IngentaConnect celebrates 10,000 e-publications!
We're very excited to report that IngentaConnect has recently surpassed the 10,000 milestone in its collection of electronic publications. The platform is now supporting over 31 million sessions a month (May 2006), providing full text access to over 20 million articles. IngentaConnect Vice President Douglas Wright notes, “We want to thank our library and publisher customers for their loyalty in recent years. It is with their support that IngentaConnect has continued to thrive, to the extent that it is now indisputably the largest full-text collection of its kind. We continue to invest in development of the platform to add benefit for all our customers, and we have several technology projects currently underway which will support and build on IngentaConnect’s sustained success.” (Read more about one such project below).
Our existing publisher customers should all have received a letter from us with news of how to enter our celebratory competition - which offers you the chance to win free conversion and hosting of a journal backfile, plus a number of tempting runner-up prizes. Don't miss out! Contact your client manager for instructions if you have not received your letter.
Technology award for Ingenta's metastore
We're proud to report that we were recently awarded Best Applications Paper at the inaugural Jena User Conference. The conference was organised by world-renowned technology systems provider HP (formerly known as Hewlett Packard) and held at HP Labs in Bristol. Ingenta software engineers Katie Portwin and Priya Parvatikar presented a paper detailing their groundbreaking use of Jena, an open source Java framework developed by HP Labs' Semantic Web Programme. Jena is the technology chosen by Ingenta to deliver our new 'Metastore', an RDF triplestore which will be phased in over the coming months to accommodate all the raw data delivered by IngentaConnect.
Metastore has been designed from the ground upwards to recognise and support the broadening user expectations and requirements of the semantic web era. It is a scalable data repository -- the largest commercial deployment of its kind -- and allows for increasingly flexible content models. For example, it will facilitate creation of "virtual journals" whereby publishers (and perhaps, longer-term, users) can define a diverse set of articles to license as a "journal". Metastore will also address an issue which has received considerable airtime in recent months: users ceasing to distinguish between different types of content (explained, for example, by computer science professor Carole Goble at this year's UKSG Annual Conference). It treats all forms of content equally, thus supporting changing user needs by enabling publishers to upload raw research materials, which can then be delivered either alongside or separately to the output of that research (the published article).
For more (technical!) information about Metastore, check out these postings on our All My Eye blog:
- My triplestore's bigger than your triplestore...
- Does your "Boy Scout Handbook" look as though it has been read by a grizzly bear?
- performance, triplestores, and going round in circles..
And our recent press release, Ingenta's technological innovation wins HP award.
Introducing IngentaConnect's North American Library Advisory Board
We are pleased to report that the following have agreed to serve as members of our recently-formed North American Library Advisory Board:
- Stephanie Aken, Electronic Resources Coordinator, University of Kentucky
- Beth Bernhardt, Electronic Journals/Document Delivery Librarian, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
- Laura Cohen, Library Web Administrator, University at Albany
- Chuck Hamaker, Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services, The University of North Carolina, Charlotte
- Mary H. Kay, Collection Development Librarian, Humboldt State University
- Callista Kelly, Head of Interlibrary Loans, Carleton University Library
- Heather Moberly, Veterinary Medicine Librarian, Oklahoma State University
- Mary Page, Head of Acquisitions, Rutgers University
- David Serxner, Library Assistant Acquisitions, North Carolina State University, Raleigh
- David Walsh, Electronic Resources Specialist, University of Missouri-Columbia
The Board's annual meetings, supplemented by monthly email discussions, will provide valuable input to IngentaConnect's product development strategy. We also intend to pass on the group's recommendations to you, via meetings and events such as our publisher forums, to support your own activities in this area. Board members have been appointed to represent a range of job functions and disciplines, to ensure breadth of perspective and varying granularity of ideas. We look forward to working with the Board to continue improving the IngentaConnect service, and meeting the needs of your institutional users.