News and Announcements 12/16/11

An update from CNI; Chinese e-reader sales down; a Chem Abstracts collaboration; a jump in magazine launches; and OCLC releases FAST.

Research Infrastructures in the Digital Humanities

According to Clifford Lynch at the Coalition for Networked Information, this policy brief from the European Science Foundation’s Standing Committee on the Humanities “offers an excellent survey of many large-scale European digital humanities efforts.”  Further details are available at the ESF website under Research Infrastructures in the Humanities.

China E-Reader Sales Down Thanks To Lack Of Content

“Though the e-book phenomenon is now taking off around the world, Chinese e-reader sales actually fell 5.1 percent, according to Analysys International’s Enfodesk.  The fall is blamed on problems at market-leading e-reader maker Hanvon, whose own sales dropped “because of insufficient content and internal system problems”

CAS and InfoChem to Collaborate in ChemInformatics

“Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) announced a longterm collaboration with InfoChem, GmbH (InfoChem), a provider of chemical structure and reaction technology as well as datamining in chemical science documents. Under the new collaboration, research teams at CAS and InfoChem will work together to explore the technology frontiers in the field of cheminformatics.”

Magazine Launches Up 23.8 Percent in 2011

According to this article in Folio “The number of magazines launched in 2011 jumped 23.8 percent, from 193 to 239, compared to 2010, according to magazine database Mediafinder.com. Meanwhile, the number of closures fell 13.6 percent, from 176 in 2010 to 152 this year.”

OCLC Releases FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) as Linked Data

In a recent news release OCLC reports that  “FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology), an enumerative, faceted subject heading schema derived from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), is now available as an experimental Linked Data service (http://id.worldcat.org/fast/) and is made available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License.”