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Vol. 21 No. 8 — September 2004

VNU Exhibitions Europe Acquires Library + information Show

VNU Exhibitions Europe announced its acquisition of the Library + information Show (LiS) from Resources Exhibitions, Ltd.

Now in its 16th year, the Library + information Show caters to all sectors of the library profession, bringing the library and information worlds together to share key industry developments and the latest technology, exchange ideas, and debate current issues. The acquisition follows a joint venture between the two businesses in April, which saw VNU's Total Library Solutions event incorporated into the overall LiS show proposition.

Source: VNU Exhibitions, London, 011-44-207-316-9000; http://www.vnuexhibitions.co.uk.

SwetsWise Welcomes BioMed Central's Open-Access Journals

Swets Information Services announced that BioMed Central's open-access journals will be included in SwetsWise, the Web-based, modular service for the procurement, access, and management of subscriptions and online information. This service, provided as part of Swets' comprehensive e-journals management drive, will allow readers to access BioMed Central's open-access and subscription articles among SwetsWise Online Content's 8,242 full-text publications from 307 publishers.

Source: Swets Information Services, Lisse, Netherlands, 011-31-252-435-111; http://www.swets.com.

Thomson Study Reveals Weak Correlation Between Self-Citations and Impact Factor

The Thomson Corp. released a study titled "Journal Self-Citation in the Journal Citation Reports—Science Edition (2002)." The study examined self-citation in all 5,876 journals covered in the 2002 Science Edition of JCR and concluded that journal self-citations are a minor component of the overall citation pattern of most titles.

The results indicate that self-citation rates vary widely across all journals and show only a weak correlation with the impact and subject of a journal. There is also a weak correlation between self-citation rate and the size or specificity of the category assigned to a journal. Additionally, the removal of self-citations from Impact Factor calculation had little effect on the relative rank of high-impact journals.

"Impact Factor, particularly how it is shaped by self-citations, has been the topic of much debate," said Jim Testa, director of editorial development for Thomson Scientific. "Hopefully, this study will address some of the questions and concerns raised by the scientific community. When properly used, JCR can be a vital tool, among a number of measures, to evaluate the impact and influence of scholarly journals."

Source: The Thomson Corp., Philadelphia, 215/386-0100; http://www.thomson.com.

Ovid to Offer PsycBOOKS Database

Ovid Technologies, Inc. announced an agreement with the American Psychological Association (APA) to make content from the APA PsycBOOKS full-text database accessible through Ovid's online platform.

Ovid's offerings from the PsycBOOKS database initially will include more than 600 titles, including 100 out-of-print books from 1950 to 2002 and approximately 50 archival resources in psychology. Ovid plans to add approximately 10 titles a month to the database.

Customers on the Ovid platform will be able to browse a table of contents and locate specific book chapters in PDF form. Users also will be able to search a database of bibliographic records that includes book and chapter titles, author names, abstracts, subject headings, and chapter references. The full text of chapters for many titles also will be fully searchable.

Source: Ovid Technologies, Inc., New York, 646/674-6300; http://www.ovid.com.

Ingenta, Inc. Chosen to Deliver BSOL

Ingenta, Inc. has been chosen to deliver the British Standards Online Project (BSOL) for BSI Business Information, the publishing division of the BSI Group.

The project involves the provision of a new online channel to market for thousands of British Standards publications. BSI will use Ingenta's technology to deliver a more flexible information commerce proposition, building new revenues through the creation of new revenue channels. Ingenta's new information commerce platform helps BSI package and deliver content to a number of new partners.

In addition to this contract, work has been completed on a Cyber Vending Machine project to host final documents and provide pay-per-view technology for the clients of BSI's Standards Writing Consultancy Services division.

Source: Ingenta, Inc., Providence, RI, 401/331-2014; http://www.ingenta.com.

Infotrieve, ISI ResearchSoft Announce Partnership

Infotrieve, Inc. and Thomson ISI ResearchSoft announced that they will collaborate to deliver enhanced services to the corporate researcher.

This partnership will provide connectivity between content delivered by Infotrieve and ISI ResearchSoft's publishing software. Researchers will be able to navigate bidirectionally between content resources and their personal reference collections. This connectivity will allow researchers to obtain full-text research articles from Infotrieve and capture bibliographic references for citing in papers and reports that they author. Researchers will save time locating relevant information, capturing references for citing, and linking to full-text content.

Source: Infotrieve, Inc., Los Angeles, 310/445-3000; http://www.infotrieve.com.

FindLaw Acquires Hubbard One

FindLaw, a Thomson Corp. business, announced the acquisition of Hubbard One, a provider of marketing applications to large U.S. law firms.

According to the announcement, the combined offerings of Hubbard One and FindLaw include award-winning Web-site design and hosting services, extranets, and analytical tools. Moreover, FindLaw connects law firm marketing efforts with the largest communities of in-house corporate counsel, businesses, and consumers through Findlaw.com. According to the announcement, this portal is the highest-trafficked legal information Web site and home to the West Legal Directory, the most often consulted directory of lawyers and law firms on the Internet.

Hubbard One joins FindLaw on the heels of FindLaw's acquisition of Glasser LegalWorks and the launch of the Thomson Legal Record, a service that enables in-house corporate counsel to perform due diligence by researching the litigation track record of outside lawyers and law firms.

Source: FindLaw, Eagan, MN, 651/687-7000; http://www.findlaw.com.

Nstein Technologies Announces Contract with Time, Inc.

Nstein Technologies, Inc. announced that it has signed two agreements with Time, Inc. for software solutions and professional services that will provide a master taxonomy and data categorization of the Time, Inc. editorial archive. Time, Inc. is a subsidiary of Time Warner, Inc. and the publisher of several well-known magazines, including Time, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated.

"Nstein solutions will be a component of the ongoing development and organization of our master archive. Their products and services will help us deliver accurate and useful search results," said Time, Inc.'s Mitchell Klaif, vice president of Global Magazine and Internet Technology.

Source: Nstein Technologies, Inc., Montreal, 514/908-5406; http://www.nstein.com.

The Content Partnership Launched

James Cuming, former general manager of content sales for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and a former director at Australian Associated Press, has launched The Content Partnership, a venture to help publishers of text and multimedia create new distribution lines and revenue.

The Content Partnership specializes in Asia Pacific-based content and is establishing relationships with information vendors in the U.S. and Europe.

"For information vendors, we offer a reliable source for quality information," says Cuming. "We have personal relationships with many publishers large and small throughout Asia."

According to Cuming, the benefit to information vendors is that The Content Partnership "allows vendors to make only one call to access several high-quality services." The relationship is then based on a single agreement, a single billing point, and a single technical contact.

Source: The Content Partnership, Sydney, Australia, 011-612-9499-6848; http://www.contentpartnership.com.

Johns Hopkins Collaborates on Digital Preservation Project

In a project to test the best methods and strategies for long-term preservation of important digital collections, the Sheridan Libraries of The Johns Hopkins University are participating in the Archive Ingest and Handling Test, a $1 million Library of Congress project.

Along with Harvard, Stanford, and Old Dominion universities, researchers at the Digital Knowledge Center at Johns Hopkins will work with a collection of images, e-mail messages, Web pages, chat logs, and other information focused on the 9/11 attacks. The universities will use various methods to analyze the collection and test ways for "bulk ingesting" the archive into digital-repository systems. The participants will keep in mind that data formats may become outdated over time and that for true long-term preservation any digital repository must be capable of migrating data and adapting to new formats.

Information about the project will be posted periodically at http://www.digitalpreservation.gov.

Source: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 443/287-9960; http://www.jhu.edu.

IHS, Citation Publishing Form Alliance

Information Handling Services, Inc. (IHS) announced an alliance with Citation Publishing, Inc. that will leverage IHS's codes and standards databases and Citation Publishing's CyberRegs environmental, health, and safety (EH&S) laws and regulations database and document management system to deliver online access to regulations, national laws, industry standards, specifications, and codes.

The joint IHS/Citation Publishing solution will help customers manage their operations and documentation requirements for health, safety, and environmental compliance; reduce project disruptions and delays; lower company costs and risks; and improve worker safety.

Source: Information Handling Services, Inc., Englewood, CO, 303/397-7956; http://www.ihs.com.

Copyright Clearance Center, OCLC Deliver Integrated Copyright Permission Service

Copyright Clearance Center and OCLC announced a partnership to provide access to copyright licensing directly from two of OCLC's reference and resource-sharing services. Through CCC's Copyright Integration Services, librarians and other users of OCLC FirstSearch and ILLiad can check copyright fees and obtain permission to use text materials through a link to CCC's online licensing services. Through these integrated solutions, OCLC users will experience a streamlined permissions process when initiating an ILL transaction, saving time and minimizing data entry errors.

Source: Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., Danvers, MA, 978/750-8400; http://www.copyright.com.

Thomson Gale Virtual Reference Library Offers xreferplus

Thomson Gale and xrefer announced a partnership for distribution in the U.S. and Canada of the xreferplus service in conjunction with Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Thomson Gale will distribute xreferplus as an added, ready-reference component of Gale Virtual Reference Library into academic, public, school, military, and government libraries in the U.S. and Canada. A selection of Thomson Gale titles also will be made available to current and future xreferplus customers, whether they subscribe directly from xrefer or purchase xreferplus as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Source: Thomson Gale, Farmington Hills, MI, 248/699-4253; http://www.gale.com.

WilsonWeb Links to RefWorks

The H.W. Wilson Co. announced that users of WilsonWeb periodicals research databases can now use RefWorks Database and Bibliography Creator to compile WilsonWeb article references into Web-accessible, personalized databases. These can be used for personal reference, sharing research, or generating footnotes and bibliographies. In libraries with subscriptions to both services, WilsonWeb's OpenURL WilsonLink utility facilitates export of bibliographic citations into RefWorks, which formats bibliographies and manuscripts automatically.

Source: The H.W. Wilson Co., New York, 718/588-8400; http://www.hwwilson.com.

AP, Convera Strike Agreement for News Industry

The Associated Press and Convera Corp. announced an agreement whereby Convera's RetrievalWare will be used for categorizing, searching, and distributing multimedia content within the AP's electronic AP (eAP) initiative. Under the agreement, the AP and Convera will tailor RetrievalWare to address broader application requirements of the news industry.

The eAP initiative, a new generation of content management and distribution systems for newspaper publishers and other AP subscribers, is expected to enhance the way the AP provides multimedia content in an interactive, easy-to-use form to its daily newspaper, radio, television, and online customers. Using Convera's Retrieval Ware, AP subscribers will be able to more easily specify the personalized news products they want to receive, access a Web-based delivery network, and receive value-added content that is relevant to customers' interests.

Source: Convera Corp., Vienna, VA, 703/761-3700; http://www.convera.com.

Paratext's Reference Universe Links to Several Databases

Paratext, LLC announced that its aggregated reference database Reference Universe now contains links to full-text reference sources from ABC-CLIO, Oxford University Press, and Thomson Gale.

Reference Universe, which integrates article titles and indexes to more than 5,000 specialized encyclopedias and reference works, now contains links to Oxford Reference Online, Gale's Virtual Reference Library, and ABC-CLIO e-books. Links to e-sources from Taylor & Francis, Greenwood Press, CQ Press, and others are currently in development.

Source: Paratext, LLC, Sterling, VA, 703/318-0285; http://www.paratext.com.

NLM Announces International Agreement to Expand PubMed Central

The Wellcome Trust, in partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), are joining forces to digitize the complete backfiles of a number of medical journals. The digitized content will be made freely available on the Web via PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.gov) and will augment its current content.

The project plans to digitize around 1.7 million pages of text. The NLM, a part of the National Institutes of Health, will manage the project, host the archive, and ensure the preservation of the digital files.

The list of journals to be digitized includes Annals of Surgery, Biochemical Journal, Journal of Physiology, and Medical History. Digitization began in summer 2004, and the first titles are scheduled to be online in early 2005.

Source: National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, 301/594-5983; http://www.nlm.nih.gov.

ProQuest Acquires Serials Solutions, Distributes NewspaperDirect Products

ProQuest Information and Learning announced the acquisition of Serials Solutions, Inc. ProQuest also announced plans to distribute NewspaperDirect products.

Serials Solutions

ProQuest has acquired Seattle-based Serials Solutions, Inc., whose products and services—Article Linker, Journal Linker, an advanced A-Z title list service, and MARC records delivery—provide e-journal management and access solutions for academic, public, government, and corporate libraries around the world. The company has products installed in 1,300 libraries worldwide.

NewspaperDirect Products

ProQuest will distribute NewspaperDirect newspaper products in the library and education markets. NewspaperDirect currently distributes more than 240 same-day newspaper titles in more than 70 countries and in more than 30 different languages through a global print-on-demand network.

"By offering NewspaperDirect for libraries, ProQuest will break new ground in handling and managing newspaper print content. As library budgets have tightened in the past few years, libraries have increasingly turned to reducing their costs associated with providing print subscription copies of newspapers. NewspaperDirect transforms and improves the library's operation," said Rod Gauvin, ProQuest's senior vice resident of marketing and publishing.

Source: ProQuest Information and Learning, Ann Arbor, MI, 734/761-4700; http://www.il.proquest.com.