eNews From the Show

Publishers took a break from partying in New Orleans at ALA annual to announce new and updated databases. Here are some highlights, many of which will be featured in Cheryl LaGuardia’s upcoming eReviews columns. LaGuardia will also offer free trials of some of these products at her LJ blog, E-Views.

ABC-CLIO’s World Religions: Belief, Culture, and Controversy will launch this month. It provides more than 50 overviews of major and lesser-known religions and of related philosophies such as agnosticism. Two versions are available: one for middle and high school students and teachers, the other for the academic market.

Alexander Street Press is making a move into science materials for the academic market and expanding its humanities coverage. Its new Nursing Education in Video database will initially include 300 titles from Medcom-Trainex and will add 30–50 new videos each year. The company’s Academic Video Online will provide films from the BBC, PBS, Psychotherapy.net, and other sources, with the collection expected to grow to 20,000 full-length titles. Alexander Street has also announced Anthropology Online, a full-text complement to its Ethnographic Video Online that will feature field notes as well as memoirs, contemporary studies, and more. The company is adding to its classical music coverage by launching Classical Scores Library: Volume II, and the new Classical Music in Video, which will include 1500 performance videos, interviews, and master classes. The Australian and New Zealand Letters and Diaries collection is the last of the company’s new database for 2011 and will chronicle the stories of immigrants to those countries between 1788 and 1922.

The newly available AtoZdatabases (see review) includes data on more than 30 million businesses and 220 million individuals, gathered from sources such as telephone directories, SEC filings, public records, telephone verification, and real estate deeds. It is aimed at businesses creating sales leads and mailing lists, at job seekers looking for information before interviews, and at those who want to find, for example, home values in a neighborhood.

Facts On File’s World Religions Online has just launched. It features landing pages that each cover a major religion, offering information on beliefs, spiritual leaders, and sacred texts. The company has also made World Almanac—the annual recently lovingly portrayed in the New York Times magazine—available as the World Almanac Online. The book’s statistics, facts, and other resources (e.g., maps, flags, Year in Review) are all there, as are extras such as This Day in History and Recent Update.

Serials Solutions Summon discovery service, which is owned by ProQuest, will soon index content from The World Book Encyclopedia and World Book’s other publications for children and adults. Summon will also include data from ReferenceUSA, a database of information on 14 million U.S. businesses and 200 million U.S. households.

ProQuest has also announced new availability of several database files, including Arabia Inform’s AskZad, a collection of multilingual content related to the Middle East. AskZad includes digitized books, academic journals, dissertations, conference proceedings, and the Pan Arab news index of newspapers and other sources. Metadata for the collection is in English and Arabic.

EBSCO’s acquisition of H.W. Wilson came before ALA, but at the conference EBSCO clarified what the purchase would mean, stating that existing customers with simultaneous access to Wilson’s Retrospective Indexes would now have unlimited access to them through EBSCOhost. Previously, simultaneous access was restricted to a certain number of users. In the future, upgrades to unlimited access will be for a fee. Cengage Learning (the parent company of Gale) has acquired the National Geographic Society’s digital and print school publishing unit, which includes the “National Geographic Science” series,

Cengage Learning (the parent company of Gale) has acquired the National Geographic Society's digital and print school publishing unit, which includes the "National Geographic Science" series, National Geographic Explorer! magazines, and Hampton Brown’s literacy and language programs. Cengage has also announced that its Business Insights: Global database will be available this fall and will provide topic overviews on major areas of international business; industry overviews, including articles, statistics, and case studies; company histories; and multimedia. Fall will also see Cengage launch a redesigned Gale Virtual Research Library.

Springer has launched SpringerReference.com, a platform for researchers and academic and corporate libraries that offers “living editions” of the publisher’s books. The service houses a growing collection of 146 encyclopedias and other reference works whose peer-reviewed material can be added to and updated by scientists sooner than would be possible in print.