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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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Seven Steps for a Successful Social Contact Strategy

By on August 10, 2012 in Blog

If you’re in marketing, you probably know these feelings. It’s a tall order to get a message out in front of prospects and leads, and it’s a Herculean feat when you’re up against larger competitors for customer business.

Social media is no magic bullet. It can’t rescue a broken lead management process. But it can provide an organic, competitive advantage when battling the big guys.

Luckily, many of the tenets of traditional demand generation also apply to social media, but social can be woven into various touches you have with potential customers.

Learn more about the Seven Steps for a Social Contact Strategy at CRM Magazine.

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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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The power of the cloud to make “what-if” real

By on February 23, 2012 in Blog

Cloud PowerWe’ve written a lot about cloud computing — because we believe it can fundamentally transform a business in very positive ways. We were delighted to see this new report by IBM, The Power of the Cloud: Driving business model innovation, that describes the benefits of cloud computing and illustrates them with examples.

The report suggests that one way to think about the role cloud computing can play is to imagine some “what-if” questions. Four that fit well with small to medium sized businesses in the information industry are:

  • What if you could give customers access to your products and services anytime, anywhere and on any device?
  • What if you could inexpensively and rapidly develop and launch new product and service offerings?
  • What if you could easily and seamlessly connect and collaborate with business partners and customers?
  • What if you could redefine your role in your industry and change your competitive positioning?

Unlimited Priorities will be speaking on cloud computing at the NFAIS Annual Conference, Born of Disruption: An Emerging New Normal for the Information Landscape this week. If you would like to discuss how cloud computing can help make these what-if questions real for your organization, please contact us at the conference or through this website.

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Blogging for Outreach and Conversation

By on February 8, 2012 in Blog

In this month’s issue of Computers in Libraries magazine Meryl B. Cole, Christian L. Gray, and Cindy A. Romaine authored Blog Impossible:

This is the inside story of how a handful of volunteers with no budget generated 4 million hits, 400,000 unique visitors, and 365 posts.

Throughout 2011, Special Libraries Association (SLA) volunteers, including the article’s authors, made it their goal to determine how information professionals are adapting to the challenges and inherent in our new knowledge economy.  They created Future Ready 365 to explore the topic and used existing social media avenues like Facebook, Twitter, and Paper.li to get the word out.  Over the course of  the year, the project took off like crazy.

Read the full story.

Blogging as Outreach and Conversation

No matter the size of your organization, a blog is a great way to stay in touch with customers, staff, and stakeholders.  Unlimited Priorities often recommends blogging as a way for organizations to keep their message and work visible to the people who matter most.  For many small to medium sized  organizations, an official blog can provide the content needed to stay fresh and relevant on social media channels.

Everyone online suffers — to various degrees — with information overload and it is easy for an organization to find that its message is lost in the flood of information surging around the net.  By blogging and acting as a curator for valuable information your organization can help your audience stay on top of new information about you and about the world in general.

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NFAIS Releases Draft for Review and Comment

By on February 3, 2012 in Blog

The National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS™) has posted a draft Discovery Service Code of Practice for review and comment from February 1 through March 16, 2012.

Document ReviewThey believe that discovery services have the potential to provide ease of information discovery, access, and use, benefitting not only its member organizations, but also the global community of information seekers. However, the relative newness of these services has generated questions and concerns among information providers and librarians as to how these services meet expectations with regard to issues related to traditional search and retrieval services; e.g. usage reports, ranking algorithms, content coverage, updates, product identification, etc.

This document has been developed to assist those who choose to use this new distribution channel through the provision of guidelines that will help avoid the disruption of the delicate balance of interests involved.

NFAIS is inviting all members of the information community to review the draft and submit questions and comments for consideration by the Code Development Task Force. Background information and the draft Code can be accessed at: http://info.nfais.org/info/codedraftintroduction.pdf.

NFAIS wants to hear from you. Are there other issues to be considered? Who do they impact? What solutions should be considered? All comments are welcome and can be submitted online at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RV257LM.

Alternatively a marked up document or written comments can be submitted to Bonnie Lawlor, NFAIS Executive Director, at blawlor@nfais.org.

Background

In 2010 NFAIS was requested to gather information on the experiences and perceptions of its member organizations regarding discovery services — specifically those services that offer an alternative to the simple search capability provided by Google. A survey was conducted, but the results were inconclusive.

The respondents had not been working with discovery services long enough to gain sufficient experience with which to quantifiably determine the benefits and challenges that they presented to information providers and their users (see: http://info.nfais.org/info/Survey_Discovery_Svces.pdf).

The survey did raise questions and during the time that elapsed while answers were being sought from each of the major discovery services (EBSCO, Ex Libris, OCLC, and Serials Solutions), three facts emerged:

  1. The questions being raised by information providers overlapped significantly with those being raised in parallel within the library community; e.g. questions related to discovery service ranking algorithms, content coverage, usage reports, updates, branding, etc;
  2. Each service has their own proprietary system and unique approach to information discovery so that there is no single answer to the questions being raised
  3. A steadily growing number of librarians and information providers were entering into arrangements with discovery services with diverse expectations and without an awareness and understanding of the issues and concerns of the various players in any discovery service arrangement.

About NFAIS

NFAISFounded in 1958, NFAIS is a membership organization of more than 60 of the world’s leading producers of databases and related information services, information technology, and library services in the sciences, engineering, social sciences, business, and the arts and humanities. Unlimited Priorities is proud to be a member of NFAIS.

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In cloud computing cost and flexibility do not conflict

By on January 27, 2012 in Blog

CloudBernard Golden, CEO of HyperStratus has just published an article in Network World where he convincingly argues that a cloud computing is both more cost effective and more flexible, or agile, than using traditional IT infrastructure:

The attempt to downplay the importance of cost regarding cloud computing is misguided. However, there is a greater mistake in branding cost and agility as conflicting choices, with the implication that choosing one means forfeiting the other. The fact is that low cost and agility both depend upon the underlying foundation of cloud computing: automation. It is automation that supports both lower costs and agility, and both of them equally reflect its nature.

He goes on to point out that in every other industry where manual processes have been replaced by automation, costs dropped, businesses that didn’t keep up failed, demand went up because of lowered costs, and everyday life was transformed.

This underscores our firm belief that small to medium sized organizations, especially those in the information industry, can effectively use the cloud today. In an earlier post we describe how cloud computing is now regularly delivering real benefits that include increased flexibility, reliability and responsiveness while lowering costs. That post is here: Moving into the cloud.

Golden’s entire article is here: Cloud Computing Both More Agile and Less Expensive

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Consumer Electronics Show 2012 – Notes and Takeaways

By on January 20, 2012 in Blog

The theme of the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show was all things connected all the time anywhere and everywhere. According to Parks Associates, more than 920 million connected devices will be sold worldwide in 2012, and revenues from operator-provided cloud-based value-added services will exceed $8.5 billion by 2015. CES product displays did not diminish any of these estimates.

The ability to perform similar functions on various sized screens is increasing. Whether you have a smartphone, tablet, notebook, or large screen OLED Television, internet access to sites, search and social connections will expand in 2012. Below are a few highlights.

Mobile Redefined

Mobility and mobile devices are no longer optional or an add-on to our business and personal lives. The connected home and connected offices have been described for many years as a home network or office network. Today, connectivity makes every device linkable. Not just devices we call computers, but appliances, remote controls, video cameras and the automobile. The car Henry Ford started with now has its own computer based internet connection so you can get traffic reports, weather updates and be connected to the National Public Radio broadcast archives to listen to most NPR programs from any date at any time. This is internet radio on wheels.

More Books

The old term was computer or personal computer. Then the personal devices became a single unit that one could carry anywhere. The books evolved – Notebook, Netbook eBook and now Ultrabook. Ultrabooks come from the folks at Intel and have screen sizes from 11 to 13 inches, weigh less than 3 pounds and are priced less than $1,000. 

Digital medical
Doctors’ offices have been mandated to go digital. Tablets and other mobile devices are being used everywhere from the operating room to admitting. More than the hospitals and doctors, devices, apps and cloud based services are providing DIY medical control for the individual. Companies like Withings have scales, blood pressure cuffs and monitors for both babies and adults. These devices are digitally accurate and when used transmit the readings to a smartphone app for storage and uploading to your account on their website. 


These highlights may not be enough for you. Just fire up your favorite search engine and search other articles about any of the more than 3,700 vendors that were on display. Change on the technology front is constant. Whatever device you see today, feature updates will occur in less than one year. So if today you need 3D television, Digital Maps, More Games, et al, the time to buy is right after the super bowl. If you can wait, go ahead, knowing that the device you have with an internet connection links you to the world of a lot information (sometimes called stuff).

One announcement of note – Microsoft said they will no longer exhibit at CES. This action is worth watch as the big electronics companies – LG, Sony, Panasonic and Pioneer are expanding their product lines with televisions, streaming players, DVRs, Portable everything. This includes managed content that will be exclusive a period of time. For example, “Angry Birds” will have its own channel on LG.

Imagine relaxing on a quiet, sun drenched beach listening to surf roll in over the sand. You reach into your beach bag and pull out a portable device that enables connection with Unlimited Priorities Site so you can read this blog, check on upcoming U-P events. You then close the device and return to your relaxation knowing more than when your feet first touched sand.

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LITA National Forum 2012 Call for Proposals Now Open

By on January 19, 2012 in Blog

LITAThe 2012 National Forum Committee is seeking proposals for quality pre-conferences, concurrent sessions and poster sessions for the 15th annual LITA National Forum to be held in Columbus, OH, October 3 – October 7, 2012.

The 2012 theme is: New World of Data: Discover. Connect. Remix.
Due Date for proposals: February 17, 2012

The Forum Committee is interested in pre-conferences and presentations about projects, plans or discoveries in areas of library-related technologies related to the identification, location, harvesting, harnessing, use, misuse, preservation and loss of data of all types and all formats in dynamic and emerging web environments. We welcome proposals related to all types of libraries: public, school, academic, government, special and corporate. Proposals on any aspect of library and information technology are solicited.

View and download the complete call for proposals [pdf].
Submit proposals to: http://lib.skidmore.edu/library/LITA_Proposal.html

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