From blawlor at nfais.org Thu Jun 2 10:43:02 2011 From: blawlor at nfais.org (Bonnie Lawlor) Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:43:02 -0400 Subject: [nfais-l] HW Wilson & EBSCO Publishing Announce Merger Message-ID: <00d201cc2133$601e7800$205b6800$@org> TWO NFAIS MEMBER ORGANIZATIONS ANNOUNCE MERGER: H.W. WILSON AND EBSCO PUBLISHING The news flash that appeared yesterday as a possible rumor in Against the Grain (EBSCO to purchase H. W. Wilson) is true -see below for the press release that went out this morning. Bonnie Lawlor NFAIS Executive Director *************************************************** EBSCO Publishing and The H.W. Wilson Company Make Joint Announcement of Merger Agreement ~Two long-time industry leading vendors come together with goal of improving services for libraries ~ Ipswich, Mass. - June 2, 2011 - EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and The H.W. Wilson Company (Wilson) have merged in what is being viewed by the companies as an ideal match. This combination of organizations will allow the strengths of each to benefit existing and forthcoming products & services. With 180 combined years of experience serving libraries, EBSCO and Wilson have traveled similar paths, but have maintained unique advantages and abilities. Libraries using products from either company will benefit as improvements are made to the respective resources. Wilson database products are known for their quality indexing. The Wilson subject thesaurus and Wilson "names" authority file are largely considered the best of their kind, and the WilsonWeb platform systematically leverages this valuable indexing within its searching to provide high quality, relevant results to end users. The Wilson controlled vocabularies will be integrated into EBSCO's controlled vocabularies, resulting in improved subject indexing for EBSCO databases. The EBSCOhostR platform will be enhanced to take advantage of this indexing in its search and relevancy ranking algorithms. According to Tim Collins, President of EBSCO Publishing, this acquisition leads directly to heightening the value and quality of EBSCO and Wilson resources. "Upholding the integrity of the Wilson indexing is essential, and extending these attributes to EBSCOhost resources is a critical part of this venture. When it comes to thesauri (subjects and names), and how these are leveraged, Wilson has long been an industry leader. We look forward to bringing this value and approach to all applicable EBSCOhost databases and are excited about the benefits this will bring to EBSCOhost users. We are also pleased to be able to add the Wilson databases into the EBSCO Discovery Service search experience" Harry Regan, President & CEO for Wilson, commented, "EBSCO and H.W. Wilson have been engaged as business partners for a number of years and are now officially operating as one. The result will be a broader and deeper range of products and services for the library reference community with significantly added value. Both companies have had separate, distinctive histories, but have always shared a common commitment for the highest order of customer satisfaction." Wilson's Vice President of Indexing & Editorial Services, Mark Gauthier, is excited about the opportunities that lie ahead. "As a company, Wilson has focused heavily on the quality of our indexing and how it impacts the search experience. With EBSCOhost full-text and abstract/index databases, along with EBSCO Discovery Service, EBSCO is really focusing on detailed editorial value to truly take its services to new levels. We're excited about the possibilities and what we can do together to benefit the research experience for libraries." All Wilson indexing, abstracts and full text will be fully searchable via EBSCO Discovery Service for subscribers of Wilson databases. The addition of Wilson's robust abstract/index records and unique full text will strengthen EBSCO Discovery Service. Wilson databases will be loaded onto EBSCOhost over the coming months. EBSCO will continue to maintain WilsonWeb until such time that all Wilson databases are available on EBSCOhost and customers have been transitioned to EBSCOhost. Giving Back to the Library Community Both EBSCO and The H.W. Wilson Foundation have a long-standing tradition of providing financial and other support for libraries and library organizations. The H.W. Wilson Foundation plans to continue its commitment to its mission of supporting libraries and librarianship, as evidenced by its numerous grants and long standing support of the John Cotton Dana Award . About H.W. Wilson For more than a century, H.W. Wilson has provided libraries with the highest-quality references in the world. The Company offers more than 80 databases on the acclaimed WilsonWeb platform: full text databases: delivering full articles from thousands of periodicals; retrospective databases: the complete journalistic record of people, developments and controversies in a wide range of fields; biography databases: in-depth profiles of newsmakers in all areas of endeavor; image databases, and more. Cover-to-cover periodicals indexing, subject-specific thesauri, and rigorous indexing standards have long earned the H.W. Wilson reputation as the source for bibliographic research. Editorial staff members with MLS or MLIS degrees--multi-lingual trained librarians and subject specialists--ensure relevant and comprehensive coverage and keep Wilson resources at the leading edge of service in libraries. New WilsonWeb tools include ReadSpeaker--conversion of articles into audio files, for listening at your workstation or downloading for later; WilsonWeb Mobile, a streamlined new interface for smart phones and other mobile devices; article translations into any of 13 languages; "My WilsonWeb" individual user accounts; citation tools that help users construct bibliographies according to the latest standards, and others. For more information, visit www.hwwilson.com. About EBSCO Publishing EBSCO Publishing is the producer of EBSCOhostR, the world's premier for-fee online research service, including full-text databases, subject indexes, point-of-care medical reference, historical digital archives, and e-books. The company provides more than 300 databases and nearly 300,000 e-books. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals and magazines from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). EBSCO is also the provider of EBSCO Discovery ServiceT (EDS), which provides each institution with a fast, single search box for its entire collection, offering deeper indexing and more full-text searching of journals and magazines than any other discovery service (www.ebscohost.com/discovery). For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com , or contact: information at ebscohost.com. EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States. ### For more information, please contact: Kathleen McEvoy Public Relations Manager (800) 653-2726 ext. 2594 kmcevoy at ebscohost.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jilloneill at nfais.org Fri Jun 10 14:32:51 2011 From: jilloneill at nfais.org (Jill O'Neill) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:32:51 -0400 Subject: [nfais-l] NFAIS Enotes, June 2011 Message-ID: NFAIS e-Notes, June 2011 Being 'NSync Written and Compiled by Jill O'Neill One of the great credits to Amazon's Kindle approach has been the recognition that individual users want to be able to access content to which they have rights on any device that they choose. Kindle content can be viewed on Amazon's proprietary hardware, on Apple's iTouch, and on personal computers. The user appreciates this flexibility, but there is one aspect to finding one's place in reading the same content across various platforms that is never made entirely clear to the user. Synchronization of the reader's place is totally dependent upon when the user last *told* the dominant system to sync. If I am reading James Gleick's book, The Information, on my Kindle and I leave off at page 471, unless I make a point of telling the device to sync with Amazon's servers before I turn it off and ensure that I have an Internet connection when I pick up my iTouch to begin reading that same title on that device instead, the iTouch will assume that I'm still back on page 250 - the last page of the book that was read on that device. This is a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but it is a nuisance. Synchronization happens in the Cloud. The fact that my devices may or may not always be synchronized isn't that big of an issue as far as my Kindle reading is concerned, but it might well be a significant problem in other contexts. Cloud storage is a given for many individuals who may be working with Google's suite of apps, or with Dropbox or Evernote. If you're unfamiliar with Evernote (http :// www . evernote . com ), it is a highly popular and visible notebook application, available on almost as many platforms as the Kindle app itself. The site was launched in 2007 as a web-based note-taking/bookmarking, cloud storage service, very similar to Google Notebooks that had launched in 2006. But unlike Google Notebooks, which Google abandoned in 2009, Evernote was successful as a free/premium service. Evernote CEO, Phil Liblin, came up with the "freemium" concept and is well-known for the quote, "The easiest way to get one million people paying is to get one billion people using." (see ;http :// www . fastcompany . com / magazine /147/ next - tech - remember - the - money . html ). Liblin's Evernote co-founder, Stepan Pachikov, worked closely with Apple in the '80's on handwriting recognition for the Newton personal digital assistant. Evernote is able to serve a number of different purposes. It can absorb a variety of media formats (video, audio, PDF documents of up to 25 pages, etc.) and those files may be ingested by Evernote through clipping, emailing, or simple typing. User interaction may be through a desktop application, a mobile app or via branded browser extension (Evernote's elephant head is immediately recognizable as an icon). That last mechanism allows the user the set of options of picking up from the Web a minimal amount of information (page title and URL, essentially a citation), clip just the body of an article sans any surrounding advertisements, or the full Web page to add it to their notebook. Using the mobile app, the system can absorb typed notes, web clips, camera phone images, audio files and high resolution photographs. The user can select which option best serves his or her need. The content goes into a default "notebook" or inbox, but the user can subsequently organize that content into other notebooks - personal notes need not be lumped together with work-related materials. It's possible to email personal documents (emails, work documents, even voice memos) to a personal address at Evernote to have those documents archived in the user's notebook for access at other times (see: (http :// blog . evernote . com /2010/03/16/ emailing - into - evernote - just - got - better / ). Evernote is surprisingly powerful. The Evernote pricing structure is roughly $5 per month or $45 per year for the premium service which includes offline access to notebooks. The free service available to any registered user does not permit offline access and caps content storage at 60MB. Premium users can store up to one gig of content. In both instances, that storage is the amount that a user is permitted to upload on a monthly basis, not total storage. The upload cap is removed at the end of a rolling 30 day period or at the beginning of a payment cycle. Evernote also has the capacity to read text within photographic images, making those photos searchable, and thereby rendering the service valuable for expense reports and record-keeping. It is even possible to encrypt information in an Evernote notebook. One can document a list of passwords used for various services and encrypt that information, with the caveat that if the individual user forgets his or her encryption key, Evernote tech support is unable to retrieve it for the client. And for purposes of social sharing, you can post one of your notes to Facebook, email it to a colleague and/or instead supply others with a link. Notebooks in their entirety are also shareable. Printing out of materials is possible solely through the use of the desktop/laptop computer applications. Ubiquitous access to the service across every major mobile platform means that Evernote is incredibly useful to many professionals and therefore hugely successful in its freemium business model. Millions are using the Cloud-based service. Lawyers are using the iPad app as an evidence locker. Real estate brokers are using it to corral shareable images and text information on specific properties. Public relations professionals are using it to archive their tweet streams and assemble client briefings. Educators are using it for purposes of assessment as well as classroom preparation. The 1%-5% of users who currently pay for the premium service are covering the cost of Evernote's day-to-day operating expense. Evernote has also been active in building third-party partnerships (see Evernote's Trunk for specifics at http :// www . evernote . com / about / trunk / ). Just one example, however, is a partnership between Evernote and Olive Tree Bible Software. Annotations made in the latter software are automatically uploaded to the user's account. Evernote was smart to underscore the natural relationship between note-taking and text-based resources. Additionally, Evernote has fostered relationships with manufacturers of scanner hardware (for those receipts referenced earlier) as well as with software providers such as Microsoft, allowing Evernote to be thoroughly integrated into Windows and Outlook. In the wake of Yahoo's sale of Delicious, a long-established bookmarking service, Evernote is an easy substitute (see: http://www.delicious.com/help/transition). Evernote can support the same functions for web workers and with a greater level of sophistication and usefulness. The mobile app has as much to offer as the desktop app It is particularly noteworthy that no functionality is lost through adaptation of the interface on different platforms. I can't quite figure out how the user is supposed to extract his or her data from Evernote should the decision be that it's not satisfying a specific need, but it's hard to imagine how this service would *not* be found satisfactory, except for the fact that it is housed in the Cloud and therefore requires synchronization. Evernote seems to be a fantastic Cloud storage and content management system. Of course, much of what one can do in Evernote can be done through other services such as Google Docs which is also capable of ingesting multiple media formats, storing multiple gigs at no cost, and which operates on both tethered and untethered devices. More specialized tools exist for specific professional communities in aiding the individual to create content and curate found materials. You may not have heard of Logos Bible Software's initiative, the Libronix Personal Book Building function (PBB) (see tutorial at www.logos.com/media/pbb/tutorial.html ). The user is able to bring together many types of long-form documents and create an individualized resource of public domain book content and personally-created content such as sermons or articles in order to make that content available to others for research or education. Essentially, the Libronix Digital Library Software offered by Logos (of which PBB is a part) is a slightly more sophisticated content management system than that offered by Evernote. Logos' service can result in both a physical as well as a virtual e-book of materials (see: (http :// blog . logos . com /2008/08/ pbb _ or _ not _ pbb _ that _ is _ the _ question _1/ ). Cloud storage seems to be reaching a tipping point. Amazon has expanded significantly the digital locker offered to their customers with the introduction of their Cloud Drive (see: phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060 &p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1543596&highlight=.) While the initial announcement is positioning the service in the context of simplifying music storage and access across devices, the press release also suggests that users can upload documents to the Amazon Cloud -- "Cloud Drive allows customers to upload and store all kinds of digital files; music, photos, videos and documents can be stored securely and are available via web browser on any computer. In addition to the 5 GB of free storage, customers can purchase storage plans starting at $20 a year for 20 GB." What is not made clear is whether Kindle users who create their own e-books would be permitted to upload home-made Kindle editions to this Cloud service. It's not precluded, but neither is it specifically referenced as an option. Currently the only back up a user has for such Kindle editions is their own hard drive. But there is a sticking point in that all of these services require me to be connected to the Web in some form (Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G -- whatever happens to be available). Synchronization and the nuisance it represents in terms of maintaining consistency for users will be a stumbling block for a mobile population. But access to content in the Cloud is rapidly becoming a user expectation. Hard upon the heels of Amazon's announcement of its Cloud Drive, Sony released a statement suggesting that it was deeply troubled that Amazon had done so without establishing licensing agreements in place with the various music labels (see: http :// www . engadget . com /2011/03/30/ amazon - cloud - player - upsets - sony - music - over - streaming - license - am / ). Sony, of course, has a competing service for music, but the licensing issue is a particularly troublesome one for users, librarians, and content providers. I upload PDFs of research articles to my Google Docs account with some frequency. I'm not sharing those documents publicly; the documents are simply housed there for my own convenience and ready retrieval in an online environment. I am seriously considering Evernote as a back-up for the same kind of activity, particularly as Evernote's architecture makes it possible to contain both a PDF document and personal annotations of that document in the same note. However, as noted earlier, Evernote and Google Docs allow the sharing of documents through a variety of mechanisms (Facebook, email, shared URL access). It's easy to imagine a student sharing an Evernote notebook with a study group and thereby violating some clause in a publisher-library contractual agreement. It's not readily evident how to export notebooks or individual items from Evernote, so there's some lid on piratical activity in that regard, but slipping over the lines of fair use strikes me as far too easy. I doubt that publishers are particularly anxious about this loophole, but given the issues surrounding electronic reserves at Georgia State University, some awareness must be maintained (see: http :// newsbreaks . infotoday . com / NewsBreaks / Summary - Judgment - Motions - Filed - in - Georgia - State - Copyright - Infringement - Lawsuit -66221. asp ). The biggest issue for the information industry with regard to Cloud storage and services such as Evernote is the increasing demand from the user community for integration. The first NFAIS member organization to enable the user to seamlessly move individual articles from a content platform onto an Evernote environment (or something similar) for purposes of education or collaborative research will win! **************************** 2011 SPONSORS Access Innovations, Inc. Accessible Archives, Inc. American Psychological Association/PsycINFO American Theological Library Association CAS CrossRef Data Conversion Laboratory Defense Technical Information Center Elsevier Getty Research Institute H. W. Wilson Information Today, Inc. International Food Information Services Philosopher's Information Center ProQuest Really Strategies, Inc. TEMIS, Inc. Thomson Reuters IP & Science Unlimited Priorities Corporation Jill O'Neill Director, Planning & Communication NFAIS (v) 215-893-1561 (email) jilloneill at nfais.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From blawlor at nfais.org Mon Jun 13 09:05:59 2011 From: blawlor at nfais.org (Bonnie Lawlor) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 09:05:59 -0400 Subject: [nfais-l] Journal Article Tag Suite Conference Message-ID: <013601cc29ca$a3db4290$eb91c7b0$@org> Posted on behalf of the National Library of Medicine **************************************************************************** ***************** Journal Article Tag Suite Conference: 2011 Program announced The Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con) is a conference for users of the Journal Article Tag Suite, that is, users of any of the National Library of Medicine's Document Type Definitions or "DTD's" (soon to be standardized as NISO Z39.96). JATS-Con is a peer-reviewed conference hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine on the NIH campus in Bethesda Maryland on September 26 & 27, 2011. The full program is available at http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/jats-con/program/. For more information on the conference, see http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/jats-con/. The proceedings from JATS-Con 2010 are available here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK47086/ There is no charge for the conference; however, space is limited so registration is required. ========================================================== Note: See http://www.nih.gov/about/visitor/index.htm for information on visiting the NIH Campus. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jilloneill at nfais.org Mon Jun 13 13:49:50 2011 From: jilloneill at nfais.org (Jill O'Neill) Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:49:50 -0400 Subject: [nfais-l] Changing Standards Landscape Forum, ALA, June 24 Message-ID: <7EF3906322C848AD9B4F883AD889FED9@DDPXRT91> NISO and BISG to Hold 5th Annual Changing Standards Landscape Forum at the 2011 ALA Annual Conference Free half-day program on June 24, 2011 will focus on the e-book marketplace and common issues between libraries and publishers Building on four years of successful co-programming, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) will again co-host The Changing Standards Landscape during the 2011 American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans on Friday, June 24, 2011 from 12:00 - 4:00 p.m. This year's forum will focus on E-books: Intersections Where Libraries and Publishers Can Learn from Each Other. Electronic books have exploded in the past 18 months, and publishing and library communities alike are struggling to deal with the constantly shifting ground. This program will explore how both the publishing and library communities are facing the new digital marketplace, with a special focus on the standards that underlie the e-book supply chain. "Over the past year, there has been a furious pace in the e-book marketplace of new product launches, new technology, new business models, and new reading devices," said Todd Carpenter, NISO's Managing Director. "We hope to draw out some of the best approaches that libraries and publishers can use to solve common problems." Speakers for this year's session include: Todd Carpenter (NISO Managing Director), Angela Bole (Deputy Executive Director, BISG), Phil Madans (Director, Publishing Standards and Practices, Hachette Book Group), Peter Brantley (Director of the Bookserver Project, Internet Archive), and Michael Cairns (Managing Partner, Information Media Partners). "The Changing Standards Landscape has become a tremendously successful event since its inception four years ago," states Angela Bole, Deputy Executive Director, BISG. "Developing a deeper understanding between the publishing, distribution, and library supply chains is increasingly critical and each year we've focused on significant challenges our communities face alongside standards and best practice solutions. This year's program will highlight again how rapidly our industry is changing and how BISG and NISO are proactively addressing these issues." The Changing Standards Landscape is organized jointly by the NISO and BISG. Both organizations support, promote, and maintain standards and best practices in the information community. NISO focuses on publishers, libraries and the systems suppliers in information distribution. BISG focuses on the book supply chain of publishers, manufacturers, wholesale and retail suppliers. A detailed agenda is available on the NISO website along with a link to an online registration form. Although this forum is free, prospective attendees are asked to register for logistics and planning purposes. (Go to: http://www.niso.org/news/events/2011/ala2011/nisobisgforum/) Jill O'Neill Director, Planning & Communication NFAIS (v) 215-893-1561 (email) jilloneill at nfais.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: