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced that it has become one of the Charter Members of the InChI Trust. Originally developed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) is a non-proprietary, international standard to represent chemical structures as an alpha-numeric character string generated by an algorithm.

InChIs are machine readable and therefore allow chemistry and chemical structures to be much more navigable and discoverable. The InChI Trust is a not-for-profit organisation established to develop and improve on the current InChI standard and thereby further enable the interlinking of chemistry and chemical structures on the web.

Recognising that scientists need to navigate through a range of information sources, Elsevier has already implemented InChI Keys within Reaxys, the leading workflow solution for synthetic chemists. The use of InChIs also ties into the broader Elsevier strategy of Content Innovation in which research articles are enriched to provide more depth, value, and context to our users. For the chemistry journals available on ScienceDirect, the incorporation of InChI keys will improve the discoverability and organisation of compounds within the chemistry scientific literature, facilitating and accelerating connectivity to other research tools and content sources.

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The US’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced the availability of funding information for grants and contracts through RePORT Expenditures and Results (RePORTER), a new search system on its Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (RePORT). RePORTER is expected to allow users to locate descriptions and funding details on NIH-funded projects along with research results that cite NIH support. It seeks to combine NIH project databases and funding records, PubMed abstracts, full-text articles from PubMed Central and information from the US Patent and Trademark Office with a robust search engine.

User-defined searches allow the public to refine, export and analyse results and provide insights into NIH spending, as well as research results across NIH-funded projects, institutions, investigators or scientific concepts. Searching for grants funded by the Recovery Act is seen to be made especially easy by a checkbox that limits searches to that area of interest. Plans for improvements in RePORTER include allowing users to personalise their experience. NIH seeks to provide users the ability to save favourite searches, set alerts for new grants, publications and patents, and even export the entire RePORTER database.

RePORTER is the latest tool on the RePORT website, NIH's online repository of reports, data and analyses of research-related funding. RePORT provides data on NIH's research-related grant and contract funding, including general reports and statistics, funding by research, condition and disease categories, and new data visualisation tools. Dynamic reports and geographic mapping tools are claimed to offer unparalleled access to information on NIH's Recovery Act grant funding on an individual project, state or national level.

RePORT is available at RePORT.nih.gov. The project search tool, RePORTER, is available through the RePORT site or by going directly to ProjectRePORTER.nih.gov.

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The Harvard University Library has announced the launch of a University-wide, open-access repository, DASH — Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (http://dash.harvard.edu). More than 350 members of the Harvard research community, including over a third of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have jointly deposited hundreds of scholarly works in DASH.

Visitors to DASH can locate, read, and use some of the most up-to-the minute scholarship that Harvard has to offer. More than 1,500 items can be located in DASH currently, with the number increasing every week. The repository also houses a growing number of retrospective articles and papers. Contributors include Harvard President Drew Faust and University professors Robert Darnton, Peter Galison, Stanley Hoffman, Barry Mazur, Stephen Owen, Amartya Sen, Irwin Shapiro, Helen Vendler, and George Whitesides.

Still a beta, DASH is a joint project of the Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) and the Office for Information Systems (OIS), both of which are strategic programs of the Harvard University Library. DASH is based on the open-source DSpace repository platform. Software customisations will continue throughout the coming academic year. The repository is also intended to serve as a local digital home for a wide and growing array of other scholarly content produced at the University. Non-faculty researchers and students are already afforded deposit privileges, and DASH will eventually have collection spaces for each of the 10 schools at Harvard.

Among the many features the DASH development team has added to its DSpace implementation is the ability to link directly from a faculty author's name in DASH search results to his or her entry in Profiles, a research social networking site developed by Harvard Catalyst. Profiles, which provides a comprehensive view of a researcher's publications and connections within the University research community, currently indexes faculty from the medical and public health schools. Its developers hope to expand it to include the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the near future.

DASH currently supports automated embargo lift dates, so that a work can be deposited "dark" and then automatically switch to open access once a publisher's self-archiving embargo has expired. Another noteworthy feature is DASH's PDF header page: when a user downloads a full-text item, DASH generates a header page for the document, giving its provenance and relevant terms of use.

DASH has its roots in the February 2008 open-access vote in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In a unanimous decision, FAS adopted a policy stating that each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his/her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorise others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.

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NetBase, Inc., a US-based provider of research software solutions that enable knowledge workers to mine the Internet and other online data to accelerate research, has announced the launch of healthBase (healthbase.netbase.com), a semantic search tool. healthBase is projected as a public showcase of the company’s Content Intelligence platform, which can read sentences inside documents, linguistically understand the meaning and power breakthrough search and discovery solutions.

The product uses Content Intelligence technology to automatically find treatments for any health condition or disease; and pros and cons of any treatment, medication and food. Like all NetBase-powered applications, healthBase enables users to get summarised answers and insights automatically from millions of online sources.

The company expects the product to demonstrate its technology by providing simple and comprehensive answers to health questions. Each question takes seconds to answer and is equivalent to someone manually reading thousands of documents. As no manual work is required to build the semantic index, healthBase can search on and find answers to tens of thousands of health conditions, diseases, treatments, medications, supplements, foods and even plants.

NetBase had launched Content Intelligence in April 2009, projecting it as a technology to harness billions of documents, linguistically understand sentences and automatically find answer to questions, not just lists of 'results.' The company had also announced that it had expanded its customer relationship with STM publisher Elsevier for several more years. The agreement was seen to validate NetBase's leadership position in helping large publishers such as Elsevier transform rich content into fully searchable insight applications that easily map to the workflow of today's fast-paced knowledge worker.

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GenomeQuest, Inc., a US-based provider of biological sequence search, content and analysis services, has announced an alliance with scientific software company Biomatters Ltd, New Zealand. The deal is to provide researchers a ‘top-down’ discovery methodology for next generation sequencing (NGS) projects.

Specifically, the companies will integrate Biomatters’ desktop analysis and visualisation software, Geneious Pro v4.8, with GenomeQuest 6.0Beta, an SDM platform which allows research organisations to manage and mine their sequence data across a portfolio of projects as well as the world of reference data. The new integrated product service will allow researchers to perform global mining on their NGS projects to identify areas of interest, complete their local investigations with familiar desktop analysis and visualisation tools, and manage their sequence data throughout the process.

Both companies share a vision for increasing the ease and speed with which researchers will be able to mine, manage and share sequence data, leading to shorter discovery periods and cost-saving efficiencies. The technical launch of the integrated product service is planned for October 2009.

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Information solutions provider Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, US, has announced new licensing agreements with medical publisher Cancer Information Group (CIG) Media and A & C Black, which publishes a diverse set of books in a wide variety of subjects and categories, including scientific reference. As a leading aggregator of online scientific information, Ovid works with more than 150 international and society publishers, offering a wide selection of online books, journals and databases via OvidSP, its leading precision search and discovery platform.

As part of its agreement with CIG Media, 8 journals are scheduled to be available for annual subscription in September. These include Clinical Breast Cancer; Clinical Colorectal Cancer; Clinical Genitourinary Cancer; Clinical Lung Cancer; Clinical Leukemia; Clinical Lymphoma & Myeloma; Clinical Ovarian Cancer; and Supportive Cancer Therapy. CIG Media publishes peer-reviewed, tumor-specific content from key specialists and opinion leaders in various types of cancers and hematology fields.

UK publisher A & C Black has an extensive selection of books, including dictionaries and handbooks for students and researchers. Five of these will be available on OvidSP in September, including Black’s Medical Dictionary, a the bestselling medical dictionary which includes over 5,000 definitions, medical terms and concepts, as well as illustrations; Dictionary of Nursing, with over 11,000 nursing terms; and Black's Veterinary Dictionary, a bestseller for over 70 years; as well as two brand-new titles - The Sports Injuries Handbook and The Complete Guide to Abdominal Training. Ovid’s global customer base can access these titles on Books@Ovid, OvidSP’s ebooks platform, as either an annual subscription or as a one-time purchase, which gives them perpetual access on Books@Ovid.

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Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, US, has announced that it has expanded its Shibboleth compliance for OvidSP, its market-leading search and discovery platform, to include the Japanese Shibboleth Federation. Now, institutions in Japan that are part of that country’s Shibboleth Federation can establish authorisation rights for end users allowing for secure, single sign-on access to important resources on OvidSP.

Currently, Ovid is Shibboleth-compliant with the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research, as well as with federations in France and Germany. Ovid continues to work with other countries to support their authentication needs by establishing Shibboleth compliance.

Content vendors use a variety of authentication mechanisms to manage access to their products. The security vulnerabilities and variety of these mechanisms make it challenging for a library portal to provide uniform and reliable access to the library's electronic subscriptions. Various institutions can join together in a Shibboleth federation, enabling users to get easy single sign-on access to content resources at institutions within the federation.

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Journal subscription services provider EBSCO, US, has announced that its EBSCO A-to-Z (A-to-Z) service now offers enhancements to the Overlap Analysis reporting functionality. The new features are expected to provide librarians with essential tools for comparing coverage overlap in library e-collections.

EBSCO A-to-Z is a web-based tool for organising and providing links to a library’s e-resources with comprehensive reporting for analysis and evaluation of a library’s complete e-collection. The existing version offers multiple reports, including reporting on usage, link-outs and knowledge base changes. It also offers Overlap Analysis reporting that features an at-a-glance evaluation for library collections.

The latest version of Overlap Analysis reporting seeks to eliminate guesswork — library collections can be compared simply and clearly on one page with the option to export directly into Microsoft Excel. The new functionality allows the tool to filter reports by coverage dates to focus the analysis on the all-important current content. It can also easily identify unique and overlapping titles with the simplified summary report format; view ‘Years of Unique Coverage’ on the title-details drill-down report, allowing librarians to see at a glance what titles in which packages offer the most unique coverage; and allow export reporting to Excel quickly and efficiently with one step. Overlap Analysis reporting seeks to provide the complete picture of a library’s e-collection, benefiting librarians who need to make important decisions that affect their library collections.

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The eiNetwork, a collaboration of the Allegheny County Library Association and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, has opted for the AquaBrowser library software, which provides libraries with visual and faceted search solutions.

AquaBrowser will provide eiNetwork’s 44 member libraries — which have holdings of nearly 4 million items — with an independent discovery layer. The Medialab Solutions product seeks to offer users a contemporary web experience without any disruption to the library’s backroom and staff activities. It also seeks to provide technology that empowers users with an intuitive and attractive interface on top of an existing catalogue. The library internally keeps working the way it always has, but customers get the kind of search and Web 2.0 experience they’ve come to expect on the Internet.

Existing users of AquaBrowser include 600 libraries. Other large consortia offering AquaBrowser to their users include Ramapo Catskill Library System (NY), Metropolitan Library Network System (MN), Upper Hudson Library System (NY), Southeastern Libraries Cooperating System (MN), Library Integrated Network Consortium (IL), MARINet (CA) and Prairie Area Library System (IL).

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Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, has announced that Periodicals Archive Online offers three more ways to build a library’s research archive - with the addition of The Spectator to Collection 7, the launch of Collection 8 and the development of five additional years of coverage for journals in Collections 1 to 5. Periodicals Archive Online is a major online journal archive that digitises the backfiles of periodicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences, providing access to the full text of a growing number of titles that have been indexed in its sister database, Periodicals Index Online.

The inclusion of The Spectator in the completed Collection 7 (available from September) makes available exclusively the complete digital backfile, from 1828 to 2000. This weekly publication claims to be the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language and represents an essential resource for researchers, offering a unique record of this period.

Collection 8 targets leading periodicals for inclusion, spanning the arts, humanities and social sciences. The choice of journals is based on their scholarly importance and is informed by recommendations from an international selection of librarians. Journals nominated by publishers and users are also considered. Among the titles in the first release of this collection are: Essays in Arts and Sciences, International Journal on World Peace, Psychiatry and Science and Society.

Developed in response to customer demand, Collection Extensions offer additional years of content, from 1996 to 2000, for journals in Collections 1-5. Collection Extensions 1 and 2 are now available, with Extensions 3-5 to follow in 2010. As well as providing valuable extra content for key publications, the Collection Extensions will extend the coverage of many journals to the point at which coverage often commences in current file services, offering institutions seamless electronic access to numerous complete journal runs.

Over 550 journals are featured in Periodicals Archive Online, representing more than 14 million pages and almost 200 years of scholarship. Libraries receive perpetual rights to content when they purchase PAO collections.

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The US’ National Library of Medicine has announced the introduction of Rapid Research Notes (RRN). Developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of NLM, RRN will be used to archive research made available through online venues for rapid scientific communication. The RRN archive (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/rrn) allows users to access research that is provided through participating publisher programmes designed for immediate communication.

According to NCBI, creating such an archive has been discussed often by its public advisors, but the recent outbreak of H1N1 influenza provided an increased impetus for the project.

Responding to the call for a means to quickly share research information about H1N1, the Public Library of Science developed PLoS Currents: Influenza, an open-access, online resource for immediate communication and discussion of new scientific data, analyses, and ideas in the area of influenza. In order to make research available as soon as possible, submissions are not peer reviewed in depth, but are screened by a group of leading researchers in the field who decide whether a contribution is suitable. Those judged suitable are immediately posted to the PLoS Currents: Influenza Web site and archived at RRN with a stable ID.

PLoS Currents: Influenza is the first collection to be archived in RRN. NCBI expects the RRN archive to expand over time to include additional collections in other high-interest biomedical fields.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced that less than a month into its official launch, the Summon web-scale discovery service has adoptions at universities on three continents. The University of Huddersfield in the UK and University of South Australia are the first commercial adoptions in Europe and Australia. Among the variety of American universities embracing the service is Arizona State University, one of the world’s largest ARLs.

These university libraries will use the Summon service to enable single search-box access to the breadth of their collections – digital and print, audio and video, single articles to entire e-journals. The Summon service is from Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest. The service claims to be the only available web-scale discovery service designed specifically for libraries. Built with entirely new technology and based on extensive end-user studies, its simple, library-branded search box eliminates the confusion users have in finding a starting point for their research.

The Summon service has been developed in close cooperation with the library community and the content providers who serve it. Among its content contributors are ProQuest, Gale, Lexis-Nexis Academic, Publishing Technology and Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science. In total, the Summon service includes content from more than 6,000 publishers. Library beta sites around the world have helped refine the service. Sites include Dartmouth College Library, Oklahoma State University Libraries, University of Sydney, University of Calgary, Western Michigan University and University of Liverpool.

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Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced that Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, has chosen a full suite of Ex Libris solutions to serve as the backbone of its library services. The university has opted for the Primo discovery and delivery solution and the Aleph integrated library system to replace its existing SirsiDynix Horizon system. It has also selected the suite of Ex Libris solutions for electronic resources: the SFX OpenURL link resolver, the MetaLib gateway and metasearch solution, and the Verde e-resource management system.

Swinburne University requested bids for all of its major library systems at the same time and considered commercial as well as open-source systems. In particular, the library was looking for a single, easy-to-use discovery interface that would enable users to find and access relevant information resources of various types, including their library collections; online content such as articles and e-books; union catalogues and catalogues of other libraries; and web pages.

Primo is claimed to be a one-stop solution for the discovery and delivery of local and remote resources, such as books, journal articles and digital objects. The solution's Deep Search technology, a component of the Ex Libris strategic commitment to provide quality discovery for all research-library resources, enables library data from all sources to be seamlessly integrated.

Aleph provides academic, research, and national libraries with the efficient, user-friendly tools and workflow support they need to meet the increasing requirements of the industry. Customisable components accommodate the requirements of institutions of all types and sizes, from single-branch libraries to the largest of consortia. Installed in scores of countries worldwide, Aleph offers full Unicode support, which enables both public and staff users to interface with the system in their preferred language.

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Enterprise software vendor Design Science, Inc., US, has announced that it is developing a new MathML-to-SVG component as part of its MathFlow product line. Publishers in the STEM marketplace (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) have rapidly moved to the EPUB format standard because of its open licensing and comprehensive feature set. In particular, mathematical equations are formatted using SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and embedded fonts to produce excellent quality on screen as well as print. This new MathFlow component will be helpful in creating publisher workflows for EPUB and other formats.

Design Science is working with publishers to gather specific requirements for incorporating the MathML-to-SVG component into their workflows. The MathFlow product line consists of a set of components for editing, display, and accessibility of mathematical notation for websites, applications and services. It includes MathFlow for Arbortext and XMetaL, and MathFlow Components & SDK which replace the company's WebEQ product. The technology at the heart of MathFlow is MathML, the XML standard for representing mathematical notation.

MathFlow is widely used in publishing, elearning, assessment, aerospace, defense, education, government, science and engineering, as well as enterprise solutions and commercial products. Licensing and pricing plans have been set for enterprise, education and commercial OEM use.

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Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, has announced improved services for users, made possible by using MarkLogic Server as its XML repository. An enhanced nature.com search and the Palgrave Macmillan eBook platform, Palgrave Connect, are the first services from NPG to utilise MarkLogic Server. A product of Mark Logic Corporation, MarkLogic Server is an XML content platform that includes a unique set of capabilities to store, aggregate, enrich, search, navigate, and dynamically deliver content.

Nature.com serves as a gateway to all of the content published by NPG. Powered by MarkLogic Server, the enhanced nature.com search is now faster, more precise and up-to-date. Users can more effectively search articles from all journals on nature.com, and the search now also includes content from Nature News. Using Mark Logic's functionality, metadata is automatically extracted from articles and added instantly to the Mark Logic database. As a result, nature.com searches are faster and more precise. Improved indexing, including author, title, journal name, DOI and some keywords, enables more precise bibliographic queries.

MarkLogic Server is also the repository for Palgrave Connect, Palgrave Macmillan's eBook platform, powered by nature.com. Launched in February 2009, Palgrave Connect offers libraries a flexible approach to building an eBook collection of Palgrave Macmillan books for academic institutions. Site licenses provide access for an institution to more than 4,000 eBooks, split into collections by subject area. The eBooks are indexed using a Mark Logic pipeline to extract the full text as well as metadata including title, authors, year of publication, and various keywords.

MarkLogic Server offers a series of pipelines that enable NPG to process an article and automatically capture the metadata, automating the processing of information into the database/repository.

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Federated search services provider Deep Web Technologies, US, has announced that its federated search product, Explorit Research Accelerator, now includes seamless integration with RefWorks, a web-based solution for citations management. Deep Web Technologies has added RefWorks Direct Export support to Explorit, allowing users to select specific results, and have their citations import directly into RefWorks. The company partnered with Scitopia.org, a scientific federated search portal, to debut this new feature.

Explorit currently integrates with citation management programmes such as EndNote, Zotero, and WizFolio, via RIS files. The RefWorks Direct Export feature works differently, since it allows users to directly post to their RefWorks account from any Explorit application with RefWorks integration enabled. Citation management is an important feature for academic users of federated search. With Deep Web Technologies' Explorit Research Accelerator next-generation federated search, the most relevant results are pulled from multiple collections of information, creating a simple yet powerful tool for researchers to find, select and download valuable information.

Explorit Research Accelerator Federated Search allows users to select results from across multiple searches. All selected results can then be emailed, printed or downloaded using RefWorks Direct Export or the RIS files downloader. The Selections feature also integrates with Explorit Alerts, an automated results search which delivers time-sensitive results on critical queries to a user's email or RSS feed.

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Enterprise software vendor Design Science, Inc., US, has announced the release of MathFlow Components and SDK, for editing, display, and accessibility of mathematical notation for websites, applications and services. MathFlow Components and SDK replace the company's WebEQ product and are an addition to its MathFlow product line that includes MathFlow for Arbortext and XMetaL.

MathFlow is widely used in publishing, elearning, assessment, aerospace, defense, education, government, science and engineering, as well as enterprise solutions and commercial products. SDK is available for programmers and systems integrators to develop custom solutions that require advanced equation editing, display, accessibility features and other math functionality. Licensing and pricing plans have been set for enterprise, education and commercial OEM use.

Design Science develops software used by educators, scientists and publishing professionals, including MathType, Equation Editor in Microsoft Office, WebEQ, MathFlow and MathPlayer, to communicate on the web and in print. The company plans to roll out other MathML-based components to address the needs of ebook publishing in the near future.

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Reprints Desk, a US-based content re-purposing company focused on medical and scientific publishing, and FIZ Karlsruhe, a European-based provider of information delivery services, have announced the immediate availability of Reprints Desk's article ePrint procurement service within the FIZ AutoDoc full-text brokerage routing system for document delivery. The new service enables FIZ AutoDoc customers, including dozens of major life science and other research-intensive companies, to simplify the content retrieval workflow for individual buyers and to improve internal visibility into electronic content spending and regulatory compliance.

FIZ AutoDoc claims to be the document delivery system of choice for many of Europe's largest corporations, supporting unmediated and mediated ordering for single journal articles, patent documents, reports, conference papers, proceedings or other publications. Reprints Desk offers ePrint procurement services as part of its Reprints NRx service that makes it easier for life science and healthcare communications companies to order bulk copies of peer-reviewed journal articles from scientific and medical publications for use in promotions and educational programmes. Scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles are important educational tools for pharmaceutical and other life science companies who communicate with medical professionals.

FIZ Karlsruhe integrated Reprints Desk's STM Document Delivery service into the FIZ AutoDoc system in June 2008. Reprints Desk is a provider of content workflow solutions, including document delivery services in support of research plus reprint services in support of product promotions and educational outreach. Reprints Desk also launched the group purchasing software service Reprints GPO in March 2009 to help companies and their global affiliates save money by aggregating individual scientific and medical article reprint purchases.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has released the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway, a new service that helps libraries and other institutions maximise the visibility of unique primary source materials, such as digital photos, newspapers, letters and diaries, through WorldCat on the Web. The service is available to all users of OCLC CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management software at no additional charge.

The WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway offers libraries a self-service tool to easily upload metadata from their unique digital content to WorldCat, an online resource for finding items held in libraries. Once the metadata is in WorldCat, libraries' digital collections are more visible and discoverable by Web searchers through WorldCat.org, WorldCat Local (including the 'quick start' version), Google, Yahoo! and other popular search engines.

The Gateway has been piloted in 12 institutions. Since May, the pilot participants used the Gateway self-service tools to upload thousands of records from their CONTENTdm collections into WorldCat. Because they have used the Gateway to set up profiles for their collections, the pilot users' metadata will be regularly uploaded to WorldCat as they add to their digital collections over time.

As libraries, museums and other cultural heritage organisations continue to upload CONTENTdm metadata, they are creating a collective digital repository to enrich the resources available to their end users. End users will be able to search WorldCat to find the resources they need from their library's digital collections of rare, historic or local materials, along with materials provided by other libraries around the world. Users will be able to click on items and visit these unique collections virtually by viewing items immediately on their computer screen-anytime, from anywhere.

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The American Institute of Physics (AIP) and knowledge management and semantic search and knowledge discovery software developer Collexis Holdings, Inc., US, have announced a new technology partnership. The innovative collaboration will allow AIP to leverage Collexis' proprietary technology within the physics market.

Collexis develops applications that range from search tools for users' websites to highly sophisticated discovery applications that are utilised by the intelligence community and R&D organisations worldwide. These applications allow users to identify and search for documents, experts, trends or new discoveries that may be hidden in the materials.

American Institute of Physics is a federation of 10 physical science societies representing more than 135,000 scientists, engineers, and educators and is one of the world's largest publishers of scientific information in physics. Offering full-solution publishing services for scientific societies and for similar organisations in science and engineering, AIP publishes 12 journals (some of which are the most highly cited in their respective fields), two magazines, including its flagship publication Physics Today; and the AIP Conference Proceedings series. Its online publishing platform Scitation hosts nearly two million articles from more than 185 scholarly journals and other publications of 28 learned society publishers.

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Information research solutions provider Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, US, has announced an expansion of its publishing agreement with CABI. Under the deal, it will offer its global customer base more than 420 e-books in agriculture, food science, environmental science, veterinary science and related disciplines. The books will be available on the Books@Ovid platform as part of seven collections.

Of the seven collections, the CABI Books Archive Collection, which consists of over 230 books published between 2000 and 2004, is already live on OvidSP. It is available as a one-time only purchase, providing users with unlimited, perpetual access. The other six collections are organised with a subject focus and will be available as annual subscriptions later this summer. These include: CABI Books Archive Collection ; CABI Agriculture Book Collection; CABI Animal and Veterinary Science Book Collection; CABI Environmental Science Book Collection ; CABI Human & Food Science Book Collection; CABI Leisure & Tourism Book Collection ; and CABI Plant Science Book Collection.

In addition to the new books collections, Ovid offers the core applied bioscience databases - CAB Abstracts and CAB Abstracts Archive. It also offers Global Health and Global Health Archive, which are sources for bibliographic information in public health.

The addition of these new CABI books will bring to more than 2,400 the number of books on OvidSP via Books@Ovid. Other publishers with books available via OvidSP include Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Ovid's sister company within Wolters Kluwer Health, Oxford University Press, Springer Science + Business Media, McGraw-Hill and Clinical Publishing.

Books@Ovid seeks to combine premium content with powerful search and discovery technology for a comprehensive, feature-rich information search experience. Natural language searching is expected to make queries quick and easy. Since Books@Ovid is fully integrated with an institution's e-resources, users can link directly to any other content resource referenced in a book. Other key features include an expandable table of contents, back-of-the-book indexing and simple navigation.

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Medialab Solutions, a US-based provider of library software, has announced that in a single year, more than 400 libraries have chosen the AquaBrowser Library, its search and discovery system for libraries. AquaBrowser, which provides libraries with visual and faceted search solutions, has over 700 customers worldwide, and can be found in thousands of libraries of all types and sizes around the world, according to the company.

The Medialab tool is designed to harness the power of common search behaviours to deliver immediate results and relevant content from a variety of sources. Its 'search, discover, refine' methodology is projected to provide visualisation and faceting features that help users quickly and easily uncover relevant results and encourage them to explore more of a library's resources.

First, AquaBrowser searches all available content using a single query. Results are ranked by relevance and enhanced through associations displayed in a 'word cloud'. Then, the 'word cloud' encourages broader explorations and discovery using context sensitive association, word variations, spelling alternatives, translations and synonyms. Associations are automatically generated from the library's resources and link users to new paths that can help them zero in on the answers they are looking for. Finally, faceted navigation further exploits the library's resource metadata to help users zoom into specific result sets and refine searches. Relevancy rankings and facets are flexible to meet the library's specific needs.

SerialsSolutions is the exclusive provider of AquaBrowser Library to academic and special libraries in North America.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced Single Sign-On (SSO) access control for the Serials Solutions 360 Link OpenURL link resolver service and 360 Core E-Journal Portal A-to-Z list. The SSO authentication capability ensures that librarians can serve their remote users with the same level of consideration and access as they do local users.

Many subscription resources now are protected using Athens or Shibboleth authentication methods and 360 Link and the 360 Core E-Journal Portal are compatible with both. When SSO is activated in 360 Link and 360 Core, library users only have to authenticate once per browsing session and are able to easily move between the Serials Solutions interfaces and native resource interfaces without re-entering login information.

In July 2008, Serials Solutions enhanced the 360 Search federated search service with SSO capabilities. By expanding the enhancement to 360 Link and the 360 Core E-Journal Portal, Serials Solutions seeks to help librarians make it easier for users to access the full breadth of the library's collection, whether they are remote or local.

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Library technology solutions provider SirsiDynix, US, has announced the launch of SirsiDynix Enterprise 3.0. Enterprise 3.0 offers users a single 'search well' to discover all resources made available by the library including one or more library catalogues, digital collections, selected web sites and federated resources. The beta programme for SirsiDynix Enterprise 3.0 will conclude this summer. General availability is scheduled for September 2009.

Enterprise 3.0 sets a new standard for local control in a hosted discovery tool. The Enterprise administrative user interface gives libraries the ability to define profiles for specific local patron groups. Users searching through a locally-defined profile may search everything the library offers or a subset of particular interest. The tool lets libraries define custom search limits for use within specific profiles. The built-in Google Analytics allows libraries to have unprecedented visibility into the usage trends of their Enterprise 3.0 discovery tool. Libraries that use the content management features will be able to select which content is available to specific profiles and can use both a WYSIWYG interface for editing and creating content or a built-in HTML editor.

In addition, Enterprise has essential elements that have become standard for a modern library discovery tool including real-time availability information, integration with an industry-wide social network (through ChiliFresh), seamless placement of holds, enriched content integration, 'did you mean' search suggestions, and RSS/ATOM feeds.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, is set to launch EBSCOhost Integrated Search (EHIS). Like traditional federated search tools, EHIS can simultaneously search EBSCOhost databases along with all other electronic resources, including OPACs, publisher packages and resources from other database aggregators. EBSCOhost is projected as one of the most used research platforms, offering users a well-known search experience. According to the company, the easy-to-use features and functionality within EBSCOhost provide users with one simple and intuitive starting place for integrated searching.

Research has reportedly shown that many federated search customers are unhappy with four components of traditional federated search products - search quality, search speed, customer service and cost. EHIS seeks to solve these problems by using the strength of the familiar and intuitive EBSCOhost interface.

In addition to simultaneously searching all electronic resources, EBSCOhost provides features that are available for any database from any vendor to improve search results. These features include basic and advanced search functionality; subject clustering; sorting results by relevancy or date; date slide limiter; add to folder options; and use of custom links.

EHIS is projected to offer fast response times. It allows for a tiered approach to viewing results which enables fast information retrieval for the top resources as determined by each library. Users need not wait for the slowest resources to determine when results will be returned-eliminating the lowest common denominator issue.

EHIS allows libraries to integrate all of their electronic resources into one central location, eliminating end-user confusion and providing librarians with additional resources. Since these resources are delivered via a platform they already know, it is expected that training would not be an issue.

Librarians may use EBSCOadmin to set up databases in EHIS. It may also be used to customise the way users see and access EHIS, to generate usage reports and label the databases to make searching easier for the end user. Access may be provided through a search box on the library's website or via the EBSCOhost interface.

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Digital content services provider Ingram Digital, US, has announced an agreement with Blackwell, US, supplier of books and bibliographic support to academic and research libraries. The deal gives Blackwell e-book distribution rights to libraries around the world via Ingram's industry-leading MyiLibrary platform, with the exception of the United Kingdom and Canada. The agreement will allow Blackwell Digital Services customers to discover and order MyiLibrary e-books via Collection Manager, the Blackwell interface.

MyiLibrary is a sophisticated platform of aggregated e-book content from the world's leading commercial publishers. It currently hosts over 185,000 e-books and is used by hundreds of academic, public and professional libraries around the world.

Blackwell's Collection Manager has just been released in a new version, providing sophisticated faceted search capabilities using the Endeca search engine. FRBRized organisation of searched titles will allow libraries to see metadata for both print and electronic versions of books, including those available from the MyiLibrary platform. Identified orders can then be ordered directly through Collection Manager, or from the library's order system, based on data downloaded from Collection Manager. Assistance in answering licensing and platform questions will be available from experts within Blackwell's Digital Services Department.

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The American Psychological Association (APA) has released a significant enhancement for all PsycARTICLES and PsycCRITIQUES users on the APA PsycNET search platform. With newly-redesigned HTML display functionality for all full-text documents in both databases, APA PsycNET now allows users to browse, search and share content more easily.

All APA PsycNET users, including institutions and APA members who subscribe via APA PsycNET Silver, APA PsycNET Gold or APA PsycNET Platinum can benefit from the enhanced display features. No additional fees or software updates are required for users to take advantage of these enhancements. Specific new HTML features include a modified layout for improved readability; quick links between article sections for easier navigation; social bookmark links for expedited sharing and collaboration; and more. Each article and review also features extensive tools for researchers and authors alike, with e-mail/RSS alerts, manuscript submission resources, and RefWorks export integration.

Launched in 2007, APA PsycNET is designed specifically for APA databases with all searchable fields mapped to APA products. It is available to institutions as a delivery platform for site licenses for each of APA's five databases. APA members and non-member individuals can subscribe to APA's databases via APA PsycNET on an annual basis. It also powers APA PsycNET Direct, APA's transactional access portal.

PsycARTICLES is the largest full-text journal database in psychology, containing more than 142,000 articles from 1894 to the present. All APA-published journals are available electronically through PsycARTICLES. PsycCRITIQUES features nearly 40,000 full-text reviews of psychology books from 1956 to the present, with 10-12 reviews added each week.

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Bibliographic information provider Bowker, US, has announced the beta-release of the latest version of its book discovery and collection development platform, Books in-Print (BIP). The official global market release of BIP 2.0 is scheduled for the early fourth quarter of 2009.

BIP 2.0 seeks to provide librarians, researchers and library patrons with access to a rich set of book information available in the reference market. The platform is projected to combine comprehensive content with visual discovery interfaces from AquaBrowser, Bowker's search platform utilised by more than 500 libraries worldwide. The result is seen to be a breakthrough offering that enables users to discover relevant book information through a variety of cutting-edge collection development capabilities. The capabilities include edition-grouped search results (FRBR), 'word cloud' search visualisation and Web 2.0 tools, such as rating, tagging and other social networking features.

The introduction of BIP 2.0 follows the April 2009 release of the American Library Association (ALA)'s 2009 report, 'The State of America's Libraries.' The study had cited a Harris Poll from 2008 that reported that 41 percent of library card holders visited their library websites in 2008, compared with 24 percent in 2006. According to the report, 39 percent of card-holders visit the library to borrow books; 12 percent to take out CDs, videos, or computer software; 10 percent to use a computer to view library holdings; 9 percent to use reference materials; and 8 percent to gain Internet access. The product development path for BIP 2.0 tracked with these emerging technology trends, content interests and social networking trends that were seen in all library market segments in recent years.

Some of the key new features of BIP 2.0 include relevancy-ranked search and faceted refine options to help users drill into the book information they need as quickly as possible; search results now grouped by book edition, making result lists easier to go through and the right items or editions much easier to locate; and the new 'social library' functionality allows users to rate, review and tag items.

A new word cloud feature provides users with a starburst of suggested terms, based on various computer-generated word associations from the original search query, or user-generated content. It allows users to select from the associations and hone their queries, while also building a discovery trail that offers more relevant results to consider.

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The Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters has announced that NEICON, Russia's largest academic consortium, will be the first organisation to have access to the new Nanotechnology Knowledge Dashboard. The Knowledge Dashboard, developed in partnership with Collexis, is a custom data mining solution for the research community that merges Thomson Reuters Web of Science data and the Collexis Knowledge Dashboard functionalities.

The Nanotechnology Knowledge Dashboard gives the Russian nanotechnology research community a strategic advantage to explore key trends and experts, as provided by its fine granular nanotechnology thesaurus.

The Knowledge Dashboard is a custom software and information solution that enables scientists to analyse large numbers of publications relevant to a defined topic swiftly and efficiently, and filter the essential information. Additionally, it allows researchers to explore existing knowledge concepts and provides proactive suggestions about the direction of research across a topic or by category. The dashboard also includes multiple thesauri that allow different points of view on the same data and navigation by subject.

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Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced additional libraries from around the world that have selected Primo as their discovery and delivery solution. Some recent newcomers to the international Primo community include Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in China; Claremont University Consortium, in the United States Law Society of Upper Canada; Vienna University, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, and University of Innsbruck, in Austria; Ecole Normale Superieure, Institut national de recherche pe, and Bibliotheque Interuniversitaire de lettres et sciences humaines, all in Lyon, France; and University of East London, in the UK.

Primo is claimed to be a one-stop solution for the discovery and delivery of local and remote resources, such as books, journal articles and digital objects. It assists libraries in fully utilising their collections and offering users an up-to-date discovery and delivery experience. Primo services can be embedded in commonly used applications such as course management systems and institutional portals, helping library serve users wherever they are.

The Ex Libris Group provides automation solutions for academic, national, and research libraries. The company maintains an impressive customer base consisting of thousands of sites in more than 70 countries on six continents. Dedicated to developing creative solutions in close collaboration with its customers, Ex Libris enables academic, national, and research libraries to maximise productivity and efficiency and, at the same time, greatly enhance the user experience. By empowering users to discover and obtain the information they need, libraries ensure their position as the bridge to knowledge.

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E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced that information solutions provider LexisNexis, US, has signed up for the former's web-scale discovery service, Summon. About a hundred other content providers are already participating in the service. ProQuest and Gale contribute indexing of titles from 4,700 of their participating publishers between them, while LexisNexis will enable Serials Solutions to index content from LexisNexis Academic, LexisNexis Congressional Digital Collection, and the redesigned LexisNexis Statistical. The Summon service provides Google-like searching of library collections - from books and videos to e-resources at the article level, integrated and accessible from a single search box. It has been in beta for six months and will be available commercially later this month.

According to Serials Solutions, research has shown that the absence of a simple, obvious starting point for research is a fundamental barrier between libraries and users. Summons is seen to overcome that obstacle. The service seeks to provide simplicity for users and expose the breadth of the library's content, allowing more resources to be discovered. Publishers and other contributors have reportedly adopted the service for this exposure.

Other participants in the Summon service include Springer, Taylor& Francis, SAGE, IEEE, Emerald, Scitation publishers, the Royal Society, scores of scholarly publishers and university presses. The participation of LexisNexis is expected to enable the discovery of a broader scope of news, business, legal, and historical content, providing an even more comprehensive reflection of the library's collection.

The Summon service was developed in close cooperation with library beta sites - partners in the service's mission to bring the researcher back to the library and provide a channel for greater return on the library's content investment. Beta sites include Dartmouth College, Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney, Claremont Colleges Library, University of Calgary, Western Michigan University, and University of Liverpool.

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Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, is leveraging its extensive research of end-users, librarians and faculty search behaviours to drive the creation of an all-new platform that will redefine search experience for library users worldwide. To be available in 2010, the new platform will facilitate and simplify access to the broad range of authoritative resources, content, and services that only ProQuest offers. The ProQuest, CSA Illumina, and selected Chadwyck-Healey products will be available on the new platform at launch, and all ProQuest products will migrate to the new platform over time.

The new platform is being built from the ground up based on years of extensive student observations, surveys of more than 6,000 end users, focus groups, and individual interviews, along with ongoing interactions with users, librarians and faculty. Its core is a single platform for all content, with a single content store, single search engine, and consolidated user experience. Users will experience deeper discovery of information, and will then be able to organise and use their findings more efficiently and with greater precision.

The new platform will enable users to quickly and easily narrow in on the answers they need by searching across all content and a broad range of complementary sources, including leading journals, periodicals, news content, rare and archival information, dissertations, research reports, ebooks and multimedia. Powerful navigation tools will surface the most relevant content of any format in context to help guide users in their search. Sophisticated post-search manipulation features will make it faster and easier to zero in on the most relevant results. For libraries, the consolidated platform will offer new administrative and reporting tools that provide greater flexibility in customising the experience to their institution's needs.

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The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has announced the sale of its Funnelback search engine technology company to content management company Squiz. Funnelback was developed by CSIRO and the Australian National University, originally under the name of P@noptic.

Funnelback's flagship product, Funnelback Enterprise, is an integrated, industrial strength search solution that searches content assets across internet, intranet, database and shared network drives, as well as electronic document management and portal systems. It is used in some of the most demanding web environments by a broad range of customers.

Squiz is a privately owned global content management company and the authors of the MySource Matrix, an open source content management system used by governments, universities and corporations.

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e-resource access and management services provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced enhanced functionality for the Serials Solutions 360 Core e-resource portal. This includes a tabbed content view for eBooks subscribers, Library Managed Holdings for eBooks, and Japanese-language title sorting options.

A new tabbed view option for eBooks allows Serials Solutions eBooks subscribers to provide discrete 'tabs' that represent their content. This allows libraries with extensive eBook collections to present a separate browse and search interface for eBooks and journals, thereby improving their patrons' research experience. For additional eBooks coverage, Serials Solutions has further enhanced Library Managed Holdings to enable clients to add library managed eBooks databases that are not tracked in the KnowledgeWorks knowledgebase. Libraries can then provide a consolidated search and browse experience for their patrons that encompass all resources.

To further support international customers, Serials Solutions has also enhanced Japanese language sorting for titles within the e-resource portal and Library Managed Holdings database interface. Now, subscribers can customise Japanese-language sorting and alphabetisation options for tracked resources in both patron and client-facing interfaces. This enhancement enables libraries to share Japanese-language resources and correctly sort titles with proper phonetic alphabetisation.

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Publishing solutions provider The Charlesworth Group, UK, has announced a partnership with scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, to incorporate eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP) metadata within online PDFs for the science journal Nature. The move is expected to improve the archiving of new Nature content and allow easier, more accurate searching for research articles, providing a better service for users of the nature.com web site. XMP-embedded PDFs are available on nature.com from the December 18, 2008 issue of Nature onwards.

XMP metadata is now embedded in all new Nature research articles as they are published. In a collaborative project with NPG, Charlesworth's development team created a tailored workflow solution to handle the work. The resulting system of automated batch processing extracts information from XML files and produces standardised, validated PDF files with the XMP metadata embedded.

Technically, XMP supports the embedding of metadata within PDF files, providing a standards-based structure for meaningful information. Article titles, author details, searchable keywords, copyright information and subject matter can all be embedded within the PDF in a format which is not only human-readable but can also be understood by software applications. Since the standard is extensible, users can also add their own custom metadata.

The introduction of this technology is projected to 'futureproof' NPG's PDFs for use in new web applications being developed for the semantic web. Following completion of the project, Charlesworth is claimed to have seen a great level of interest in the potential of XMP from a number of large publishers.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has launched a new display and searching technology designed to improve user experience. The new system supports natural language searching for scientific formulas. It provides users with the ability to store and show html markup allowing display of scientific formulas. Inspec is the first of many databases to utilise this new database architecture. The new technology will soon expand to other EBSCO Publishing databases also.

Natural language searching will make it easier for researchers to find relevant information within their searches. For instance, those searching for records related to water are now able to enter 'H20' to return the desired records.

As the provider of EBSCOhost, a platform for STM research, EBSCO continues to make enhancements to create a technologically sophisticated, yet familiar search experience for all of its end-users.

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E-research and educational publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, US, has announced the launch of PowerSearch 2.0, an enhanced version of the original PowerSearch platform which provides the library community comprehensive access to authoritative reference, periodical and primary source information.

PowerSearch 2.0 simplifies browsing through Gale's more than 20,000 publications, providing the ability to search across more than 150 million documents. The new interface provides users a Web-like experience and includes added features that will appeal to and empower library patrons, students and other researchers.

Key enhancements provide more customisation options for the user, allowing them to create their own custom profile. Users can modify the home page so that the topics and publications they are interested in are fed through RSS feeds directly to the page at login. In addition, users have better navigation options such as the new Publication Browse with hover technology which allows users to see more publication details without clicking through. Beginning in July, PowerSearch 2.0 will be fully implemented for all customers.

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Dartmouth College Library has launched an open beta of the Summon web-scale discovery service, a Google-like search of the full breadth of content found in library collections. In addition to librarians, the Summon service is now being used by students and faculty at Dartmouth College, enabling them to search the contents of the library - physical and dsetserialigital - from a single search box. The Summon service has been developed by Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest.

Serials Solutions is set to launch the Summon service in July, 2009. New content providers are consistently being added to the Summon service in order to expand the breadth of content discoverable via the library. The service now includes nearly 100 contributors, including key partners ProQuest and Gale - aggregators representing more than 4,700 publishers. Serials Solutions harvests and indexes their content, enabling fast, relevancy-ranked search results.

The Summon service aims to bring the user back to the library as the starting place for research, and provide for greater return on the library's content investment. In addition to Dartmouth College Library, leading institutions serving as beta sites for the Summon service include Oklahoma State University, University of Calgary, University of Sydney, Claremont Colleges Library, University of Liverpool and Western Michigan University.

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Scitopia.org, a free, federated search portal created by leading science and engineering societies, has signed three new content partners, expanding its single-search access to include the digital libraries of the Association of Facilities Engineering (AFE), Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) and Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering (ICST). Further, functionality has been enhanced with a browser plug-in that enables scitopia.org searches to be launched from the user's toolbar. The enhancements were announced at the Special Libraries Association conference and centennial celebration in Washington, D.C.

AFE will contribute global journal content related to plant and facility engineering, operation and maintenance, especially for Fortune 500 manufacturers, universities, medical centers and government agencies. SEG's content contribution focuses on expert and ethical practice of geophysics. ICST will provide peer-reviewed journal articles that examine innovation and technology transfer in information technologies, their management and their applications.

With scitopia.org's new browser plug-in, users can launch searches of scitopia.org content from their Internet browser's toolbar, making access fast and easy. The site uses a unique federated search engine, developed by Deep Web Technologies, that accommodates continuously growing content without slowing the search process. Each partner uses a standardised XML gateway to handle search queries, resulting in fast, accurate results. Search efficiency and precision are seen to be essential as scitopia.org now includes more than 3.5 million documents - primarily peer-reviewed journal content and conference proceedings - spanning 350 years of scholarship.

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STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced a new partnership agreement with NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data. This agreement allows for an integration of NextBio's set of ontology-based semantic tools and a compilation of high quality sources of public data on Elsevier's online scientific research platform, ScienceDirect.

While most scientific information on genes, pathways, diseases, tissues and compounds is available online, it currently resides in various disconnected locations. Enhancing ScienceDirect with NextBio's biomedical ontology framework enables life sciences, health sciences and chemistry researchers to analyse ScienceDirect content and search ScienceDirect peer-reviewed literature together with publicly available research data from PubMed, clinical trials, experimental data, and news articles, on one single platform.

NextBio's platform seamlessly combines powerful tools with unique correlated content to transform information into knowledge, providing the foundation for new scientific discoveries. NextBio is delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, resulting in quick deployment and rapid return on investment.

The new enhancement will become available on ScienceDirect and accessible to subscribed users in summer 2009.

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Electronic research databases provider EBSCO, US, has announced a new feature of its A-to- Z listing service which enables researchers to browse e-journal tables of contents and directly access articles to more quickly discover the information they need for their research.

The system's new point-of-need authentication option allows libraries greater freedom to display appropriate resources to all users while restricting access to e-journals in accordance with publisher agreements. The new feature allows all users to access a library's A-to-Z Reader Site-including listings for e-journals subscribed to through EBSCO-without needing to authenticate. When users attempt to view an e-journal's table of contents, they will be authenticated through the method the library administrator has selected. Once authentication is successfully completed, users will be able to access the table of contents for any other e-journal for the remainder of the A-to-Z session.

In addition, the powerful A-to-Z Administrator Site features allows libraries to control the appearance of the table of contents pages for all e-journals, including the display of important notes that alert researchers to specific details about e-journal access or coverage.

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Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) has announced that a new digital library and search engine created by its researchers now holds more than 1 million journal articles and other scholarly works that can be easily accessed by anyone.

CiteSeerX (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu), based in Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), is designed to enhance the dissemination of scientific literature by making papers and other documents easier to locate online. The library provides resources such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques and software that are transferable to other digital libraries - supplying users with more than just an index of search results. The newest version, released in early 2009, added the capability to search tables.

The search engine was developed by C. Lee Giles, David Reese professor of information sciences and technology and Isaac G. Councill, a Penn State Ph.D. recipient. It is based on open source software, which means it can be adapted as needed, by anyone, to fit users' requirements.

The search engine also includes a feature called MyCiteSeerX, a customisable personal space where the individual user can do tagging, make corrections, create his or her own collections and monitor paper updates.

Other tools currently being developed include Our CiteSeerX, an environment where collaborating teams can work and share information within the library, and a feature that will allow users to receive alerts about new papers of personal interest.

CiteSeerX was funded by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, NASA and the College of IST.

DeepDyve, a US-based provider of research engine for the deep web, has released a trio of free tools that allows websites to incorporate powerful search capabilities for a more compelling user experience. These tools complement the company's recently announced suite of publisher tools which utilise DeepDyve's search technology to make publisher content more findable from anywhere on the web.

DeepDyve's new tools enable websites and bloggers to quickly and easily display related articles and search results directly within their sites and blog posts. Visitors can now discover new, authoritative information seamlessly as they read and browse through websites that utilise DeepDyve's technology. These tools can be implemented by copying/pasting a few lines of code into the site, or by installing a WordPress plug-in.

The More Like This Content API tool automatically displays results from DeepDyve that are similar to the information displayed on the current page. It is designed for use by any website that would like to include a 'related articles' functionality, regardless of whether their content has been indexed by DeepDyve. A Content Highlight Widget enables websites to integrate search with their users' normal reading and browsing behaviour. DeepDyve's WordPress plug-in allows bloggers using this platform to automatically include links to 'related articles' directly in their blogs. The plug-in utilises DeepDyve's 'More Like This' technology to use the text of the blog as a query and return relevant search results.

As users have become more accustomed to searching for information online, it is now becoming clear that search behaviour is evolving. A recent Hitwise report found that queries of eight words or more had grown from less than 1 percent of queries in 2004, to nearly 4 percent of queries by February 2009. This increase suggests that users are not only growing more proficient in their use of search, but they are forced to write longer queries to find what they want, given the volume of data that is returned. In April 2009, DeepDyve unveiled a suite of tools designed specifically for the publishing community. The products are designed to first make the publisher's content more discoverable in search engines. From there, other tools are available to increase the engagement at the publisher's site by allowing users to quickly find related articles based on what they are viewing.

DeepDyve is demonstrating its publisher tools and free widgets at booth #230 at the ongoing Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting in Baltimore.

Online information services provider Dialog, US, part of the ProQuest family of brands, has added new content to its Dialog and DataStar platforms, significantly enhancing medical and business information resources. These platforms are best known for their ability to power deep and precise searches of authoritative content.

Among the new content sources is The Lancet, an independent general medical journal. Stringently edited and peer-reviewed to ensure scientific merit and clinical relevance, The Lancet is known for its independent, authoritative voice in global medicine. Its international focus and coverage of all aspects of human health make it a key gateway for medical information research. Lancet Infectious Diseases, Lancet Oncology and Lancet Neurology will also be available through Dialog and DataStar. The content has a two-month embargo from its appearance in hard copy.

Additionally, more than 300 new sources have been added to ABI/INFORM, the foremost source for authoritative business information, and 400 new sources have been added to Periodical Abstracts Plus, a cornerstone resource providing cover-to-cover indexing and abstracting of articles from more than 1,800 general-reference publications.

These content additions are part of an initiative of Dialog and ProQuest to make ProQuest's expansive selection of authoritative, full-text content more widely available to Dialog's traditional markets. The new initiative enriches the ProQuest resources available through the Dialog and DataStar platforms and also makes complementary ProQuest products on their traditional ProQuest platforms available through Dialog sales channels.

E-resource access and management services provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced that it is building a new XML federated search connection to Infobase eBooks, which span a wide range of core, curriculum-oriented subject areas from history, science and literature to geography, social issues, the arts, biographies, and beyond.

With the new connection, subscribers to the Serials Solutions 360 Search federated search service will soon be able to provide access to more than 2,000 current and backlist Infobase titles from Facts On File, Ferguson Publishing, Chelsea House, Bloom's Literary Criticism, and other sources. The new Infobase connection will be available free to 360 Search subscribers.

Built with an XML framework, the Infobase eBooks connection will allow users fast and stable access to content using latest technology. Infobase was recently certified through the Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks Certified program for content providers, but has partnered with Serials Solutions since long before the programme's inception.

Information research solutions provider Ovid, US, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, has announced that it is showcasing various features of its products at the ongoing 2009 Annual MLA Meeting being held at the Hawaii Convention Center. The products include OvidSP search modes; Nursing@Ovid, Ovid's nursing and allied health portal; new and upcoming journals, books and book collections in a range of medical, nursing, health science and life science specialties; and new three-dimensional interactive anatomy tools from Primal Pictures.

Visitors to the Ovid booth (#802) can attend 15-minute in-booth theatre presentations to learn more about best practices in each of OvidSP's multiple Search Modes; the latest news, including a live demo, of Nursing@Ovid, first released in October of 2008 but debuting at this year's MLA meeting; and an update on premium journals and books, including new book collections, now available or coming soon to the OvidSP platform, as well as additions to Ovid's suite of 3D interactive anatomy tools from Primal Pictures, claimed to be one of the world's leading sources of interactive tools for anatomy specialists - whether they're in clinical practice, research, or education.

Throughout the show, visitors to the Ovid booth can also hear more about recent enhancements to OvidSP, including customisable Search Fields, new search limits, quarterly AutoAlerts and improved highlighting; Ovid Universal Search, Ovid's cross-platform search solution; and upcoming collections of more than 400 e-books in agriculture, veterinary science, environmental science and related topics from CABI.

The HathiTrust Digital Library, a partnership among some of the US's largest academic research libraries, has launched a new digital catalogue search that delivers nearly 3 million full-text records through an Internet browser. The new service provides access to the collections of premier research libraries in the US.

Admission for the public to examine archives at the most prominent research libraries is an ongoing effort for HathiTrust to build a digital archive of library materials converted from print, co-owned and managed by participating academic institutions. HathiTrust is also currently finding ways to use large-scale full-text searching, which will provide researchers with a mechanism to search within the works and across the entire repository. Blending the latest technology with purpose of sharing knowledge, the service is building a community with the common goal of openly distributing information.

Launched in October 2008, the HathiTrust Digital Library includes the 12-university consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the 11 university libraries of the University of California system, and the University of Virginia. HathiTrust partners began including digital content from Indiana University and the University of California in late April. The addition of digital content from these institutions increases the number of books and journals in the repository by an estimated 500,000 volumes per month. Before adding these materials, content was exclusively from collections at the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin.

Catalogue records of the HathiTrust Digital Library are also available to local libraries, which can download and incorporate HathiTrust records into a local catalogue. Many institutions, including the University of Chicago and the University of Colorado, have already successfully integrated the content.

Serials Solutions, the e-resource access and management services arm of ProQuest, US, has added University of Calgary as a beta development partner for the Summon unified discovery service. Several new content providers, including BMJ, an international peer-reviewed medical journal and subsidiary of the British Medical Association, have also signed onto the Summon service. BMJ joins nearly 100 content providers along with key partners ProQuest and Gale - aggregators representing more than 4,700 publishers.

The Summon service addresses what research shows is a fundamental barrier between libraries and users: a simple, obvious starting point for searches. The service is being developed in close cooperation with library beta partners, with a goal of not only bringing the researcher back to the library, but providing a channel for greater return on the library's content investment. The role of the beta partners is to ensure the service is tracking against those goals, providing feedback from the field. Librarians, archivists and curators at the University of Calgary will initially test and use the Summon service. They will then move it to an open beta in May, getting feedback from faculty and student users. Other partners who are already testing include Dartmouth College, Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney, University of Liverpool and Western Michigan University.

The Summon service produces fast, relevancy-ranked, results through a single search against pre-harvested content. While the aggregated databases of ProQuest and Gale form a cornerstone for the Summon service's content, new contributors are consistently being added to provide the most accurate reflection of the breadth of content available in any library - whether print or electronic.

The Summon unified discovery service will move from beta to commercial launch in July 2009. The hosted service is built with an open API that will allow it to be used with existing library Web sites, next-generation catalogues or campus systems with low impact on staff.

Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, US, has announced that 60 ebooks from Clinical Publishing, an independent medical publisher based in the UK, are scheduled to be available on OvidSP in 2009. Many of the titles are already for sale and accessible via Books@Ovid, OvidSP's ebook platform. All titles will be available to Ovid's global customer base as an annual subscription or for one-time purchase.

An imprint of Atlas Medical Publishing, Ltd, Clinical Publishing specialises in medical colour atlases and medical reference texts for doctors, specialists, and trainees worldwide.

Key titles scheduled for availability on Books@Ovid include several titles from the Therapeutic Strategies series, including Therapeutic Strategies in Epilepsy and Therapeutic Strategies in Thrombosis; volumes in the Problem Solving series, such as Problem Solving in Cardiology and Problem Solving in Oncology; and others in the series, including Hypertension: Atlas of Investigation & Management, Ischemic Stroke: Atlas of Investigation & Management, and more.

First launched in 2004, Books@Ovid offers a streamlined, efficient search experience to a wide range of novice and advanced user types. Natural language searching makes queries quick and easy. Users can search ebooks simultaneously with ejournals and bibliographic databases, and can link directly to any other content resource referenced in a book. Important features include flexible search, browse, and results management features; inline abstracts; a variety of search limits; and downloadable MARC records to help librarians manage their online catalogue.

With the addition of Clinical Publishing, Ovid's portfolio of ebooks publishing partners now totals ten. Other partners include Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (Ovid's sister company within Wolters Kluwer Health), Oxford University Press, Springer Science + Business Media, McGraw-Hill, and Jones & Bartlett.

DeepDyve, a US-based provider of research engine for the deep web, has launched a suite of tools for publishers and scientific societies to enhance the search capabilities on their websites. The suite seeks to leverage DeepDyve's KeyPhrase algorithm, which allows users to input whole sentences, paragraphs or entire articles as their query to find related results.

The products are designed to first make the publisher's content more discoverable in search engines which is where, according to a report from Outsell, more than 70 percent of users begin their research. From there, other tools are available to increase the engagement at the publisher's site by allowing users to quickly find related articles based on what they are viewing.

Publisher landing pages use DeepDyve's technology to enhance the findability of publisher content by various search engines. These co-branded or private label pages present the web searcher with a whole page full of closely related articles from the same publisher, with links leading them to the publisher site. According to DeepDyve, one landing page can be set up for each article, yet they are easy to deploy, totally automated and hosted by the company's product.

DeepDyve's search technology is available to publishers via a web services API (Application Programming Interface). The API can be set up to search only a publisher's own content, or to help users discover other relevant documents in the DeepDyve index. Searches can be launched with a few keywords, or by allowing users to use a paragraph or an entire document as a query to find articles that match the concepts described. Results are returned via an XML feed or as a hosted, co-branded web page.

The DeepDyve 'More Like This Document API' enables websites to directly interface with the DeepDyve database to search for articles that are similar to a designated document within the DeepDyve index. It is designed for use by publishers whose content has been indexed by the company and 'who would like to include a related articles' functionality on their site without the laborious implementation.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is one of the first organisations to implement DeepDyve's search technology.

Biomedical IT/text-mining Company Bioalma, Spain, has announced that novo|seek is now capable of executing full-text searches in all Open Access journals housed in PubMed Central. Novo|seek is an information extraction system for searching the published knowledge in biomedical literature.

Leveraging Bioalma's text mining capabilities, users can now extend beyond just the abstract to identify - for the first time - key information housed in the full-text article. By identifying key biomedical terms in the entire text, searches yield the most relevant research results. Additionally, by adding Open Access journals to the novo|seek universe of search targets, Bioalma is extending the number of searchable articles by an average of 1,000 new articles per day, or about 140,000 total new articles.

Open access rights to biomedical research is important as it goes beyond just free access to content, making distribution, copying and derivative work production possible. Free access only allows the individual to view the content, but not use it or share it, and it is not made available in public repositories. Novo|seek indexes biomedical literature with text mining technology built by Bioalma that identifies key biomedical terms taking into account external available data and contextual term information.

Ovid, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, US, has announced that it is adding new modules to its suite of 3D interactive human anatomy offerings from Primal Pictures, a producer of multimedia products for teaching human anatomy. Human Anatomy: Systemic Edition, 3D Head & Neck Anatomy for Dentistry and a Spanish-language version of Essential Regional Anatomy are now available via OvidSP, the company's precision search and discovery platform. Cost-effective packages of multiple modules are also now available to Ovid's global customer base.

Targeted at institutions such as nursing schools and allied health programmes that teach human anatomy as a series of bodily systems, Human Anatomy: Systemic Edition consists of 15 distinct modules, such as Skeletal System, Muscular System and Cardiovascular System. Combined, they include more than 300 anatomical views and 4,000 anatomical structures supplemented by descriptive text, a study guide and quiz section.

Designed for dentists in training or practice, 3D Head & Neck Anatomy for Dentistry is authored by leading specialists in dentistry and maxillofacial surgery. It includes more than 100 three-dimensional views of the head, neck, face, oral and nasal cavities, dentition, individual teeth in 3D and cross section, nerves, larynx and pharynx, sinuses, eye and brain. Users can click on any structure to view related text, as well as dissections, clinical slides, annotated illustrations, video clips, and functional anatomy animations which they can rotate and add/ remove layers.

Fundamentos de Anatomia Humana en 3D (Essential Regional Anatomy) takes a regional approach to the study and teaching of anatomy: nine views focus on a specific body region, such as head & neck, shoulder, spine, and knee. Similar to the English and French versions of this product, users can strip away layers of bone, muscle, and ligaments, and rotate anatomy models on screen.

The products are created by a team of expert anatomists and graphic artists who interpret actual medical scan and dissection data, and then construct images using advanced imaging techniques. All modules are designed to graphically illustrate structural anatomical relationships, functions and biomechanics, and deliver a variety of features and interactive functionality. Depending on the module, users can rotate anatomical models as much as 360 degrees and strip away different layers of each anatomical region or organ. Assessment and treatment videos, MRI slices, pathology slides and clinical descriptions may also be included.

NetBase, a US-based provider of research software solutions that enable knowledge workers to mine the Internet and other online data to accelerate research, has announced the launch of the Content Intelligence platform. The platform is projected as a comprehensive intelligent search solution designed to harness additional value and insight from any content source including the Internet, premium and enterprise content.

The company is transitioning from an application provider focused specifically on R&D to opening up to a deeper, broader platform that is powering a new generation of consumer and B2B content-rich applications. The Content Intelligence technology powers applications for recognised global leaders in publishing, healthcare, government and Fortune 500 organisations like P&G and 3M. It is claimed to be the world's only technology that can harness billions of documents, linguistically understand sentences and automatically find answer to questions, not just lists of 'results.'

NetBase has also announced that it has expanded its customer relationship with STM publisher Elsevier for several more years. The agreement is seen to validate NetBase's leadership position in helping large publishers such as Elsevier transform rich content into fully searchable insight applications that easily map to the workflow of today's fast-paced knowledge worker.

Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced the creation of a new research tool that will harvest metadata from internal and external sources, creating a centralised pre-indexed service of significant size and speed. The tool, EBSCO Discovery Service, will provide libraries with a single entry point for research and launch users into the entire array of a library's collection. The launch is expected by the end of the calendar year.

Powered by EBSCOhost technology, the new discovery service will enable users to search a wide-ranging collection of metadata and link quickly to the content to which they have rights. EBSCO Discovery Service will allow for 'local' access to the metadata associated with EBSCO Publishing's leading databases, e-journals from more than 400 publishers, and additional resources from other partners, including OCLC, NewsBank, Readex and Alexander Street Press.

Due to the newly announced partnership with OCLC, local indexing of WorldCat will add rapid access to the metadata for 130 million books, videos and music CDs. Locally indexed content will also include news and information resources from NewsBank and the digital collections from its Readex division. Alexander Street Press is also participating, allowing access to its historical archive, music and video collections. New partnerships for additional locally indexed content will be announced in the near future.

In addition to the locally indexed content, libraries will have the ability to search the content of the over 300 databases on EBSCOhost, as well as databases on remote services through EBSCOhost Integrated Search (EHIS). EHIS is a federated search service that is based on the EBSCOhost platform and expected for release in June 2009.

Health information services provider Healthline Networks, US, has announced two new decision-support platforms for online healthcare. These are Healthline TreatmentSearch, a treatment search application for the web; and Healthline DocSearch, a searchable doctor database featuring semantically-suggested specialists based on the consumer's health condition or symptoms.

These join Healthline SymptomSearch, Healthline DrugSearch and Healthline Learning Centers to inform patients and caregivers at every stage of the health condition: from symptoms and diagnoses, to doctors, treatments, drugs and costs. The integrated suite of Healthline Clinical Applications is now available on Healthline.com and will be licensed to select partners within Healthline Networks.

With most treatment information online embedded deep within articles on health websites, Healthline TreatmentSearch is claimed to be the first online application to surface a semantically-generated list of possible treatment options for a disease or condition. The application covers 4,500 treatments, including 1,200 medications and 3,300 medical, surgical and alternative therapies. Healthline Treatment Search results are ranked algorithmically, and sub-categorised into Diagnostic Tests; Medical Procedures; Surgical Procedures; Self Care; Alternative Procedures; Prescribed & Over-the-Counter; Medications; and Nutritional Supplements.

Serials Solutions, the e-resource access and management services arm of ProQuest, US, has signed Western Michigan University as a beta development site for its new Summon unified discovery service. Also participating are new content providers, including engineering society IEEE; IT publisher IGI-Global; scholarly publisher Brill; and two Australian presses that expand the service's local coverage. The Summon service's contributors, which include the content resources of ProQuest and Gale, have expanded to more than 80. Harvested content now exceeds 400 million records in preparation for the service's July launch.

Announced in January, the Summon unified discovery service is seen to have captured the attention of both librarians and publishers for its creation of Google-like searching of the full breadth of content found in library collections. These range books and videos to e-resources at the article level. The service addresses what research shows is a fundamental barrier between libraries and users - a simple, obvious starting point for searches.

The Summon service is being developed in close cooperation with library beta partners, with a goal of not only bringing the researcher back to the library, but providing a channel for greater return on the library's content investment. Western Michigan University, which will use the Summon service with its VuFind next-generation catalogue, joins Dartmouth College, Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney and University of Liverpool in providing feedback that will refine all aspects of the service.

The Summon service bypasses federated search in favour of a single search against pre-harvested content enabling fast results, in true relevancy-ranked order. Publishers can use the service for this ability to surface content in the right context at the right time for the right user.

The Summon unified discovery service creates a library-branded search box that eliminates the confusion users have in finding a starting point for library research, making collections simple to use. It is projected as the result of Serials Solutions' unique combination of assets and expertise, enabled by its growing list of content providers. The hosted service is built with an open API that will allow it to integrate with existing library websites or campus systems with low impact on staff. To learn more about the Summon unified discovery service, visit http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon.

Serials Solutions, the e-resource access and management services arm of ProQuest, US, has announced the release of enhanced Full-Text and Peer Review features for the Serials Solutions 360 Search federated search service. Using a combination of data supplied by the Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks knowledgebase and Ulrich's Global Serials Intelligence knowledgebase, these search filters enable users to limit the results of queries to full-text or peer-reviewed sources reliably.

The new functionality is provided free to all 360 Search subscribers. Libraries not already using the Full-Text and Peer Review functionality should contact Serials Solutions for activation. Libraries that already use this feature can expect to see immediate improvements in filtered results.

Serials Solutions serves more than 2,000 libraries of all sizes and types. Its KnowledgeWorks is the foundation for Serials Solutions 360, an integrated e-resource access and management solution. Serials Solutions recently introduced the Summon unified discovery service, a discovery tool that provides instant access to the full breadth of the library's collection through a single search.

STM publisher Thieme Publishing Group, Germany, has announced the availability of Science of Synthesis Version 3.7. Science of Synthesis provides a comprehensive critical treatment of synthetic organic chemistry and is one of the most authoritative, in-depth information resources available on synthetic methodology. This upgraded version brings two more volumes online.

Significant synthetic methods for a wide range of classes of compounds are held by the information resource, which now contains 40 volumes out of what will eventually be a total of 48. The upgrade brings the total number of reactions to over 222,000 with 8,000 new reactions. With the addition of volume 32, Category 4 (out of what will eventually total 6 categories) is complete. Category 1- 4 are all available online for the first time.

Developed in cooperation with InfoChem, Science of Synthesis possesses a user-friendly search function that allows substructure, exact structure, reaction, combined keyword, and full-text searches. Within the application, a structure search is quick and easy since users have the ability to choose between multiple structure drawing tools (ISIS Draw, Java Applet, and ChemDraw). Its compatibility with SFX assists librarians in navigating literature requests of Science of Synthesis users to resources and services relevant to their search queries.

The International ISTC Agency, the official Registration Authority for the International Standard Text Code (ISTC), has announced that the International Organization for Standardization has formally published ISO Standard 21047, which is available now at http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/
catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=41603.

The ISTC system provides a means of uniquely and persistently identifying textual works in information systems. It also facilitates the exchange of information about such works between publishers, authors and authors associations, collective management organisations, libraries, search engines and others on an international level. The ISTC makes it possible to group together products containing the same content, or even in some cases, different content with the same origins, optimising their discoverability in search engines, retail and library cataloging systems.

The International ISTC Agency has already received a number of formal expressions of interest from prospective ISTC registration agencies in Europe.

Founded in 2008, the International ISTC Agency is responsible for the promotion, coordination and supervision of the ISTC standard and system. Bowker, Nielsen, CISAC (International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers) and IFFRO (International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations) are its founding members.

Medialab Solutions, a US-based provider of library software, has announced that the Harvard University Library is to implement AquaBrowser Library, its search and discovery platform, in spring 2009. Medialab is part of bibliographic information provider R. R. Bowker.

The Harvard University Library implementation will include faceted navigation, word cloud discovery, relevancy ranking, an integrated Authority File, real-time availability information for items, and integration with the ILS for patron services. The patron services include placing holds, making requests, viewing checkouts and renewing items.

AquaBrowser is projected as an original search and discovery system for libraries. Medialab Solutions is dedicated exclusively to developing AquaBrowser for providing visual and faceted search solutions for libraries. According to the company, AquaBrowser has over 500 customers worldwide, and can be found in thousands of libraries of all types and sizes around the world.

The AquaBrowser platform is exclusively represented by Serials Solutions in the academic market in North America.