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    February 2nd, 2012LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    2/2/2012

    CONTACT:

    Nathan Curulla

    (888) 900-8944

    sales@bywatersolutions.com

    Six Libraries Partner to Bring DOM Biblio Indexing to Koha

    ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company announced today that six of their library partners are joining forces to bring DOM Biblio Indexing to Koha.

    The libraries collaborating on this effort include:

    • Arcadia Public Library of Arcadia, CA
    • Brooklyn Law School of Brooklyn, NY
    • Goddard College of Plainfield, VT
    • Marlboro College of Marlboro, VT
    • Ripon College of Ripon, WI
    • The Vermont Organization of Koha Automated Libraries (VOKAL) of VT

    ByWater Solutions will be partnering with Equinox Software, of Duluth, GA on this development, making it a cross company, multi partner collaborative effort.



    The DOM Biblio Indexing development will greatly improve authority searching in Koha by allowing for fully coordinated subject heading searches. The development will also provide the option to search for an exact title, including subtitle and title parts, as well as indexing the full title with and without initial stop words to allow for more accurate title sorting.

    The DOM Biblio Indexing development also provides the framework for additional features in Koha that otherwise would not be possible to develop such as broader, narrower and related authorities searches and OCLC number record matching. It will also open the door for differentiating Subject heading thesauri, relator term indexing and enhanced item availability limiting.

    Brendan Gallagher, CEO of ByWater stated:

    “I’m very excited to see so many of our partners joining forces to make this development a reality.  One of the great things about open source software is that different libraries can work together and pool their resources to come up with a solution that will meet all of their needs, while at the same time adding to the functionality of Koha for all of its users.”

    About Koha:

    Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). In use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals. Koha’s impressive feature set continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base. It includes modules for circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, serials, reserves, patron management, branch relationships, and more.

    Koha’s OPAC, circulation, management and self-checkout interfaces are all based on standards-compliant World Wide Web technologies–XHTML, CSS and Javascript–making Koha a truly platform-independent solution. Koha is distributed under the open-source General Public License (GPL). For more information about Koha, please visit www.koha-community.org

    About ByWater Solutions:

    With over 10 years of experience, ByWater Solutions offers customized hosting, data migration, configuration, installation, training, top ranked support options and development of enterprise class open-source library systems. Offering a 24/7 technical helpline, ByWater Solutions’ clients have the support system they need to make their software work for them. ByWater Solutions pledges to share 100% of all developed code to the Koha community for the strengthening and advancement of the Koha ILS. For more information about ByWater Solutions, please visit: www.bywatersolutions.com

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    February 2nd, 2012LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    http://brill.nl/brill-typeface

    Display any language from any period - Freely available for non-commercial use

    Brill has taken the initiative of designing a typeface. Named “the Brill”, the new typeface presents complete coverage of the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts with the full range of diacritics and linguistics characters used to display any language from any period correctly. There are over 5,100 characters in all. This indispensable tool for scholars has become freely available for non-commercial use. “The Brill” will be especially welcomed by humanities scholars quoting from texts in any language, ancient or modern. John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks, well-known for his multilingual fonts, is the Brill’s designer.

    "Technically, the Brill fonts have to be able to legibly display any combination of the supported characters that might be encountered in text and to be able to do so in typographically sophisticated ways. The idea is that users will be able to throw pretty much any text at these fonts and get back a legible and aesthetically pleasing display."
    - John Hudson, designer, Tiro Typeworks

    If you would like to receive more information about this project, please contact Dominique de Roo, marketing manager, via roo@brill.nl

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    February 2nd, 2012LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    At the opening of the Digital Book World Conference in New York City in January, the British Library, together with technology partner, BiblioLabs, LLC, was awarded the prestigious Publishing Innovation Award (PIA) for their British Library 19th Century Historical Collection iPad App. The App, released in August last year to rave reviews from both critics and consumers, offers seamless, cloud-based access to more than 45,000 historical works from the British Library, spanning 21 thematic collections.

    The Publishing Innovation Awards were established to honor outstanding digital products that enrich and delight readers. The British Library 19th Century Historical Collection App was named the 2012 Winner in the Reference/Academic category.
    Accepting the award, Simon Bell, Head of Strategic Partnership and Licensing at the British Library said “The British Library is delighted to be working with the outstanding team of technologists at BiblioLabs to unlock the potential of devices like the iPad. We are thrilled to have been able to offer these exquisite, high-resolution, full-color facsimiles of 19th Century books in a manner that comes close to the experience of leafing through the original item. This is a great example of how the British Library is using digital technology to make the riches of our historical collections accessible and compelling to a wider audience than was ever previously possible.”

    BiblioLabs, LLC (www.bibliolabs.com) is the fast growing software-media company that built the cloud-based technology platform to manage the selection, enhancement, and distribution of the featured British Library collection. BiblioLabs, LLC has become a global leader in the creation of interactive Apps featuring historical books and artifacts from the world’s leading libraries and cultural institutions.

    The Company only recently moved into digital book distribution. It began in 2007 as a print-on-demand (POD) publisher offering historical reproductions. Prior to founding BiblioLabs, LLC the same group started BookSurge, LLC the world’s first truly global POD (one book at a time) retail infrastructure, which was sold to Amazon.com in 2005 and was integrated to become Amazon’s global print-on-demand solution as well as the Amazon self-publishing service CreateSpace.

    “The exciting thing for us is that this is the first App we created and we did it with a very small team, in a very short time,” says BiblioLabs founder and Chief Business Officer Mitchell Davis. “It met with phenomenal success as a consumer product when it launched and it has continued to grow” (today it has over 350,000 users in over 150 countries and growing).

    “To also have our innovative approach to content distribution recognized by the industry is really an honor and a signal to the great things you will see from us.” Davis added “The British Library is an ideal partner. They care deeply about their materials, and the public they serve. They are continuously looking for ways to innovate and increase the impact of their services. Working with them is a true partnership.”

    Building on the things they learned this past year, BiblioLabs, LLC will roll out a larger App in April 2012 - BiblioBoard. “Tens of millions of historical artifacts are available and our mission is to curate the interesting, quirky, important, weird, or forgotten, then integrate creative modern context and make engaging thematic content products. BiblioBoard is the unified interface where curators will meet readers and this will happen across tens of thousands of books, articles and images within hundreds of curated niche Apps.” Curious bibliophiles can sign up for pre-release, preview access at BiblioBoard.com.
    At launch BiblioBoard will contain more than forty niche Apps including a number of micro-collections from the British Library. “Our team is hugely excited that as we are winning this award we are already moving to the next generation product.” Davis says.

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    February 2nd, 2012LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    Come with us this spring as we explore Turkey and meet the Turks!

    While our tour includes elements of special interest to library professionals and bibliophiles, anyone with an interest in history, the arts, and archeology is welcome to join this introduction to Turkey’s illustrious past and contemporary attractions.

    We begin in Istanbul, the only city to straddle both Europe and Asia. Let us open the doors to mosque collections dating from the 15th century and to the extraordinary German Archeological Institute archives. We’ll travel to the Aegean region and visit the acropolis of Pergamon (whose library treasures were Marc Anthony’s wedding gift to Cleopatra). Pondering the glory that was Rome, we can contemplate the magnificent Library of Celsus in Ephesus, the grandest city of the eastern Roman Empire.

    Springtime in Asia Minor presents us with a riot of native blooms, and anyone with botanical enthusiasms will enjoy the journey as we trace the Meander River eastwards to Konya, center of the mystical Whirling Dervish sect. Here, as in so many Turkish provincial cities, there are private museums and libraries open to public. Crossing the high Central Anatolian Plateau, we proceed to Cappadocia,whose eerie, wind-sculpted, volcanic valleys are dotted with hundreds of early churches.

    Traditional agrarian rhythms persist in central Turkey, and we’ll learn about one of the region’s earliest social entrepreneurs who worked to increase literacy and bring the printed word (via donkeys laden with books!) to remote villages.

    Through all of this we’ll include the famous highlights that have drawn visitors to Turkey for centuries- Haghia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Hippodrome, Topkapi Palace, the fanciful waterfront mansions of the Bosphorus….

    The Pergamon Asklepion where Galen practiced medicine… Ephesus’s famous colonnaded street and theatre where St. Paul addressed the populace …. the flower-strewn site and sculpture museum of Aphrodisias, sacred to the pagan Goddess of Love. Rumi’s brilliant turquoise-tiled shrine, and the lunar landscape of Cappadocia.

    Land Program in Turkey: $2,425.00 per person, double occupancy.

    The tour begins and finishes in Istanbul, 17 April – 26 April 2012.

    Separate extensions for Istanbul or other regions of Turkey can be made on a customized basis.

    Airfare to/from Turkey is NOT included, but we are happy to advise you about economical flights or help you make the most of your frequent flyer miles.

    For the complete, day-by-day itinerary of this tour or other programs, please email either-Equinox Travel info@Equinox.com.tr or Holly Chase Holly@HollyChase.com

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    February 2nd, 2012LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    ~ Content Coverage and Subject Indexes Key Factors in Decision ~

    IPSWICH, Mass. — February 2, 2011 —Bielefeld University has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) citing superior content coverage as one of the main factors in its decision. Bielefeld selected EDS after an intense and detailed review of the service, determining that EBSCO Discovery Service provided the best content coverage plus the option to integrate high quality subject indexes.

    University Library Bielefeld is one of the most prestigious libraries worldwide with a strong focus on the quality and development of services provided to its users. The university had been looking to replace its Journal Articles Database, known and used Germany-wide under the name of JADE, which the library created and developed in the mid 1990s.

    Mr. Dirk Pieper, Media Department Head, says the university library was very pleased with the content in EBSCO Discovery Service and it was one of the major factors when choosing EDS as its discovery solution. “Our decision to choose EDS was primarily due to the superior content coverage provided in the Base Index. EDS convinced us with its high quality A&I data and will replace our own journal articles database, JADE, which can be seen as a first kind of discovery development started by our library itself in the mid 90s.”

    Libraries subscribing to subject indexes on EBSCOhost can leverage EBSCO's "platform blending" technology to infuse results from these high-end indexes into the EDS result list, heightening the overall value and experience for end users. For Pieper this unique attribute of EDS was a major factor in the decision to implement EDS. “We were very pleased with the integration of EBSCO database subject indexes and the option to blend in high quality subject indexes. In addition EBSCO’s web services help us to accomplish integrating the strong EDS index into our own library catalog using a very comfortable interface (API).”

    EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box — searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.

    The Base Index for EBSCO Discovery Service forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalog, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes. It is this combination that allows a single, comprehensive, custom solution for discovering the value of any library’s collection.

    The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from the world’s foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers. Although constantly growing, today the EDS Base Index provides metadata for nearly 64,000 magazines & journals, approximately 825,000 CDs & DVDs, nearly six million books, more than 320 million newspaper articles, more than 400,000 conference proceedings and hundreds of thousands of additional information sources from various source-types.

    About University Library Bielefeld
    University Library Bielefeld stands in the library community worldwide for innovative, user-friendly information services that were developed and tested in Bielefeld and later adopted by library unions and single libraries joining their user groups. University Library Bielefeld was the first library to run an OPAC in Germany in 1979. University Library of Bielefeld is the host and organizer of the Bielefeld Conference, a bi-annual conference, set up 1992 to especially create a discussion forum focused on library innovation (10th International Bielefeld Conference: 24 - 26 April 2012), and is known for technological innovation in search engines and communication systems, of which the open access platform BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is only one example.

    About EBSCO Publishing
    EBSCO Publishing is the producer of EBSCOhost®, the world’s premier for-fee online research service, including full-text databases, subject indexes, point-of-care medical reference, historical digital archives, and eBooks. The company provides more than 350 databases and nearly 300,000 eBooks. 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 Service™ (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@ebscohost.com. EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.

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    For more information, please contact:
    Kathleen McEvoy
    Public Relations Director
    EBSCO Publishing
    (800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
    kmcevoy@ebscohost.com