Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Credo Reference has a number of publisher collections which feature the titles from an individual publisher.  They are available for purchase or subscription in Credo, but are generally not part of the Credo General Reference collection.  Credo just announced a new collection from Marshall Cavendish - 9 titles/70 volumes.  Here is more from the press [...]

The following is a summary of the presentation from Paul Kobasa of World Book Inc. Paul represents the perspective of the traditional encyclopedia publisher/editor.                                                      World Book in a Wikipedia World Paul A. Kobasa Vice President, Editorial Editor in Chief World Book, Inc. Conventional Criteria to Evaluate a Reference Source. Which Still Apply Today? [...]

Databases designed expressly for children are few and far between. Rosen, publisher of the very successful Teen Health and Wellness, recently launched PowerKids Life Science, an online science resource specifically aimed at learners in grades 3 to 6. Made up of curriculum-correlated content, including more than 400 articles on key life science topics, PowerKids Life Science promotes digital literacy [...]

Here's a press release I received about some new developments at Alexander Street Press. (I wonder if they've ever had the same conversations about the word "Press" in their name as I've had about the word "Books" in Reference Books Bulletin.) Electronic publisher Alexander Street Press today announced plans to launch an integrated online repository of [...]

News from ProQuest: ProQuest is unlocking the primary source material it acquired with University Publications of America (UPA) through a new digital archive called ProQuest History Vault. Its first three modules are being released this year and will provide researchers with a unique, unfiltered view into the Black Freedom Struggle and U.S. foreign policy during the [...]

Oxford Dictionaries Online (which was the Top of the List, Booklist Editors' Choice: Reference Sources, 2010) is updating today. Here's a selected list of additions: babycino - a drink of hot milk that has been frothed up with pressurized steam, intended for children backlink - an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website. [...]

Thomas Jefferson took a keen interest in the Library of Congress while he was President. He was also an avid book collector, and when the Library of Congress was destroyed during the British invasion of Washington in 1814, more than 6,000 books from his personal library formed the nucleus of the new LC. That wasn't the end [...]

87% of students feel online libraries and databases have had significant impact on learning According to a survey released last week by Cengage Learning, 87% of students feel that online libraries and databases have had the most significant impact on their overall learning. The survey, entitled "Instructors and Students: Technology Use, Engagement and Learning Outcomes" [...]

The spring semester is now beginning for many college students and WorldCat Mobile is an app that might be useful in certain situations.   The app uses WorldCat.org  which is "the world's largest online resource for finding information in libraries." Reviews of the app have not been great, but for a quick check to see if [...]

H. W. Wilson's WilsonWeb Service has a variety of new enhancements. Highlights include: • Record previews. Users can preview individual records without navigating away from the "brief display" search results screen, by mousing over the new "quick view" icon.  The pop-up "quick view" includes important fields such as Abstracts, Title, Author, Source, Publication Year, and Subject.  [...]

CQ Press will launch a new, revolutionary database in April of 2011 – First Street.  First Street consolidates congressional, government and lobbying data back to 1993, including CQs plethora of staff directories.  The First Street Coalition Builder (TM), the coolest part of the product, is a visual mapping tool which displays connections between staffers, lobbyists, [...]

Proquest announced yesterday the acquisition of ebrary.  From their press release:  "ProQuest has acquired acclaimed e-book pioneer ebrary, setting the stage for significant acceleration of the process of serious research.  The agreement will marry both companies’ inventive, user-centric technologies and add a growing pool of a quarter-million e-books to ProQuest’s monumental content offerings.  The combined [...]

Coming soon from EBSCO, the expansion of multilanguage searching in EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) and EBSCOhost® to include over forty-five (45) languages.  This includes the searching, discovery and display of database and catalog content in these languages.   Additionally, the EBSCOhost interface will be localized into 25 languages, with more planned.  For more information on [...]

The Oxford English Dictionary Online was relaunched last week, 10 years after it first appeared. The new versi0n has over 600,000 words and now incorporates the Historical Thesaurus of the OED. The RBB review of the previous version was long (really long) on technicalities, as were most of our reviews of electronic resources back then, when the [...]

Gale today announced the release of Gale NewsVault, a specially designed online platform that enables cross-searching of Gale’s enormous range of historical newspaper and periodical collections from a single interface. Providing access to more than 2,000 titles and 10 million digitized pages, Gale NewsVault provides an unparalleled window to the past for researchers and students. [...]

Facts On File recently announced a content update to Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center database.  New data provided by Peterson’s Nelnet, LLC, on more than 4,000 schools that offer two- and four-year degrees in the United States and Canada, is now searchable in Ferguson's. Users can filter school search information in a variety of ways: by [...]

From an OCLC Press Release:  OCLC and EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) have expanded their partnership to enhance the discovery experience for users of WorldCat Local and the EBSCO Discovery Service through an expanded data exchange agreement. The new agreement will create more value for libraries that subscribe to services from OCLC and EBSCO. WorldCat Local libraries [...]

From a Gale/Cengage Learning Press Release: Gale, part of Cengage Learning, and 18thConnect, a scholarly organization dedicated to forging links between eighteenth-century archives and today’s digital research environment, today announced a partnership to share scholarly content and improve the searchability of documents within Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online(ECCO) archive. Gale’s ECCO archive, one of the largest [...]

EBSCO Publishing has released the third of five series from American Antiquarian Society (AAS) with American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 3. The series is part of a collection that provides digital access to what is by far the most comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1691 and 1877. American Antiquarian Society Historical [...]

ASP just announced new functionality for their video products.  The following is from an email from ASP:  I am pleased to let you know that we now have "Send-to-Mobile" functionality for our video collections as well as our streaming music collections. Videos in Dance in Video and Opera in Video can now be sent to [...]