Universities and libraries propose Share: Shared Access Research Ecosystem; Self-Published eBooks are 12% of the digital market; Elsevier announces digital services upgrade; Gale, The Library of Michigan and CIVICTechnologies partner to provide business resources; HarperCollins announces BookSmash app contest; Europeana 1989: we made history - project launched in Warsaw; and SydneyPLUS, Inmagic, Cuadra, Questor and affiliate companies now Lucidea Corporation.
Jennifer Howard reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education that “as federal agencies scramble to meet an August 22 
deadline to comply with a recent White House directive to expand public access to research, a group of university and library organizations says it has a workable, higher-education-driven solution. This week, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, and the Association of Research Libraries are offering a plan they call the Shared Access Research Ecosystem, or Share.
Share would expand on systems that universities and libraries have long been building to support the sharing and preservation of research...
According to GoodEreader, “Bowker Market Research is reporting … that self-published eBooks now account for 12% of the entire digital publishing market. In some cases, the number actually rises to a very respectable 20%, but is fairly genre specific to crime, science fiction and fantasy, romance and humor…”
Elsevier will upgrade its more than 500 websites this fall with better capabilities for search and mobile access. Elsevier’s investment will deliver more accuracy in search results, an improved editorial tool for article collections, and mobile optimization…
Elsevier’s Smart Content, a semantic taxonomy tool, will power the new web services. The content tagged by Smart Content feeds into a new editorial collection tool that creates automated or curated topic collections so readers can find relevant articles for the topics they search. Smart Content has more than 1 million concepts and 3 million synonyms saved, in areas such as diseases, drugs, procedures, anatomy, clinical findings and symptoms, organisms, and substances…”
Gale, part of Cengage Learning …, the Library of Michigan and CIVICTechnologies have “announced a partnership to make business resources available at no cost to local Michigan business owners and entrepreneurs. Following a request for proposals process, the Library of Michigan selected Gale to provide business resources, including a range 
of ebooks, forms and research databases, and CIVICTechnologies to provide business market research data and software. The services have been purchased through funding allocated in the budget of Michigan Governor Rick Snyder as part of his “Economic Gardening” initiative to grow businesses in the state. All Michigan libraries and all Michigan residents can access these digital resources via the Michigan eLibrary (MeL), the Library of Michigan’s online home for digital resources…
According to TeleRead “in the latest push by Big Publishing to win back ground lost to digital disruption, Big Six house HarperCollins has announced a competition, BookSmash, for developers “to create excellent, functioning software and proof of concept apps utilizing the HarperCollins OpenBook API.” The competition comes with a first prize of $15,000…”
Europeana, Europe’s digital library, museum and archive, has launched a new project titled ‘Europeana 1989′. People across Europe are invited to share their experiences, stories and memorabilia from the time of the fall of the Iron Curtain in a digital archive.
This release will also be available in the languages of the former Communist states.
According to Library Technology Guides “SydneyPLUS, … announced that SydneyPLUS and all of its affiliated companies – Inmagic Canada Software, Cuadra Associates, Questor Systems, LookUp Precision, LawPort, and Incite Software Solutions – will now operate as one company under the new name Lucidea Corporation. All products will retain their brand names, and will continue to be enhanced and supported by Lucidea…”
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