Infotoday Blog

ITI Bloggers December 2nd, 2004

Co-publishers Vitek Tracz and Eugene Garfield will announce tomorrow that The Scientist, a widely read free print and electronic publication, will be switching to a paid subscription model, at least for institutional subscribers, with BioMed Central handling subscription sales, according to Natasha Robshaw, head of marketing and sales for BioMed Central.

Late today Natasha told me that those who qualify to receive The Scientist under its controlled circulation model will continue to receive the print publication free. There are currently 70,000 practicing scientists in this category.

But institutions will now have to pay. How much? Glancing over her shoulder at the hot-of-the-press price list, I observed it’s a little complex to give a simple answer.

“An ‘average’ institution,” she said, “will pay $2500 a year for one copy of the print publication and unlimited online access.”

Further details will be announced tomorrow by BioMed Central.

But, remember, you heard it here first.

BioMed Central was also at the conference promoting its new Open Repository service. Under this intiative the Open Access publisher will help libraries build institutional repositories, using DSpace as the platform.

The service was announced earlier this fall, but, as another bit of exclusive information, the first organization to sign up is INSERM in France, according to Ms. Robshaw.

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content

• Online Information 2004

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ITI Bloggers December 2nd, 2004

Another Content Management company that Martin White recommended I see is Immediacy, a UK firm that says it provides cost-effective CM solutions for organizations of all sizes.”

Even on the final day of the trade show and even as the show was otherwise winding down, Immedicay’s product presentation drew a reasonable crowd. As the speaker finished his remarks, I heard someone in the audience say, “Hmm., very interesting.”

Visit an example of Immediacy’s technology at the British Council’s Web site and I think you will find it interesting, too.

***

And thus with my visit to Immediacy, I wound up a quick tour of some, hopefully representative, CM companies among the 82 vendors who classified themselves in the CM category.

As the picture shows, Factiva (a content aggregator) positioned itself right in the middle of them, which (hmm. hmm.) I found interesting. Content, itself, after all, is also part of an organizations’ CM strategy. Other companies listing themselves in this category included OCLC, Questel Orbit, and Information Today.

Dick Kaser

ITI VP, Content

• Online Information 2004

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ITI Bloggers December 2nd, 2004

There’s always this let down when you’ve finished your last talk of the conference and there’s only an hour to go til the entire place shuts down.

I left the Theatre presentation, went over to the AIIP stand, had a nice chat, went to the Information Today stand (which is next to AIIP), had a nice chat, discovered I couldn’t sit still, and decided I needed more input from speakers. So I headed upstairs to the sessions. The portals track ended early so I didn’t catch any of that one. Drifted into one on enterprise search in time to catch the tail end of Ben Anderson’s talk on exploring user search habits and assessing need. He’s at the Department of Work & Pensions in the UK and is using Verity, but not all the bells and whistles.

I didn’t stay for the conference wrap up, there were still a few loose ends on the exhibition floor.

Before I knew it, the hall was closing. Three days of conference ended. And I’m left with the frustrating feeling that there were exhibitors I missed, speakers I should have heard, and conversations with attendees I should have had.

Yes, information overload. Perhaps I’ll do better next year.

Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals
www.onlinemag.net

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ITI Bloggers December 2nd, 2004

“Most CM systems are too complicated,” said Alan Wigley, UK Sales Executive for WebPac. “They have too many functions that are certainly needed in some cases. But most customers only need 5% of them.”

Presto!

CM vendor WebPac, which has been in business for about 7 years, recently launched v. 3.0 of its Xture software.

Wigley describes the product as “a very straight-forward front-end that permits users to easily build intranets, extranets and portals.”

Practicing what they preach, you’ll find WebPac’s own site powered by it.

Dick Kaser

ITI VP, Content

• Online Information 2004

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ITI Bloggers December 2nd, 2004

As always, Online Information is the most wonderful place to reconnect with friends and colleagues from other countries. I was so pleased to see some familiar Czech and Slovak faces this week, people I met when I spoke at Albertina’s InForum last May. I was particularly glad to hear Anna Diacikova (her surname is without the proper diacritics, I’m afraid) speak about the competencies she requires of herself and her staff at Slovakia’s Chemosvit. The things they can accomplish with only a 5 person department! So impressive! She talked about doing things that many other information professionals only think about doing, well maybe some don’t even think about it. As a practical follow-on to the more philosophical comments of Janice Lachance, it made for a very effective track on topics relevant to information professionals.

Also in that session was Dennie Heye, a Dutch librarian with Shell Exploration and Production, talking about their globalization project. Shell has gone from an extremely decentralized library services structure to a centralized one. Standardization is one goal. I was particularly interested in how they’ve established two regional centers to handle literature searches, one in the U.S. and one in Holland.

It was also good to see colleagues from Finland that I had last seen at the October EUSIDIC meeting in Helsinki. I don’t think any of them were speaking at a session, but listening to their comments on the conference and exhibition gave me some new perspectives.

Marydee Ojala

Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals

www.onlinemag.net

• Online Information 2004

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ITI Bloggers December 2nd, 2004

In the category of European privacy rights meeting freedom of the press . . . here was a vendor not at all happy to receive free public exposure for its product.

I’m not exactly sure who this company is or what it does. And I’m certainly not going to go out of my way to find out.

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content

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ITI Bloggers December 2nd, 2004

Let’s see, the blogger team has been all over the exhibition, visited the sessions, sat in on international forums, and contributed to roundtables. But that’s not the entire extent of Online Information. If you didn’t want to pay to go to the sessions (held at a rather far distance from the exhibition area), you had numerous opportunities to listen to highly knowledgeable and qualified speakers in the various Theatres sprinkled about the exhibition. These you don’t pay for. Amelia Kassel’s Web search techniques presentation this morning was overflowing. Arthur Weiss did a marvelous talk on competitive intelligence aspects of corporate web sites. He warned that he didn’t want web site designers listening to his talk because if they were in attendance, all that lovely data would disappear. And I spoke this afternoon on Ten Top Business Web sites. I did find it very limiting to be held to 10, so I think I actually had more than that. The Theatre sessions are enormously popular — duh, they’re free — but attendees complain that the rooms aren’t big enough. That was certainly true for Amelia, Arthur, and me.

Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals
www.onlinemag.net

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ITI Bloggers December 2nd, 2004

The enterprise CM service that gets its name from the red dots indicating what you can do, now serves 1200 customers and is behind 3,000 to 4,000 Web sites, according to RedDot Sales Executive Ross Jenner.

"We serve the mid-tier market," he said, "with an integrated suite of content management, document management, business process management, and collaboration tools."

As an example of what can be done with RedDot, visit Deutsche Bank.

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content

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ITI Bloggers December 2nd, 2004

On the recommendation of Conference Program Chair Martin White, I paid a visit to the stand of UK CM vendor, GOSS Interactive.

There I had a delightful visit with GOSS representatives Clare Stirling, sales and marketing manager, and Robert McCarthy, technical director.

The service, which has been active for about five years, is well-known and highly regarded in the UK, but they are still relatively small, with just over 30 employees.

If you’ve ever visited the Web site of Reed-Elsevier, you’ve seen what they can do.

Besides serving big enterprises like Reed, the service is also empowering about 20% of the public sector Web projects in the UK, according to the GOSS representatives. Just get a load of their diverse client list.

Now, according to Ms. Stirling, GOSS will receive funding from the UK Dept. of Travel and Industry to carry out an export initiative.

“We’re looking to spread our wings,” said Mr. McCarthy.

I agree with Martin. GOSS is a company to watch.

Dick Kaser

ITI VP, Content

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ITI Bloggers December 2nd, 2004

David Hamilton, from Documentum, showed me how the company’s new Enterprise Content Integration Services bring federated searching to a company’s desktop.

David is displaying here a search in progress. The various icons arranged in an arc represent different databases, information collections, and even the open Web being searched simultaneously.

You’ll want to read Paula Hane’s NewsBreak story on this breakthrough, published by ITI earlier this year.

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Cotent

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