ITI Bloggers June 16th, 2009

EBSCO Publishing has been Tweeting to get its news out. On Monday, public relations manager Kathleen McEvoy, sent out: For those who can’t attend #sla2009 EBSCO Publishing has mapped content to the SLA conference themes http://budurl.com/EBSCOatSLA2009.

Printouts were also available at the EBSCO booth. Article selections and abstracts came from Business Source Corporate on EBSCOhost and there were a number of excellent Business Book Summaries on leadership, knowledge management, and strategic learning.

Kathleen emphasized that the company now offers a broad spectrum of resources for corporate learning (see www.ebscohost.com/corporatelearning). Earlier this month it announced a series of 10 Learning Centers (www.ebscohost.com/uploads/thisTopic-dbTopic-1273.pdf). She says these become critical resources in a time of downsizing and cutbacks. Each of the Learning Centers provides current learning content for corporate training and development applications.

At SLA, EBSCO Publishing released a new database called Academic Search R &D (ASR&D). With ASR&D, corporate users may link directly from the citation-only records in A&I databases on EBSCOhost to the corresponding full text in Academic Search R&D. ASR&D contains cover-to-cover information-complete full text articles with images, tables, charts and other graphical content-from more than 3,600 titles. ASR&D also includes more than 2,800 peer-reviewed journals, many of which are available in native (searchable) PDF format.

Another tweet went out-the company has also added the Federal Research In Progress (FEDRIP) database produced by NTIS, which provides information for ongoing research in the fields of engineering, physical & life sciences. FEDRIP project descriptions generally include project title, keywords, start date, estimated completion date, principal investigator, performing and sponsoring organizations, summary, and progress report. It does not function like an archive and the projects are removed once completed.

Kathleen also reports that EBSCOhost Integrated Search is in testing and expected to launch in July at the ALA Annual conference (see www.ebscohost.com/integrate for more info). And, the new Discovery Service announced in April should start beta testing this fall with the goal to launch by the end of the year. (For details, see the NewsBreak at http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/New-Discovery-Tools-for-Online-Resources-From-OCLC-and-EBSCO-53468.asp.) She says the company is on target for fiscal year 2009 to deliver its planned 52 new databases to the EBSCOhost service. “We’re one of the few companies in Massachusetts that is still hiring. We just held a career fair to fill 35 open technical positions and 300 very qualified people attended.”

Paula J. Hane

News Bureau Chief, ITI

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