The Art of Conjuring E-content

Any magician would be proud of the database industry. Disappearing acts, metamorphoses, and even a bit of pure trickery characterized this "magical" year.

The dirtiest trick award goes to the divine/RoweCom/Faxon debacle. This show unfolded over several months and continues, as both RoweCom and parent company divine have filed for bankruptcy. EBSCO having recently acquired what's left of RoweCom's subscription businesses worldwide and is working with publishers to strike a deal that will help libraries pull their undelivered serials out of the bankruptcy hat. But divine is also the parent company of NorthernLight. This highly touted web search engine has already discontinued its article sales service, Special Collection. Factiva has offered Special Collection's corporate customers a subset of Factiva's content to replace the lost service.

Most of the Tribune newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun, were removed from LexisNexis Academic and from Dialog. As library serials budgets are being slashed, primary publishers report that aggregator services cut into their subscriptions. By forcing libraries to access titles directly from their web sites or only by subscription, primary publishers hope to pull the serials rabbit out of the hat.

Government information also disappeared. The entire PubSCIENCE online service was discontinued at the end of 2002, most likely the victim of lobbying by commercial companies eager to stem government competition. In addition, owing to worries over terrorism, sensitive information was taken off government web sites throughout the year.

Responding to an outcry in the scholarly community, Elsevier (formerly Elsevier Science) changed its policy of removing discredited articles from ScienceDirect and replacing them with a cryptic legal notice. Elsevier links a notice to discredited or retracted articles. If an article must be withdrawn for legal reasons, ScienceDirect keeps the metadata and posts a more informative message explaining why the article was withdrawn.

Joint ventures, mergers, and acquisitions continue to transform companies and services. Nearly two-thirds of our respondents made a strategic partnership this year, and 84 percent report a new product or service. Almost all added content to existing services.

Some of the joint ventures start at home, as Thomson's numerous divisions are beginning to work together. ReferenceLink, for example, available through Gale, combines newspapers from Dialog's new NewsRoom Library with 50 databases from Dialog. It employs an InfoTrac-like interface.

Many companies made agreements to solidify their core businesses. Infotrieve purchased RLG's Ariel service to enhance its document delivery capabilities. Dun & Bradstreet refocused on its core content, business information, as it spun off A.C. Nielson, Moody's, and R.H. Donnelly but purchased Hoover's. Oxford University Press bought the Grove Dictionaries from Macmillan. Ingenta expanded access to its journal holdings by partnering with Gale to offer Ingenta titles through InfoTrac. OCLC added linking from many services to its Electronic Collections Online and from its FirstSearch service.

Other activities expanded markets. The school market is a new focus for some companies. ProQuest's purchase of bigchalk gives the firm an instant boost in the K–12 market. Gale's new Kids InfoBits will use InfoTrac's interface with resources geared to grades K–5. Facts On File knows the school market but will expand in it by creating two new history databases. Ingenta's purchase of Heron, a British course pack provider, may bring it more directly into the college instruction market.

Some old services got a new look this year. H.W. Wilson Co. unveiled a totally revamped version of WilsonWeb, the front-end of a metamorphosis of its entire internal indexing system. Factiva will move all of the old Dow Jones Interactive and Reuters Business Briefing customers to the completely new factiva.com. Content, searching, and special features keep Factiva's focus clearly on the business market.

ProQuest added additional publishers to its database, including the Wall Street Journal, and reached an agreement with Tribune publishing to add the complete runs of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times to ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

The trend of bringing the past into the future continues with ProQuest's American Periodicals Series, which provides access to over 1100 periodicals that began publishing between 1741 and 1900. Wilson's Readers' Guide Retrospective now includes all Readers' Guide content from 1890 to 1982. The American Chemical Society Journal Articles archive is now linked to the CAS abstracts database, which goes back to its 1907 roots. Subject and chemical substance indexing are also being added to the original bibliographic records.

Companies that provide e-books continue to build products in expectation of customers. In the reference and library market, that is happening already.

OCLC's netLibrary now has over 50,000 e-book titles. In the last half of 2002 it added ten publishers, including over 500 technical e-books from Kluwer Academic. netLibrary is seeking more Spanish-language, health, and business content. Gale will offer e-versions of the Gale reference books on netLibrary. It also began an ambitious project to digitize all 150,000 English-language books published in the 18th century. H.W. Wilson's reference books, such as Famous First Facts, are also available on netLibrary.

netLibrary is not the only e-book vendor. Special librarians are talking about Knovel, which provides scientific and engineering books along with nifty software that allows cross-book searching, interactive tables and graphs, and full-text searching. ebrary now has over 20,000 e-book titles from all types of publishers. Springer-Verlag's LINK service mixes electronic journals and e-books while Books@Ovid continues to add scientific, technical, and medical (STM) titles as a companion to Journals@Ovid. Greenwood introduced Literature in Context, an e-version of its sourcebook titles, and ARBA online, an e-book version of Library Unlimited's American Reference Books Annual (ARBA). BioOne will debut its first e-book in 2003.

History is a growth area for e-books. ABC-CLIO makes all books published since 2000 available as both print and e-books. Gutenberg-e, a project of Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association, will provide high-quality history e-books, with links to additional web content, on a subscription basis.

The greater world of the web should never be ignored in the database marketplace. Many information companies (and some libraries) see the free web and web search engines such as Google as their main competition for end users. Google introduced new products in the last year, notably Google News, which brings together current news stories from major sources worldwide and organizes them into topical categories. AOL switched to Google's search engine.

If you can't beat the web, you can join it (or at least add it). Elsevier's Scirus system points to selected science web sites with hopes to be the Google for science. Scirus was selected by the readers of Search Engine Watch as the best specialty search engine in both 2001 and 2002.

Vivisimo's document clustering features have made it the second hottest search engine for the last couple of years. The American Institute of Physics recently selected Vivisimo's search engine for its Axiom online search service.

In March 2003, Microsoft announced an agreement with Gale, Factiva, and Alacritudes that will enable users to access limited business content from these vendors without leaving Microsoft Office 2003. Using XML and Web Services, the content will be available through Word, Excel, and other popular Microsoft products.

Neither a magic show nor the database industry can succeed without props. In the database marketplace the props include technical standards, interface software, and software for linking.

The OpenURL standard is due soon. In the meantime, proprietary services such as Ex Libris's SFX are using OpenURL to help libraries provide links between its bibliographic databases and electronic journals. WilsonLink introduced SFX in the new version of WilsonWeb. EBSCO Publishing is going a step further by introducing a competitive linking software product, LinkSource, that will be sold as standalone software and included as part of EBSCOhost. LinkSource includes prevalidated links that match citations with available full text from over 12,000 journals. Endeavor has its own LinkFinderPlus, and ISI is partnering with Openly Informatics to market Openly Informatic's OpenURL software. Soon, bibliographic databases and library catalogs that do not provide links to full text may be a thing of the past.

In early 2003, Serials Solutions began marketing Journal Linker to bridge the gap between a citation and its full text. When users perform a search in a subscribed database and find a citation, they can click on a hyperlink and Journal Linker displays the library's holdings for that title, whether it is print, electronic, or microform. For local holdings, the link often includes MARC records.

Overhauls of interfaces help more users get to database content. Factiva added Chinese and Japanese interfaces, while FirstSearch now has interfaces in Chinese, Spanish, and French. Interface redesigns were introduced by RLG/Eureka, STN Express, WilsonWeb, LexisNexis Academic, and others.

Other software props are more specialized. Factiva Fusion adds XML and Factiva's "Intelligent Indexing" to internal and external information, providing an integrated search system. R.R. Bowker's Ulrich's Serials Analysis System will allow libraries to evaluate its serials collections. ISI's ResearchSoft division produces software for managing citations.

The economy of the past 18 months makes magic hard to come by in libraries and the companies that serve them. With budgets down, libraries are looking for lower-cost alternatives. Database companies are coping with that reality by creating a bit of magic of their own. The vast majority are going with joint ventures, partnering with competitors, working toward standards, and adding more content—while trying to hold prices down. While a little black magic appeared in the database industry this year, most participants are using good business sense to make it through.

ABC-CLIO 130 Cremona Dr., Santa Barbara, CA 93117; 800-368-6868; 805-968-1911. www.abc-clio.com
Users have logged the five millionth combined session of Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life. While increased volume and changes in site architecture caused access problems, ABC-CLIO has responded with hardware and software changes. CLIO Links facilitates access to full-text articles from JSTOR, the History Cooperative, ProjectMUSE, SwetsnetNavigator, etc. The new ABC-CLIO e-books service is available through a web browser, with unlimited access and MARC records. Future plans include putting the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalog on the web.

Alexander Street Press, LLC 3212 Duke St., Alexandria, VA 22314; 800-889-5937. www.alexanderstreetpress.com
Alexander Street Press continues to develop scholarly, full-text collections of primary sources in the humanities and social sciences with indexing by subject experts. At the ALA Midwinter Meeting 2003, it launched American Film Scripts Online (1000 titles upon completion) and Asian American Drama (250 titles planned). Alexander Street's partnerships with film studios, like Warner Bros. and the Writer's Guild, should enhance the value of these products. New titles are Black Thought and Culture; North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories; and Digital Library of Catholic Reformation (from Ad Fontes). A collection of ten Alexander Street titles, called The Sheet, has been packaged and priced for smaller institutions.

American Psychological Association 750 1st St. NE, Washington, DC 20002-4242; 800-374-2722; 202-336-5650. www.apa.org
PsycARTICLES covers 48 journals from 1988 to the present. It is available on several platforms, including EBSCO, OCLC FirstSearch, and Ovid. The American Psychological Association (APA) plans to extend the back file to 1985. It recently announced an archiving policy for customers who do not renew, allowing them access to the full text for the years for which they paid, with only an annual administrative charge. APA's premiere database PsycINFO covers the psychological literature from the 1800s to the present. PsycVIDEO is a database of summaries of 3000+ videotapes with psychological content.

BioOne Amigos Library Services, 14400 Midway Rd., Dallas, TX 75244-3509; 800-843-8482. www.bioone.org
BioOne continues to expand its collection and now has 60 full-text bioscience research journals from 49 publishers. New titles scheduled for 2003 include Avian Diseases, Journal of Orthoptera Research, and Folio Geobotanica. Its first electronic book, from the American Society of Plant Biologists, is planned for release in 2003. BioOne has linking relationships with JSTOR, CSA, PubMed, CrossRef, and Biosis. Users receive tables of content alerts and can download citations in formats for EndNote, ProCite, and Reference Manager. Amigos Library Services distributes BioOne in the United States and Canada.

BIOSIS Two Commerce Sq., 2001 Market St., Suite 700, Philadelphia, PA 19103-7095; 800-523-4806; 215-231-7500. www.biosis.org
Not-for-profit Biosis introduced Biology Browser, a free portal on the life sciences. It includes discussion forums, selected web links (over 12,000), science news, and other free resources. Its premiere database, Biosis Previews, is available on many platforms: Dialog, DataStar, DIMDI, Ovid, ScienceDirect, SilverPlatter, STN, and ISI's Web of Knowledge. Additions to be made to the database in 2003 include BIOSIS Major Concepts across the database, over 6300 sequence data accession numbers, and nine million CAS Registry Numbers.

R.R. Bowker 630 Central Ave., New Providence, NJ 07974; 888-269-5372. www.bowker.com
R.R. Bowker produces directories of books and serials, both in print and online. At the ALA Midwinter Meeting 2003, Bowker introduced Ulrich's Serials Analysis System, a collection development tool to evaluate a library's serials holdings against the titles covered by Ulrich's. Subscribers to booksinprint.com may now view the full text of over 13,000 titles through ebrary. In development for 2003 are spanishbooksinprint.com, a resource for Spanish-language publications, and childrensbooksinprint.com, a subset of booksinprint.com. Bowker acquired Pubnet, an e-commerce service connecting publishers, distributors, bookstores, and libraries.

CAB International (CABI) CABI Pub., 44 Brattle St., 4th fl., Cambridge, MA 02138; 800-528-4841; 617-395-4056. www.cabi.org
CAB Abstracts, the premiere CABI product, is known for its detailed indexing of agriculture and related subjects. It is available on the web, directly from CABI, as well as through several database vendors, including EBSCO and ISI's Web of Knowledge. CABI has created global compilations for various markets with its compendia products: Crop Protection Compendium, Animal Health and Production Compendium, and Forestry Compendium. These are available on CD-ROM and through the Internet. CABI recently introduced a free online resource, ICMFocus, for integrated crop management. It also plans to digitize the archives back to 1908 in selected areas and introduce an improved interface.

CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) 2540 Olentangy River Rd., Columbus, OH 43202; 800-753-4227; 614-447-3700. www.cas.org
CAS continues to enhance its search interfaces. STN Easy for Intranets has new value-added options, including predefined search strategies for 80+ databases and the ability to create current awareness alerts. STN Express version 6.01 provides access to CAS Registry BLAST, identifying sequences along with associated literature and patent information. Predefined reports and tables assist in postprocessing of data. New databases added to STN include Aquatic Toxicity Information, Federal Research in Progress, NUTRACEUTicals International, PHARMA MarketLetter, International Standards Database, and WELDASEARCH. CAS announced that in 2002, 50 percent of the new substances recorded in the CAS Registry file came from patent literature. The CAS file was enhanced with over 1.6 million references and page images from 1907 to 1946 Chemical Abstracts and links to ACS full-text journal archives.

CINAHL Information Systems 1508 Wilson Terrace, Glendale, CA 91206; 818-409-8005. www.cinahl.com
The primary database for nursing is CINAHL, the Cumulative Index in Nursing and Allied Health Literature. Over 900 journals are abstracted, along with books, AV materials, pamphlets, dissertations, etc. Selected full-text material is available along with a document delivery service, CINAHL Express. CINAHL Sources provides free links to selected web sites.

CISTI (Canadian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information) National Research Council Canada, 1200 Montreal Rd., Bldg. M-55, Ottawa, ON K1A 0S2; 800-668-1222; 613-998-8544. www.nrc.ca/cisti
CISTI is known for its document delivery service, providing 24-hour turnaround for 90 percent of requests, with a fill-rate of 87 percent. It has document delivery partnerships with several database vendors, including CSA, Gale, EBSCOhost, and Ovid. The CISTI Source database covers citations for over 17,000 journals, primarily in science and technology. It also supports a current awareness service, allowing searching by journal title or keyword, and links to its document delivery service. The CISTI web site was redesigned to improve site navigation and comply with new Canadian regulations for government web sites.

Columbia University Press 61 W. 62nd St., New York, NY 10023; 800-944-8648. www.columbia.edu/cu/cup
Columbia University Press has been actively creating electronic resources. Its major online reference titles include Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Columbia Gazetteer of the World Online, and Columbia Granger's World of Poetry Online. Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO) is a comprehensive collection of resources on international affairs. The press recently introduced Gutenberg-e, a new electronic collection of scholarly texts in history, compiled jointly with the American Historical Association and The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing.

Congressional Quarterly, Inc. 1255 22nd St. NW, Washington, DC 20037; 800-834-9020; 202-729-1800. www.cqpress.com
Congressional Quarterly provides comprehensive coverage of congressional news, politics, and public policy. Several of its online services come together in the CQ Electronic Library: CQ Researcher, CQ's Electronic Encyclopedia of American Government, CQ Public Affairs Collection, CQ Supreme Court Collection, CQ Insider, and CQ Weekly. The CQ Electronic Library can be used by students as well as researchers. In 2002, CQ Researcher was awarded a Silver Gavel Award by the American Bar Association for its nine-part series "Liberty and Justice."

CRC Press 2000 NW Corporate Blvd., Boca Raton, FL 33431; 800-272-7737; 561-994-0555. www.crcpress.com
The Chemical Rubber Company (CRC) distributed the first edition of its Handbook of Chemistry and Physics free to customers of its laboratory supply business in 1913. Today, CRC Press is a publisher of science and engineering books and online information products. The netBASE collections of electronic reference works are available in several subject areas, including chemistry, engineering, environment, food technology, and information technology. CRC also publishes several journals, available electronically. Another online product is the Auerback ITKnowledgeBASE, which provides journals and reference books about information technology.

CSA 7200 Wisconsin Ave., Suite 601, Bethesda, MD 20814; 800-843-7751; 301-961-6700. www.csa.com
CSA, formerly Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, provides web access to its databases, as well as those from other vendors, through its Internet Data Service (IDS). In 2002 it won the Software & Information Industry Association's Codie Award for Best Online Science, Technology, or Medical Service. It announced a new database, CSA Civil Engineering Abstracts. In 2003, it plans to release several new databases, including IMID: Institute of Management International Database, Index Islamicus, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, and Earthquake Engineering Abstracts. CSA developed a new platform for the SAGE Full-Text Collection, 79 journals in communications studies, criminology, politics and international relations, and sociology. The IDS interface has been updated with browsable indexes (author, journal name, publication type), and there are expanded usage reports. CSA has added more full-text linking partners and is OpenURL compatible.

D&B 103 JFK Pkwy., Short Hills, NJ 07078; 800-234-3867; 512-794-7768. www.dnb.com
D&B, formerly Dun & Bradstreet, has several electronic business and financial information products. The flagship product is the Million Dollar Database for U.S. and Canadian businesses (top 1.5 million) and for international businesses outside of the United States and Canada (top 1.6 million). The new web interface for the Million Dollar databases was released in March. It features a more intuitive user interface, improved searching and output features, and updated online help. In March 2003, D&B acquired Hoover's Inc.

The Dialog Corporation 11000 Regency Pkwy., Suite 10, Cary, NC 27511; 800-3DIALOG; 919-462-8600. www.dialog.com
Last year, Dialog announced e-journal linking to articles of 75+ publishers. It also introduced the Domain Names Database, with records of current and historic Internet domain names. Dialog's partnership with its sister corporation, Gale Group, is producing ReferenceLink, a collection of approximately 50 of Dialog's databases with 1500 full-text titles from Dialog NewsRoom. It is marketed to public and academic libraries through Gale Group. DialogWeb users will now be able to link to abstracts of records from CAS Abstracts at $1.27 per abstract. CAS has, until now, not allowed Dialog or other database vendors to have records with abstracts.

EBSCO Publishing PO Box 682, 10 Estes St., Ipswich, MA 01938; 800-653-2726; 978-356-6500. www.epnet.com
One of the big three journal database aggregators, EBSCO also created and acquired new databases this year, including two Spanish-language-based electronic resources: HAPI (Hispanic-American Periodicals Index) and Informacion de Salud para los Consumidores (health information for consumers and patients). EBSCO acquired the CommSearch database from the National Communications Association (NCA) and plans to add titles, expand indexing and abstracting, and create a new database of full-text NCA journals. In a partnership with Point 5 Technologies, EBSCO will market the Auto Repair Reference Center to public libraries and technical schools. In March 2003 the company released LinkSource, an OpenURL-compliant resolver that provides item-level linking. It matches citations with available full text from 12,000 journals.

Ebrary, Inc. 318 Cambridge Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94306; 866-4EBRARY; 650-475-8700. www.ebrary.com
The ebrary collection has grown to over 20,000 electronic books/documents from 150 publishers. Institutions purchase individual titles (publisher list price plus annual service fee) or buy new database collections: Business & Economics; Computers, Technology & Engineering; Humanities; Life & Physical Sciences; and Social & Behavioral Sciences. ebrary has publisher collections in sheet music, manufacturing, engineering, rare books and original manuscripts, and Spanish titles. Pricing for the collections is based on type of institution and FTE. Full MARC 21 records are available. The ebrary user interface features highlighting, bookmarks, and annotations. Alliances with R.R. Bowker and Blackwell's Book Services allow buyers to preview books through ebrary before buying them.

Elsevier 360 Park Ave. S., New York, NY 10010-1710; 212-989-5800. www.elsevier.com
Elsevier fully converted Academic Press IDEAL journals to the ScienceDirect interface, bringing the total number of journals to 1700+. New pricing models are now in place, and there are new subject back file collections as well. Elsevier is using netLibrary's platform for electronic versions of some of its books. The free Scirus search engine for science and technology now features links to free abstracts from Elsevier and Academic Press journals. At the end of 2002, Elsevier announced Library Connect, an initiative to provide librarians with information about electronic publishing and digital libraries. It consists of newsletters, seminars, workshops, and partnership initiatives.

e-psyche, LLC 2425 Ridgecrest Dr. SE, Albuquerque, NM 87108; 505-348-4965. www.e-psyche.net
e-psyche continues to build its database with weekly updates. It covers 3600 source publications—journals, dissertations, preprints, and web sites—in psychology and related behavioral sciences. Author e-mail addresses, when available, are included with each record. Most titles go back to 1993, with bibliographic references extending back to 1970. The database is available through CSA and EBSCOhost .

Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company PO Box 300, Princeton, NJ 08543-0300; 800-369-7466. www.factiva.com
Factiva is moving customers from Dow Jones Interactive to factiva.com. The interface is tighter and sleeker, with fewer screens to move through. New files have been added: historical market data, D&B reports, Investext reports, and the Celex database of European Union documents. A Newsstand feature allows users to browse the front pages of newspapers; DJI had a similar feature. In the new Standard search screen, the user can access Factiva Intelligent Indexing terms. The interface is available in several different languages, most recently adding Japanese. It was announced that Reuters customers will be able to access selected Factiva services.

Facts on File 132 W. 31st St., 17th fl., New York, NY 10001; 800-322-8755. www.factsonfile.com
Facts On File publishes reference materials for libraries and schools, including material tailored to the school curricula, in several subject areas: geography, science, U.S. and world history, health, sports, religion and mythology, and careers. Titles are available on CD-ROM or via the Internet. The two Curriculum Resource Centers, for grades K–5 and 6–12, provide materials in several subject areas. Facts On File updated its Career Guidance Center with content from Ferguson Publishing Co., a recent acquisition. Two new history databases will be introduced in 2003.

Facts On File News Services 512 7th Ave., 22nd fl., New York, NY 10018; 800-363-7976; 212-290-8090. www.facts.com
For news, facts, and current issues, the FACTS.com Reference Suite provides a collection of five web-based databases: Facts On File World News Digest (1940+), Issues & Controversies On File, Today's Science On File, World Almanac Reference Database, and World Almanac Encyclopedia. The databases may also be purchased separately. A new service, Facts for Learning, was launched for grades 3–8, with modules for elementary and middle schools. It contains publications from the Weekly Reader, Funk & Wagnall's New Encyclopedia, plus selected materials from the FACTS.com Reference Suite.

Gale Group 27500 Drake Rd., Farmington Hills, MI 48331; 800-877-4253. www.galegroup.com
Gale Group continues to increase and enhance its electronic offerings. Last summer it announced the Eighteenth Century-Complete Digital Edition, a three-year project that will digitize nearly 150,000 English-language books published between 1701 and 1800. Gale electronic books are now available through netLibrary. The Literature Resource Center includes an option to add the MLA Bibliography. Gale and Dialog finally partnered on ReferenceLink, a gateway that allows 1500 newspapers and 50 databases from Dialog to be searched singly or collectively with an interface similar to InfoTrac. ReferenceLink is marketed by Gale. KidsInfoBits, a product for K–5 that also has the InfoTrac interface, will be released in 2003.

Greenwood Electronic Media (GEM) 88 Post Rd. W., PO Box 5007, Westport, CT 06881-5007; 800-225-5800. www.gem.greenwood.com
Greenwood Electronic Media publishes online sourcebooks that contain the full text of the print versions enhanced with links to selected web sites, multimedia, and more. The sourcebook titles include American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography, Biographical Dictionary of American Sports, Baseball, and Studies in Irish Literature It partnered with Paratext to introduce ARBA Online, a database of reviews of print and electronic reference works. GEM also publishes the GrantSelect database, compiled by Oryx Press, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

HarpWeek 2116 Owls Cove Lane, Reston, VA 20191; 703-264-9862. www.harpweek.com
HarpWeek, a database of page images of Harper's Weekly from 1857 to 1912, is available in nine segments: Civil War Era, Reconstruction I & II, and the Gilded Age I–VI. Not only has every article been fully indexed, but every image and advertisement as well. Literary genre ("patriotic verse") is also indexed. John Adler, HarpWeek's publisher, continues to help libraries find donors to purchase HarpWeek.

HighWire Press 1454 Page Mill Rd., Palo Alto, CA 94304-1124 highwire.stanford.edu
Highwire Press, the "library of the sciences and medicine," is located at Stanford University and currently hosts 348 full-text journals, including 44 of the 100 most frequently cited journals. Over 470,000 articles from 144 journals are available for free, with approximately 3000 new articles added per month. Several tools are available for users, including e-mail current awareness alerts, individualized lists of favorite Highwire journals, and a list of subscriptions at one's institution. Future enhancements include saved searches and saved articles by topic.

IEEE (Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers) 445 Hoes Lane, PO Box 1331, Piscataway, NJ 08855; 800-701-4333; 732-981-0060. www.ieee.org
The IEEE's periodicals, conference proceedings, and standards are available separately or as a total package in the IEEE/IE Electronic Library (IEL). The Xplore interface used to access IEEE publications was enhanced to download records for citation management software and to link from author names and index terms in records. A new "What Can I Access?" button lets users identify what titles their library subscribes to. In January 2003, IEEE added to the IEL over 80,000 documents from the 1950s through 1987, which already had content back to 1988. In spring 2003, IEEE plans to market a new subset, the IEEE Biomedical Engineering Library.

Infotrieve 10850 Wilshire Blvd., 8th fl., Los Angeles, CA 90024; 800-422-4633; 310-234-2000. www.infotrieve.com
Infotrieve has an impressive array of products. Its ArticleFinder database covers 35,000 titles and delivers table of contents alerts for over 20,000 journal titles. It provides traditional and electronic document delivery services. Infotrieve's reprints service assists users with ordering reprints and digital ePrints. The acquisition of the document delivery software Ariel® from RLG is a strategic move to enhance Infotrieve's ties to the academic and research community. Infotrieve also acquired the assets of TheScientificWorld (TSW), which ceased operations in 2002, and plans to reactivate TSW's publishing program.

INFOUSA, INC. 5711 S. 86th Circle, PO Box 27347, Omaha, NE 68127-0347; 800-321-0869; 402-930-3500. www.infousa.com
infoUSA was founded in 1972 and produces mailing lists and sales leads. It uses phone directories and verifies information directly through phone calls. ReferenceUSA, its primary web-based product for libraries, has data from national, state, and specialized directories. It includes residential and business information from the United States and Canada. infoUSA formed a partnership with Tele Atlas North America, Inc., to combine data from its business database into a Tele Atlas map product to help users locate hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses.

Ingenta, inc. 44 Brattle St., Cambridge, MA 02138; 800-296-2221; 617-395-4000. www.ingenta.com
Ingenta's document delivery service provides access to over 28,000 publications. It also makes available over 5400 electronic full-text publications from 200+ publishers on a subscription or a pay per view basis and provides a current awareness alerting service by journal title or keyword/subject. Last year, Ingenta bought HERON, a leading supplier of online course packs in the UK that should complement Ingenta's document delivery business. Ingenta also builds and maintains web sites for other publishers and was selected to create a new scholarly book site for Oxford University Press.

JSTOR 120 5th Ave., 5th fl., New York, NY 10011; 212-229-3700. www.jstor.org
Over 1500 institutions from 71 countries subscribe to one or more JSTOR collections of journal back files. As of December 2002, JSTOR's back file collection consisted of 322 journals from 182 publishers. Two new collections were added in 2002: Arts & Sciences II and Language & Literature. Modifications to the web interface improved accessibility for visually impaired and learning disabled users and lets citations be downloaded for citation management software. Responding to users' suggestions, JSTOR added links to current issues for over 140 journals.

knovel Corporation 13 Eaton Ave., Norwich, NY 13815; 866-303-3336. www.knovel.com
The Knovel Corporation, a spinoff of William Andrew Publishing, provides over 300 online engineering and scientific handbooks and databases in 13 subject areas from several publishers, including McGraw-Hill and CRC Press. The Knovel interface features searchable text and interactive tables and graphs. Knovel is developing a chemical structure and substructure search interface for chemical data products. It offers academic institutions free subscriptions to four chemistry references: International Critical Tables of Numerical Data, Physics, Chemistry and Technology; Knovel Critical Tables; Smithsonian Physics Tables; and Thermochemistry of the Chemical Substances.

LexisNexis Academic & Library Solutions 4520 East-West Hwy., Bethesda, MD 20814-3389; 800-638-8380; 301-654-1550. www.lexisnexis.com/academic
LexisNexis academic web products changed both interface and name. Familiar products like "LexisNexis Academic Universe" became LexisNexis Academic. The Academic interface became less complicated and now features a homepage to conduct quick or basic searches and a single standardized Guided News Search. The new LexisNexis Country Analysis provides news, analysis, in-depth reports, and statistics on 190 countries that come from several sources including Political Risk Service, Business Monitor International, and Interfax. The company bundles some existing services into products for public libraries. For example, the Homework Help Package consists of LexisNexis Current Issues and LexisNexis Primary Sources in U.S. History.

LINK, Springer-Verlag 175 5th Ave., New York, NY 10010; 800-SPRINGER; 212-460-1500. link.springer-ny.com
Launched in 1997 with 100 journals, the LINK service now provides over 500 Springer-Verlag journals, electronic books, and 16 book series in 11 subject libraries: Chemical Sciences, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geosciences, Law, Life Sciences, Mathematics, Medicine, and Physics and Astronomy. The complete Landolt-Boernstein data collection is now available through LINK. The LINK Online First service allows access to peer reviewed articles before publication in selected journals; it is expected to add more titles.

Mergent, Inc. 60 Madison Ave., 6th fl., New York, NY 10010; 888-411-0893; 212-413-7700. www.mergent.com www.fisonline.com became www.mergentonline.com
In early 2003, Mergent Online replaced FIS Online. It will have the FIS Online content plus new content and features, such as customized viewing and output, saved searches, labeling, and tracking. The data available through this service include U.S. and international company data, e.g., archival data and annual reports, insider trading data, institutional holdings, and the D&B Million Dollar Database Plus.

National Journal Group Inc. 1501 M St. NW, #300, Washington, DC 20005; 202-739-8400. www.nationaljournal.com
The National Journal Group publishes in the area of politics, policy, and government. Policy Central is a comprehensive suite of online resources for academia. Updated ten times a day, it includes individual products of the National Journal Group: National Journal, The Hotline, Congress Daily, Technology Daily, The Almanac of American Politics, and Research Databases.

Nature Publishing Group 345 Park Ave. S., 6th fl., New York, NY 10010-1707; 800-221-2123; 212-726-0200. www.naturereference.com
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is the scientific publishing division of Macmillan. It produces both print and online journals, such as Nature and Nature Reviews, and reference materials in the biological and physical sciences. Nature Reviews Microbiology, a monthly review journal, will be introduced in 2003. The NPG online journals provide access to prepublication articles and archival issues. NPG relaunched the online version of Nature Encyclopedia of Life Sciences in 2003 with a new interface and new and revised articles. Monthly updates are planned. NPG has also developed gateways and portals for special areas such as drug discovery, human genome, and cellular signaling.

NewsBank, Inc. 5020 Tamiami Trail N., Suite 110, Naples, FL 34103; 800-762-8182. www.newsbank.com
NewsBank is known for its massive collections of newspapers. Its databases feature the full text of global newspapers, as well as national and regional U.S. newspapers. It also provides online full-text access to various documents including collections from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, United Nations, and British Parliament. The Readex division of NewsBank focuses on scholarly materials. With the American Antiquarian Society it has completed several segments of Evans Digital Edition, Series I: Evans, 1639–1800. The next Readex project is the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, Digital Edition.

NISC (National Information Services Corporation) Wyman Towers, 3100 St. Paul St., Baltimore, MD 21218; 410-243-0797. www.nisc.com
NISC produces unique databases in both CD-ROM and web formats. It covers a wide range of subject areas in the natural and social sciences and arts and humanities, with comprehensive coverage of selected geographic regions: Latin America, South-East Asia, and Arctic & Antarctic. The new Men's Studies Database (abstracts) complements other NISC databases in gender studies. The new CHILE: Natural Resources and Related Business Sectors Database brings together bibliographic information from five government and private organizations in Chile. NISC's BiblioLine web service provides access to third-party databases, with added titles from Biosis. The service is also OpenURL compatible.

OCLC 6565 Frantz Rd., Dublin, OH 43017; 800-858-5878; 614-764-6000. www.oclc.org
OCLC's WorldCat, now at over 50 million records, has a new logo that will be branded on all services powered by WorldCat. In this past year FirstSearch end users increased their searching of WorldCat by over 25 percent. Enhancements were made to the FirstSearch interface, including "more like this" searching, spell-checking, default ranking by holdings, and limiting. OCLC netLibrary continues to add publishers (315+) and titles (42,000+). netLibrary introduced its Reference Center Collection (470+ titles from leading reference publishers) in 2003. FirstSearch now has 78 databases available via subscription or by the search. Thesauri were added to CINAHL, INSPEC, MLA Bibliography, and Sociological Abstracts. The Alternative Press Archive back files from 1969 to 1990 were added, and there are future plans for a PAIS Archive. At the end of 2002 the OCLC Electronic Collections Online had 4,356 publications from 70 publishers.

OneSource Information Services, Inc. 300 Baker Ave., Concord, MA 01742; 800-554-5501; 978-318-4300. www.onesource.com
OneSource's primary product line, Business Browser, contains business information on over one million public and private companies from over 25 information providers. There are editions for the United States, UK, Europe, and a new version for the Asia-Pacific region. The company is marketing information management tools to aid firms in managing its own information.

Ovid Technologies, Inc. 333 7th Ave., New York, NY 10001; 800-950-2035; 646-674-6300. www.ovid.com
Ovid's parent company, Wolters Kluwer, announced that it will focus on health, law, tax, business, and education, and Ovid is doing the same. The Books@Ovid service includes the full-text Lippincott/Springhouse Nursing Collection. Journals@Ovid added the Ovid Psych Plus Collection, 40 journal titles in the behavioral sciences. These titles complement other new full-text journal collections in the biosciences, pharmacology, and nursing/medicine (Brandon/Hill, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins). An e-mail alert service with links to citations/full text was added to the Journals@Ovid interface. Ovid is integrating the SilverPlatter databases into its product line; however, it states that future development will be with the Ovid Platform.

Oxford University Press 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016; 800-334-4249. www.oup-usa.org
Oxford University Press (OUP) is known for its reference titles, scholarly monographs, and journals. Most of its 190 journals are available electronically, and libraries can subscribe to the entire collection or subject subsets. Journal access is direct through the OUP journal site or through Ingenta, SwetsNet Navigator, OCLC Electronic Collections online, or EBSCO Online. Oxford Reference Collection Online is comprised of 100 reference titles. OUP recently acquired Grove Dictionaries (The Grove Dictionary of Art and New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians) from Macmillan. The new Oxford Scholarship Online will feature four collections of scholarly monographs—economics and finance, political science, philosophy, and religion and theology—and will be created in conjunction with Ingenta.

Paratext. Inc. 111-M Carpenter Dr., Sterling, VA 20164; 703-318-0285. www.paratext.com
Paratext databases include 19th Century Masterfile (over six million citations of pre-1920 publications), BookNews Online (online full text of two review resources, Reference & Research Book News and SciTech Book News), and Reference Universe (an index to several thousand reference resources). ARBA Online is a collection of reviews of print and electronic reference titles and is produced in conjunction with Libraries Unlimited. Paratext markets WebFeat, a federated search engine. The Library Dynamics service analyzes library holdings for storage/deselection decisions.

ProjectMUSE c/o Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 2715 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218-4319; 410-516-6989. muse.jhu.edu
Launched in 1995 by Johns Hopkins University Press, ProjectMUSE added 26 new titles to its subscription list, which now numbers well over 200 titles from nonprofit, scholarly publishers. It includes coverage information for each journal on its web interface, improved accessibility for disabled users, and enhanced administrative tools. Usage statistics are now available on demand, and there is a Holdings Data Tool for libraries to download data. Last year, ProjectMUSE worked on a pilot project on current issues linking with JSTOR.

ProQuest 300 N. Zeeb Rd., PO Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 41806-1346; 800-521-0600; 734-761-4700. www.proquest.com
ProQuest lost several full-text business titles to EBSCO and is working to change that. It will add 125 full-text titles from Kluwer to its full-text databases, including the ABI databases. The upgrade to ProQuest 6.1 in 2002 brought improved publication searching, easier uploading of library holdings, and improved PDF images. Agreements with the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times expand the historical newspaper back files. These historic newspaper files include the entire paper—advertisements, photos, and graphics. All articles are searchable, but full-page images are displayed. ProQuest will work with the National Library of Scotland to add 2000+ documents to Early English Books Online. Literature Online now features Poets on Screen, a collection of video clips of poets reading.

PubMed Central National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine (NLM), NIH Bldg. 45, Room 5AN12, 45 Center Dr., MSC 6510, Bethesda, MD 20892-6510. www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov
PubMed Central is a free, unrestricted digital archive of peer-reviewed life sciences literature. It was begun in 2000 and is managed by the NCBI at the NLM. Currency varies, with most titles having an embargo period of around six months. The archive contains 109 titles, including 52 from BioMed Central. For inclusion, journals must be part of a major abstracting/indexing service or have at least three editorial board members as principal investigators on research grants from major funding agencies.

Questel*Orbit 8000 Westpark Dr., Suite 130, McLean, VA 22102; 800-456-7248; 703-556-7400. www.questel.orbit.com
Questel*Orbit is one of the leaders in intellectual property data: patents, scientific and technical information, Internet domain names, and trademarks. Enhancements to the Questel*Orbit search interface include forward and backward patent citation searching and a new report format for citation analysis of patent families.

Research Libraries Group (RLG) 1200 Villa St., Mountain View, CA 94041-1100; 800-537-7546; 650-691-2333. www.rlg.org
RLG provides several different scholarly electronic resources, including its RLIN union catalog. Citation databases are accessed through the Eureka interface. The newest database addition is Anthropology Plus, a combination of Harvard's Anthropological Literature index plus Anthropological Index from the Royal Anthropological Institute, UK. RLG Archival Resources features a database of detailed finding aids from archival collections worldwide. RLG Cultural Materials brings together primary source material from RLG member institutions in high-quality digital format.

Roth Publishing PO Box 220406, 175 Great Neck Rd., Great Neck, NY 11022; 800-899-ROTH. www.rothpeom.com
Roth Publishing creates literature databases for libraries. Its premiere product, Lit Finder, comprises three databases. The centerpiece is Poem Finder, with 100,000+ full-text poems and 800,000+ poem citations and excerpts. Biographical data about poets are also included, along with a Subject Navigator with over 9500 hierarchical subject headings. Story Finder and Essay Finder contain thousands of full-text short stories and essays, respectively. They both include explanations, biographies, genre searching, and pictures.

SIRS Publishing, Inc. PO Box 272348, Boca Raton, FL 33427-2348; 800-232-7477. www.sirs.com
SIRS Publishing builds databases for the school library and public library markets. Articles and web sites are selected for their quality and then indexed by professionals using LC Subject Headings. SIRS Knowledge Source, with 100,000+ articles, is comprised of three databases: SIRS Researcher, SIRS Renaissance, and SIRS Government Reporter. Subscriptions can be to one or a combination of databases that can be searched simultaneously. New products include Discoverer WebFind, a database of Internet resources, and SIRS Interactive Citizenship, an educational resource that emphasizes reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. SIRS web interfaces are accessible by persons using assistive technology.

Snapshots International, Ltd. 5 Dryden St., London, WC2E 9NB, UK; +44 (0) 20 7829 8408. www.snapdata.com
Snapshots International produces market research reports about several industries by country. All 1700 reports are now available on the web, complete with Boolean search capabilities. An agreement with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) provides market data for a new EIU information product.

Standard & Poor's 55 Water St., New York, NY 10041; 800-221-5277. www.standardandpoors.com
Standard & Poor's is one of the premiere providers of business and financial information. NetAdvantage, its primary online product marketed to libraries, consists of Stock Reports, Industry Surveys, Corporation Records, The Register, Bond Guide, Stock Guide, Dividend Records, The Outlook, Security Dealer Directory, Mutual Fund Reports, and Earnings Guide. Several online aids are available, including a new Investment Glossary and an online tutorial.

Thomson ISI 3501 Market St., Philadelphia, PA 19104; 800-336-4474; 215-386-0100. www.isinet.com
ISI's Web of Science interface was enhanced for creating search sets and combining them with Boolean operators. The initial limits screen was also simplified. The current awareness alert service available through ISI Current Contents Connect is now available separately at an additional charge. Changes planned for 2003 include integrated chemistry searching and the ability to save search strategies. ISI Current Contents Connect will have prepublication citation information. ISI ResearchSoft, maker of EndNote and ProCite, announced WriteNote, web-based citation management software for undergraduates. ISI ResearchSoft recently partnered with Openly Informatics to market lCate, OpenURL link server software.

West Group (Thomson) PO Box 6187, St. Paul, MN 55164-0833; 800-328-4880. www.westlaw.com
West Group's award-winning service, Westlaw, comprises over 16,700 databases. It entered an agreement with Factiva for Westlaw to have Factiva content. The Westlaw in Library Schools program provides free Westlaw access to ALA-accredited library schools. Early this year, Westlaw announced a new online certification program for legal professionals. The FindLaw web site, a free resource from West, has the most Internet traffic of any legal web site.

Wiley InterScience 111 River St., Hoboken, NJ 07030; 201-748-6000. www.interscience.wiley.com
Wiley InterScience, the online service for John Wiley & Sons, focuses on the STM publishing market. It provides online full-text access to 300+ journals, 300+ volumes of reference titles, and 200+ books in the new Wiley InterScience Online Books service. Institutions may subscribe to one or more subject collections. The Enhanced Access License for the Online Books service features ArticleSelect tokens, similar to those for the electronic journals service, so users can purchase access to chapters of books not subscribed to. A new Polymer Backfile Collection of journals is available for one-time purchase. Several new online reference titles in chemistry, materials science, engineering, and life and medical sciences will launch in 2003.

H.W. Wilson Company 950 University Ave., Bronx, NY 10452; 800-367-6700; 718-588-8400. www.hwwilson.com
The long-awaited WilsonWeb interface was brought out at the end of 2002. The new interface, while an improvement over the previous version, evoked some criticism about the searching syntax. In response to reviewer and user comments, Wilson released a revised edition in March. The new interface does handle OpenURLs with SFX technology and has new system administration tools. Index to Legal Periodicals & Books Full-text and Book Review Digest Plus were recently introduced, and there are plans to have retrospective databases for Humanities Index and Social Sciences Index later in 2003. Wilson's more popular reference titles will be available in netLibrary.

World Bank Publications PO Box 960, Herndon, VA 20172-0961; 800-645-7247; 203-661-1580. www.worldbank.org/publications
World Bank produces two online databases of economic indicators and financial data, World Development Indications Online and Global Development Finance Online. Last year it entered into an agreement with Ingenta to create the World Bank e-Library, an electronic portal to the bank's full-text collection of books, reports, and other documents. It debuted last month at the ACRL National Meeting.