What would you do if a new deadly disease which seems
to spread in crowded conditions arrives in the city where you live? Nobody
knows what it is except that it looks like flu. But this flu is killing
people, perhaps 10 percent of those it infects. Would you close your
library? Move to Cleveland? Or do what librarians in Hong Kong did when
SARS came knocking on their library doors? Tommy Yeung tells
ACCESS what happened in his library at Lingnan University.
The interview is here.
Oops. Just breached copyright?
Copyright is a subject few will get perfectly right
even if we think we're a whiz at it. For example, if you create a link to
a document rather than make copies of it can an eagle-eyed lawyer come
after you? The answer to this and nine other copyright conundrums
is here.
The latest Ovid Regional Data Center arrives
in Taiwan
This is the fourth Ovid data center, each being a
mirror of the other. It will ensure uninterrupted service to Ovid's
collection of medical and health sciences books, journals and databases.
Are there plans to open it up to subscribers in Southeast Asia?
The answer is here.
Thinking of becoming a scholarly
publisher?
Then read this. The founding mother of BioOne, Heather
Joseph, presents an account of its first two years. The business model,
the advisory groups, acquiring the loot, the cancellation of print
subscriptions, enlarged membership but more slices of pie to distribute...
It hasn't been easy. The most amazing thing is that for a service offering
68 scholarly journals, Heather Joseph IS BioOne: the only full time
salaried member of staff. AND BioOne is on the cusp of breaking even.
Remarkable. This must-read feature is here.
Islam digital library launched in
Malaysia
There can be no better time to better the world's
understanding of Islam. Which is just what the National Library of
Malaysia has done with the International Islamic Digital Library launched
during the recent Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) Summit. here has
its URL.
Scholarly research changed forever
That's what you're promised when you subscribe to
Oxford Scholarship Online. The way you access and use scholarly books will
radically change, it is promised. Oxford is taking research into a new
dimension, they say. This GBP2 million product is
described here.
Library education in Asia survey gets
underway
CAVAL is undertaking a survey
of senior librarians throughout Asia on the skills they want new recruits to
have. The results will be used to design a completely new library
science curriculum for Asian librarians. A university in Thailand has
already expressed interest in hosting the course which will be a combination
of classroom, distance learning and work experience. Details
here.
The largest for the
biggest
Anything to do with numbers and China we're often
sceptical about. For years official statistics were a baseline for
imaginative guessing games. And then there's the thousand, million and
billion thing where numbers regularly get mixed up in speech and
publications. But because this story comes from Xinhua we're pretty sure
that millions are not hundreds of thousands. The key numbers to remember
are 12 million, 25 percent and 31 million. They're contextualised
for you here.
Amazon.co.uk and the British Library and
antique books
ACCESS
likes this get together of two leviathans. Rare book sellers
can peddle their wares on the UK Amazon web site, but buyers must have
found it difficult to track them down because the BL has added
more then 2.5 million records to the Amazon catalogue to make
describing and finding them easier. Now it will be a doddle to
find that first folio of Shakespeare that you've always wanted...
here
has more, much more dear friends.
And yet another get together...
Only this time it's Gale and Google. Users of the
former's InfoTrac platform will be able to link to the latter's Image
Search service while searching within the premium databases. And all this
because Gale customers were requesting additional images in their
databases. So those sweetypies at Gale... Not to trivialise this great
idea, customers will be able to search a reported 425 million images.
Pandas for example, are mentioned here.
Your favourite ebook service gets A+ rating
(but not from Moody's)
Is it Knovel as in knickers? Or Knovel as in kanoon?
At the Online Information show in London it was defiantly (k)novel without
the k. We prefer k-novel since it makes us and them stand out in the
crowd. We're unsure what the Library Journal calls them (Darling,
perhaps?) since recently awarding the service an A+ rating for all sorts
of innovative and groovy features. kThey're klisted in the
kfeaturette here.
Online Information 2003 which concluded
recently in London (2-4 December), was amongst the quietest in
recent memory. The crowds seemed smaller and the number of booths -
or the floor space they occupied - was reduced. Gone too was the
buzz about new products and directions for libraries and the content
industry. In each of the last few years there's been something to
fire the imagination such as linking technologies, ejournals and
ebooks. But this year there was nothing much to get excited about
although many companies were showing new products and services.
Here's a round up of what caught our eye.
The American Institute of
Physics and IEE have partnered
to provide Scitation Alerts powered by INSPEC, from April
2004. Scientists may subscribe to alerts from 100 physics
related subjects and receive weekly email updates of new
research added to the INSPEC database. IEE also announced
several enhancements to INSPEC including: Manufacturing and
Product Engineering will be added to Section E of the
database; the entire collection of Science Abstracts
from 1898-1968 will be offered as an XML archival backfile;
and one million full text links (DOIs) will be added to the
backfile. Showing for the first time was IEE.tv a multimedia
webcasting service for viewing IEE's seminars, lectures and
conferences online. Its website is here
.
IEEE journals added to
VJ
AIP also
announced that it will become the publisher of record for the
innovative online journal Geochemical Transactions
which was launched in 2000 as a publishing partnership between
the American Chemical Society's Division of Geochemistry and
the Royal Society of Chemistry. Also destined for the AIP/APS
Virtual Journals in Science and Technology (VJ) service are
articles and abstracts from the IEEE's 120
journals. Virtual
Journals are online publications that collect papers
from a broad range of science journals. The series includes
nanoscale science, quantum information and ultrafast physics
and incorporates the latest issues of more than 175 journals
including Nature and Science
.
IEEE had a slew
of announcements for Online Information 2003. First is the
news that Google will display IEEE Technical Papers in its
search results. Google is currently crawling, or indexing, the
abstracts for all IEEE technical documents and standards
available through the IEEE Xplore online delivery
platform. When completed, Google users will see the linked
content in their search results. Non-IEEE subscribers will be
able to purchase the documents online. This might be the
reason why IEEE also announced a partnership with Infotrieve to
provide access to the latter's document delivery services
through links from IEEE Xplore
.
The best priced journals
ever, anywhere
IEEE also
issued news to gladden the hearts of librarians everywhere:
IEEE journals are the most highly cited in their fields while
being priced 42 percent below market average. A journal
pricing study found that the average price for an IEEE
periodical is USD370 while comparable journals cost USD642.
Even those from other non-profit publishers were more
expensive than IEEE at an average cost of USD485. As for
citation league tables, the most recent ISI Journal Citation
Study found that IEEE publishes 8 of the top 10 cited
publications in electrical engineering; the top 7 journals in
telecommunications; and the number one cited publications in
imaging science, computer science, information systems,
robotics, software engineering and other categories.
A PayPerView
Service is new from Ovid. Subscribers are
able to purchase journal articles if their institution doesn't
already subscribe to them. The service is offered on both the
SilverPlatter and Ovid platforms. Ovid with
IEEE also announced the creation of an online
IEEE Biomedical Library through Journals@Ovid
. Barbara Lange, IEEE Director of
Publications Business Development said that the service "is
IEEE's first article compilation organized around a subject
area rather than packaged by publication." The Library offers
more than 40,000 full text documents from IEEE and IEE
published since 1988.
Also launched at
the conference was Oxford Scholarship
Online from Oxford University Press
, dedicated
to the humanities and social sciences. It offers more than 700
OUP books with 200 new titles added each year. See page nine
for more details.
GBP2 million spent by British
Library
New technology
for document delivery was showcased by the British
Library which has spent GBP2 million on
technology to e-deliver over 100 million items to we assume,
excited customers. This secure service is based on Adobe
Reader 6.0 and Relais. Interestingly, the BL has delivered
over 100 million documents in the past 40 years which in
ACCESS
'
opinion means an income well over one billion pounds.
FreePint, an online
community of research workers, launched VIP at its booth. The
monthly VIP
offers product
reviews, case studies, and interviews with senior information
industry figures. VIP Eye provides twice monthly news and
analysis. The VIP website also has two free services: the Wire
and the Lounge, the former being a press release database
while the latter is a discussion area.
Emerald showcased
ManagementFirst
an innovative service built around
leading journals. It is split into nine forums such as change
management and innovation, and has discussion forums, case
studies, articles and interviews with management gurus.
Oral history from Alexander
Street Press
A favourite
publisher of ACCESS, Alexander Street
Press (seeissue
45 for an interview with its CEO Stephen Rhind-Tutt), has
a couple of new and very different databases. Oral History
Index indexes more than 2,000 English language collections
from around the world, representing interviews with well over
one hundred thousand individuals from all walks of life. Mr
Rhind-Tutt told ACCESS
,
"we're in the midst of building the index so the numbers are
changing constantly. At the moment the full text proportion is
some 7 percent, but that's mainly because we've found much
more material than we anticipated." Currently the collection
points to 5 million pages of which 400,000 are full text.
There are also 6,800 audio files and 1,200 video files. The
collection will launch in January 2004 with about 10 percent
of this and build to the larger number during the year.
For personal
perspectives on current affairs such as globalisation, the
second new database from Alexander Street Press, Global Views
and Voices, offers more than 1,200 articles on more than 100
topics by 600 authors in 58 countries. The content includes
personal perspectives on current development issues from
villagers, local activists and politicians, to well known
thinkers and personalities such as Salman Rushdie, Carl Bildt
and the Body Shop founder, Anita Roddick. There is also a
pubic forum for registered readers to debate amongst
themselves and with the authors themselves.
Online Resources from the
World Bank
Staying with
international affairs, the World
Bank
introduced its Online Resources. It
offers access to three World Bank databases: World Bank
e-Library - books, journals and reports; World Development
Indicators Online - data for over 550 development indicators
for over 200 countries; and Global Development Finance Online
- debt and financial flow data for 138 countries.
IBSS, the
International
Bibliography of the Social Sciences
with more than 2 million references dating
back to 1951, has expanded its full text links via Ingenta,
JSTOR, Emerald Fulltext, Infotrieve and SpringerLink.
The Electronic Archiving Network
Initiative (EMANI) from Springer now has
its own website at www.emani.org. It offers free access to 100
mathematical journals from various publishers. As well as
digitally produced journals, these also include recently
digitised titles such as Mathematische Annalen
.
The iGroup's
eBridge platform is the engine behind the new version of CAB
Direct from CABI. It's loaded with
an intuitive interface and new features including links from
abstract to full text within 3 clicks. The new CAB Direct also
includes user guides and tutorials to get the most out of this
new service. CABI is also planning to put its entire archive
of CAB Abstracts
online. Known as the Heritage Project, the
online file will span from 1908 to the present.
First time exhibitor from
China
Exhibiting for
the first time was Wanfang Data
from China, the provider of several flagship Chinese
databases. They include Chinese Digital Periodicals Database
(CDPD), Chinese Dissertation Database Fulltext (CDCF) and
Chinese Science and Technology Papers and Citation Database
(CSTPC). The company was founded in 1993 under the Institute
of Scientific & Technical Information of China (ISTIC).
May Zhang from Wanfang's Overseas Marketing Department told
ACCESS that while she had a trickle
of visitors to her booth, meeting other exhibitors and
electronic publishers made the trip from Beijing worthwhile.
She also announced the launch of Wanfang's new English
language website here
.
The American Psychological
Association must be hoping that students of
psychology will become enthusiastic users of PsycBOOKS, a new
database containing full text scholarly titles published by
APA Books, when it debuts in April 2004. The initial service
will have 500 titles from 1950-2002 including 100 out of print
and 50 classic psychology books from other publishers. The
collection will also include an exclusive electronic release
of the APA/OUP Encyclopedia of Psychology
with more than 1,500 authored entries.
The European Community
had one of the largest booths
at the exhibition as befits this juggernaut. Just published on
CD-ROM is TARIC, a database used by the Commission and Member
States for applying Community Tariff and trade measures
relating to imports to the customs territory of the EU of
products originating in non-member countries, and to exports
of Community products to non-member countries. The CD is in
eleven languages and costs EUR50.
H.W. Wilson keeps on adding
to WilsonWeb
Humanities &
Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1984 is one of the
new products announced for WilsonWeb from H.W.
Wilson
in 2004. Also new is Book Review Digest
Plus with a 300 percent increase in the number of books
covered and a doubling to 1,200,000 of the book reviews. A
completely new database for 2004 is Index to Legal Periodicals
Retrospective: 1918-1981. Bibliographic Index is also new with
indexing of over 272,000 bibliographies in all the major
European languages. Wilson also announced that WilsonWeb
databases will henceforth link to Ingenta full text who will
also provide a full text document delivery service for
WilsonWeb customers.
The
18th century in the 21st was the
highlight of Gale
's latest product Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Billed
as the most ambitious single digitisation project ever
undertaken, the database offers 33 million text-searchable
pages based on The English Short Title Catalogue, a
machine-readable union list of the holdings of the British
Library, as well as those from more than 1,500 university,
private and public libraries world wide. In sum, you get
150,000 English-language titles and editions published between
1701-1800. That's a lifetime's reading for academics and
insomniacs.
IEEE journals added to
VJ
