Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

Happy to see JackBe still making news and especially with regards to a project which started while I was there. Click through to read the article from eweek in the entirety. Mashups Give Defense Department Strategic Edge ( Page 1 of 4 ) Off-the-shelf Web 2.0 mashup software from JackBe aids decisions and keeps troops safe. To make the right decision, it's essential to have the right information at the right time. But just what information is needed, when and in relation to what other information is a subtle science that tests the mettle of IT managers everywhere. In the armed forces, victory and defeat—not to mention human life—may hang in the balance of every decision that is made. In its ongoing effort to enable better decision-making, the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, has deployed an enterprise mashup server running JackBe software to bring together strategic information from disparate sources, particularly geographic and mapping data. "The DOD [Depa...

Serials Solutions ( www.serialssolutions.com ), a business unit of ProQuest, has added several new content providers and a new library beta development partner for its Summon unified discovery service. The service is being developed in close cooperation with library beta partners, with a goal of not only bringing the researcher back to the library but providing a channel for greater return on the library's content investment. The new partner, Western Michigan University, which will use the Summon service with its VuFind next-generation catalog, joins Dartmouth College, Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney, and University of Liverpool in providing feedback that will refine all aspects of the service. New content providers include IEEE, the pre-eminent engineering society, information technology publisher IGI Global, international scholarly publishing leader Brill, and a pair of Australian presses that expand the service's local coverage. The Summon service's cont...

by Paula J. Hane Providing a single point of access to a broad range of library materials seems to be emerging as the Holy Grail of the library world. Libraries provide a vast richness of content, but that content has historically resided in separate silos of storage and access-books in the catalog, subscription content from multiple providers, ebooks, archival collections, electronic journals, and other resources on the web. Library vendors have approached the problem with federated search products that search remotely and rely on connectors, but these are generally seen to be only partial and limited solutions. However, new discovery tools have begun to appear that promise to provide a single interface to multiple resources based on using a centralized consolidated index to provide faster and better search results. Serials Solutions ( www.serialssolutions.com ) announced its Summon service in January (see NewsBreak) and garnered much interest; it is currently in beta testing in a sm...

April 14, 2009 Serials Solutions Signs Beta Partner WMU and New Content Providers for the Summon™ Unified Discovery Service IEEE, Brill, IGI, and Australian presses bring new content to rapidly expanding service Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest, has signed Western Michigan University as a beta development site for its new Summon™ unified discovery service. New content providers will also participate. Among them are IEEE, the world's pre-eminent engineering society, information technology publisher IGI-Global, international scholarly publishing leader Brill and a pair of Australian presses that expand the service's local coverage. The Summon™ service's contributors, which include the massive content resources of ProQuest and Gale, have expanded to more than 80. Harvested content now exceeds 400 million records in preparation for the service's July launch. Announced in January, the Summon™ un...

I joined the Summon product team at Serials Solutions this week as the product marketing manager. I have to say, it was the potential I saw in this streamlined information discovery service that was the tipping point in choosing the oppertunity over others. Just as Newspapers have been dropping like flies, acedemic libraries face a very real challenge of exposing the breadth of information in a streamlined fashion in keeping with the paradim establish by Google. Libraries are realizing that information if undiscoverable is meaningless in this experimental learning culture. Meaning, if the discovery process is not streamlined to the standards of the web search engines, people will pop out to the web and bypass all the resources behind the walled garden of the institution. Summon, unified discovery service soon to be released by Serial Solutions, aims to solve this problem... and it does as proven in early beta tests. More to come....

That's right, I went with the MacBook Pro and am extremely happy. 4gigs if proving more than enough to virtualize with Parrallels and run Windows XP for some windows only apps I run. Thanks to all that took the poll and or sent me their feedback.