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Copyright Clearance Center Launches RightFind™ XML for Mining

By on June 14, 2015 in Blog

XML for Mining is built on the RightFind™ platform, CCC’s unique suite of cloud-based workflow solutions that offer immediate, easy access to a full range of STM peer-reviewed journal content.

Linguamatics I2E text mining software is the first third-party text mining platform integrated with RightFind XML for Mining; integrations with other third-party solutions are planned.Publishers participating in the offering include Springer Science+Business Media, Wiley, BMJ, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Cambridge University Press, American Diabetes Association, American Society for Nutrition, Future Medicine and more. The module is available to businesses through the sales teams of CCC and RightsDirect, CCC’s European subsidiary.Using RightFind XML for Mining, researchers will be able to identify articles associated with their research from publications to which they subscribe and from those that fall outside their subscriptions.

Learn more at: Copyright Clearance Center Launches Text Mining Solution

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Unlimited Priorities Coordinates Publishing Partner Agreement Between Accessible Archives and Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library

By on January 30, 2015 in Unlimited Priorities News

Cape Coral, FL (January 30, 2015) – Unlimited Priorities LLC, a firm specializing in support for small and medium-size companies in the information and publishing industries, has announced that it has finalized a publishing partners agreement between Accessible Archives, Inc. and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library located in Springfield, Illinois.

Accessible Archives, Inc., a publisher of electronic full-text searchable historical databases, will preserve in digital format a number of primary source collections relating to President Lincoln and the State of Illinois.  Once the materials have been digitized and made fully searchable, they will be available to genealogists, scholars, students, and those studying historical issues of personal interest as new or enhanced databases by Accessible Archives.

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library

Established in 1889 as the Illinois State Historical Library by the Illinois General Assembly, it later was renamed the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library to reflect its essential role in telling the story of Abraham Lincoln’s life.  The library holds an impressive collection of Lincoln materials, among them Lincoln family letters and a prized collection of Lincolniana and assassination materials.  In addition, the library contains the premier collection of materials on Illinois history, including myriad books, original maps and thousands of boxes of personal papers and other records relating to Illinois’ political, business, and cultural leaders.  The Library’s county history collection provides at least one history from each of Illinois’ 102 counties, which over time will become available through Accessible Archives.  The Library also stages exhibits that showcase its impressive historical holdings relating to all aspects of Illinois history, including an extensive Civil War collection and strong offerings on slavery and abolition, early settlement, church and community histories, and Illinois coal mining. Continue Reading →

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Understanding Reference Products

By on August 18, 2014 in Blog

Have reference sources eroded in quality in the online era? We’re all aware of the challenges facing us and our users in vetting (or not) the authority and credibility of free sources available online. But the quality of contemporary vetted sources is worth examining in its own right.

Many librarians continue to value traditional authorities, even if users do not. An answer may be found quickly via one’s favorite web search engine, but awareness of vetted sources may lead to quick answers as well. Choosing a vetted source first in looking for the answer can offset or reduce time spent carefully evaluating candidate retrieved websites.

Continue Reading →

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Why You Should Build Your Apps on a Cloud Platform

By on May 11, 2012 in Blog

At Unlimited Priorities we’re strong believers in cloud-based computing. We’ve said “It’s transforming the way computing services are delivered by providing unheard of flexibility, increased reliability and drastically decreasing costs.” (See our Cloud Computing page.)

A post today by Scott Fulton on ReadWriteWeb argues that most apps today should be built in the cloud.

A key point of the article is this. As an application provider your business is to deliver service. Traditionally, applications delivered that functionality running on clients’ platforms. Running there, it becomes a slave to the browser and the operating system. Two major changes now make it possible to remove these constraints:

  • Low cost highly available bandwidth makes it possible to run major parts of an application on a server.
  • There’s a healthy and growing cloud platform market, with many players offering innovative and inexpensive services to support these applictions.

These two changes make it much easier for development teams in small to medium sized companies to focus their skills on the application not the platform it runs on.

The entire article, along with a list of platform service providers is here:

Why You Should Build Your Apps on a Cloud Platform – And How to Choose the Right One

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Learning Cloud Computing Vocabulary

By on March 28, 2012 in Blog

If you are following developments in cloud computing, even a little, you know that there are new terms and concepts added every day. It’s easy to get lost as familiar terms get co-opted and new ones get added.

Unfortunately, it’s also hard to find decent articles to help sort through it all. Doing a Google search for “cloud computing primer”, quoted which means that the article needs to have that exact phrase in its body or title turns up a daunting 186,000 hits. Most of them are only primers if you already understand a lot about the cloud.

So it’s nice to see a simple, easy to understand piece that clearly explains many of the key concepts. “Think of EC2 as the computational brain behind an online application or service.” That sentence is one of many in the article “Cracking the cloud: An Amazon Web Services primer. It’s short and easy to understand, explaining in simple language how the Amazon Cloud works and what the key parts are. Read this and in addition to “Elastic Cloud Compute”, you’ll be able to use terms like “Elastic Load Balance” and “Elastic Block Storage” with confidence.

It won’t turn you into an expert, but it will help you when you are talking to experts about how the cloud can be used to help make your business more efficient and flexible while saving money at the same time.

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Cloud storage prices keep dropping – Comparing Amazon, Google and Rackspace

By on February 8, 2012 in Blog

Hard drive vs cloudAmazon has just announced another decrease for their standard cloud storage customers. This is their fifth in five years and it reinforces the attractiveness of using the cloud to store an organization’s data.

Amazon says in their announcement “With this price change, all Amazon S3 standard storage customers will see a significant reduction in their storage costs. For instance, if you store 50 TB (terrabytes) of data on average you will see a 12% reduction in your storage costs, and if you store 500 TB of data on average you will see a 13.5% reduction in your storage costs.will see a significant reduction in their storage costs.”

That sounds good, but it’s important to dig in a little. A terrabyte (TB) is 1024 gigabytes (GB), which is 1024 megabytes (MB). New laptops are now delivered with 1 TB disks. In very round numbers, a TB of storage will hold about 200,000 high-resolution photos, 100,000 large Power Point presentations, 250,000 songs or 350 HD movies. While data storage needs are growing rapidly in all organizations, most small to medium size organizations will not need anywhere near 50 TB, even if they move all of their data into the cloud.

So how do Amazon’s prices compare with the two other big providers, Rackspace and Google, for typical amounts of data? Here’s a table of monthly storage costs constructed using the current published prices:

Company –– 1TB (1,024 GB) –– 10TB (10,240 GB) –– 50TB (51,200 GB)
Amazon$128$1,142$5,647
Google$133$1,239$5,540
Rackspace$153$1,536$7,680

 
For small amounts of data, the differences are not large and remain close for the normal storage needs of many small to medium sized organizations. As the amount of data stored increases, Google compares favorably with Amazon, and is in fact slightly lower at 50 TB. Prices for Rackspace increase faster as the amount of data stored increases and are well above Google and Amazon at the 50 TB mark.

Price is not the only consideration when considering the use of cloud-based file storage, but it’s an important one. Amazon’s announcement will put pressure on the other providers to come down as well and continue to increase the attractiveness of storing data securely offsite where it can be accessed by and used by anyone who needs it.

The sources are: Google cloud storage pricing, Rackspace pricing calculator and Amazon web services blog.

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Moving into the cloud

By on December 30, 2011 in Blog

Cloud ComputingThe number of vendors in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment of the Cloud Computing market is now estimated to be over 2,000. This is one of the statistics in the NetworkWorld Insider Report, “Cloud Computing Changes Everything“, modestly titled and free to download (if you register first). Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has more than 30 current vendors and platform as a service (PaaS) as a service has more than 40. The differences between these three services are described on our Cloud Computing page, but simplistically, SaaS refers to shared applications like Salesforce.com, PaaS refers to shared web platforms like the Google App engine and IaaS refers to virtual servers created on-demand. All three of these areas are rapidly changing as new vendors enter, innovate and compete.

While there’s still a lot of hype, cloud computing is now regularly delivering real benefits that include increased flexibility, reliability and responsiveness while lowering costs — often substantially. But, the lack of an experience base and missing skills can make cloud computing, like other new technologies, difficult for an organization to effectively use.

Moving to cloud computing often reveals benefits that come by having computing and software resources delivered as services instead of provided by an internal IT department. Organizations switching from traditional products like Office to Google Docs have often been motivated by cost savings but found major additional benefits from increases in productivity that come with the collaboration features and the transparent upgrade process. Organizations with in-house application development groups have often been motivated by easy access to a supported development platform but found that the ease of creating test and staging servers on demand has vastly decreased the time it takes to develop, test and deploy new applications. Organizations that provide a hosted service have often been motivated by capital costs but found that the increased flexibility allows them to easily respond to demand changes.

There are pitfalls. Adopting cloud computing can be disruptive to established departments. IT may need to give up control to other groups. Current applications, especially if they’ve been customized may not run in the cloud. Some things may actually be more expensive in the cloud — like storing large amounts of data. Moving data in and out of the cloud can be costly. The vendors themselves don’t always help. Pilot programs designed to get an organization started are often too short and result in commitments that are difficult to undo.

Despite these pitfalls, we firmly believe that small to medium sized organizations, especially those in the information industry can effectively use the cloud today. We advocate a process that starts with an analysis of the current IT and IT-supported activities in the organization. From that analysis, one or more activities are selected for a cloud-based trial. The results of the trial are then used to determine how to move forward. Our experience is that by taking small, but real steps, the organization quickly gains experience, confidence, learns to deal with the issues and is able to see the benefits of cloud computing in a short period of time.

If you would like to discuss how cloud computing could benefit your organization, please contact us.


Contact Unlimited Priorities to learn how we can help your business excel and grow.
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