UC Hastings College of the Law Library has installed Encore Synergy, which offers expanded article access and advanced search capability to staff and users. Among other sources, the Library is integrating articles from ProQuest®, Google Scholar™, and HeinOnline’s™ Core Collections that comprise more than 40 million pages of legal history, including more than 1,500 law and related periodicals.

The Library now presents Encore article sources as the default search option, while still providing access to the print collection in a single search. Says Technical Services Librarian Marlene Bubrick: “We chose to spread the article sources across a number of disciplines to increase their research value and pinpoint the needs of faculty and law students, who are increasingly in need of interdisciplinary resources. Article resources are crucial for law research, because they provide quality information. They also have to be up to date, and we get that with Encore.”

Bubrick continues: “As far as searching features, the faculty wants a deep subject area search, whereas students generally want a broader view of ‘what exists out there’ in terms of a particular subject. Keyword searching is the route students take and the new advanced search is a great tool for librarians. For all our users, faceting helps them drill down to what they need. Faceting for HeinOnline is particularly helpful because there are so many titles in that resource.”

You can see the Library’s implementation of Encore here

Google Scholar™, Google; HeinOnline™, William S. Hein & Co; ProQuest®, ProQuest LLC.

About UC Hastings College of the Law

UC Hastings College of the Law was founded as California’s first law school in 1878 by Serranus Clinton Hastings. The Law Library serves as a central focus of the law school campus. The Library’s collection of over 650,000 volumes includes an extensive collection of United States and international materials, as well as federal and California government documents.

Emeryville, CA—Innovative announced today the launch of Encore Release 5, which will incorporate social Web features to provide a more relevant, visible, and engaging presence for today’s libraries. In Release 5 of Encore, users will be able to “like” all kinds of library content such as books, movies, and music. Sharing these finds on social networks will be easy, with the use of a standard set of sharing links that include Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. Encore Release 5 will also provide users with the ability to create and share their own home page with options to include a profile, reviews, reading lists they create, or items they have checked out or put on hold. What’s more, library users will find more content created by their peers thanks to a pool of reviews and shared lists created by Encore
users worldwide.

The Right Approach to ‘Social’

This advance builds on earlier Encore milestones that focused on discovery tools such as facets, subscription article integration, and advanced usability. “The new capacities of Encore represent the right way to approach social features in libraries,” says Encore Product Manager Alan Dyck. “We’ve formally surveyed librarians and found that an approach that connects with social activities, rather than recreating a social platform, will be most desirable for them and their communities. At many points, users will find options to share things to social networks patrons are already using, while also discovering the views and reviews of their peers in Encore. We have also taken care to balance social features with the privacy concerns of our customers, by allowing users and libraries to choose their level of social participation.”

Encore Release 5 will be available to users of both Encore Discovery and Encore Synergy. Planned for general release later in 2012, it will offer full integration with either Millennium or Sierra.

We’d like to share a preview of a few upcoming social features. For example, a Share This badge is a way to tie the Encore experience to any of dozens of social networks and book-marking services.

You also will be able to add a “Like” button, or other links into your users’ networks, directly on the record display. The record display has a customization option, so if you can build it in Javascript, you can put it on the page.

As we know from the popularity of the social web, people respond well to sites that let them leave their mark. With existing features such as Community Reviews and tagging, you can give your patrons a chance to be part of a social dialog within the Encore environment.

We’ll be announcing the availability of new social features mentioned here as part of Release 4.2 of Encore, scheduled for the first quarter of 2012. You can also look forward to an Encore Release that focuses on unlocking the full potential of the social discovery experience later in 2012.

• The new Cobalt skin, designed from usability testing feedback
• Article Portfolios for an expanded and contextual discovery experience
• Advanced Searching
• Improved relevance sorting options
• Integration with Novelist Select for You Might Like… recommendations
• Integration with Hein Online for precision legal research

And much more! For information on how to self-upgrade to the Cobalt release, please write the Encore team.

Release date: July 26, 2011

Emeryville, CA—University of Colorado-Boulder Libraries is live with Encore Synergy 4.1 and is the first US academic customer to implement the new release. Encore Synergy now offers expanded article access, advanced search, and a new Cobalt look and feel option inspired by usability testing and user feedback. The University Libraries is also taking advantage of the new Article Portfolios feature by creating article source groupings in the areas of Arts, Literature & Language; Business; Communication & Technology; Science & Engineering; and more.

The new Cobalt skin features a more compact format and new facet re-design for catalog subject headings. “We are delighted with the new Cobalt look and feel,” says Rice Majors, Assistant Professor and Faculty Director of Libraries Information Technology. “It’s a significant improvement in simplifying Encore’s interface to a cleaner presentation. Generally speaking, the Libraries’ faculty have been very vocal about how much they like it.”

Majors continues: “We definitely like how searching of our article databases works in Encore Synergy 4.1. We’re now able to search many more databases than previously, and Encore is leveraging configuration choices we’ve already made, which saves us the time of having to start from scratch. We have usability data that shows, for example, that our students love to be able to limit to peer-reviewed articles.”

Encore Synergy at University of Colorado-Boulder, can be accessed at http://encore.colorado.edu.

About University of Colorado-Boulder Libraries

The University of Colorado-Boulder Libraries is the largest library collection in the Rocky Mountain region, with more than 12 million books, periodicals, government publications, audio-visual materials, microforms, maps, manuscripts, papers, and computer-based sources. The University Libraries is affiliated with the best academic libraries in the country and is a member of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (a cooperative of Colorado and Wyoming research libraries), the Greater Western Library Alliance (a group of 32 research libraries located in the Midwest and Western states), the Association of Research Libraries and the Center for Research Libraries.

Library staff will know that today’s latest, groundbreaking research is right there in Encore Synergy, direct from carefully selected, trusted resources geared for their community. Encore Synergy surpasses other discovery products by presenting a search that is as complete as possible in terms of evidence, while providing a context that makes it easier to refine to a user’s specific research need.

Want to offer access to your subscription databases in a discovery environment? Write the Encore Team for more information.

Emeryville, CA—Innovative is pleased to announce that resources from HeinOnline™, William S. Hein & Co’s premier online research product, now integrates into the Encore Synergy discovery application. A single search of Encore Synergy will now include results from HeinOnline’s Core Collections, which comprise more than 40 million pages of legal history, including more than 1,500 law and related periodicals. This new integration represents an advance for discovery of legal research and reflects Innovative’s continuing commitment to law libraries.
Key Features

In addition to discovery, Encore Synergy users benefit from one-click access to full-text PDFs or Web pages from HeinOnline. Full-text indexing of HeinOnline content allows the greatest possible access to this material by legal researchers.

Encore Synergy also extends its faceted search technology to HeinOnline resources. Users can select facets to limit Hein results by date, by collection (such as the American Association of Law Libraries), or by content type (such as article, case, comment, and more).

Law library users can search Encore Synergy by HeinOnline citations. This functionality uniquely targets the needs of law students who are familiar with complete and partial Bluebook citations, as well as extending findability to novice users who might remember keywords in the non-abbreviated publication title.
Extending Partnership

“We are proud to have brought HeinOnline resources into Encore Synergy,” says John McCullough, Vice President, Encore Division. “Law libraries can now provide more research value to users in a single discovery search. We have partnered with HeinOnline in the past for staff-side functions in the Millennium ILS; and we are pleased to extend that partnership in service of law library users.”

The integration is available for libraries that have Encore Synergy and are subscribers to HeinOnline Core Collections. HeinOnline will be available with Encore Synergy Release 4.1.

HeinOnline™ is a trademark of William S. Hein & Co.
The Bluebook is published and distributed by the Harvard Law Review Association.

About William S. Hein & Co. and HeinOnline

William S. Hein & Company, Inc. has been serving the law library community for nearly 90 years. It is a highly respected publisher of original legal publications, a major reprinter of legal classics and out-of-print United States Government Printing Office documents, the world’s largest distributor of legal periodicals, and a provider of a multitude of services to the law library community. HeinOnline™, a product of William S. Hein & Co., is one of the fastest growing online legal research databases, featuring more than 65 million pages of legal research material available in an online, fully searchable, image-based format. Now in more than 4,000 locations in over 180 countries, HeinOnline is the world’s largest image-based legal research collection and contains more than nine centuries of legal history.

About Encore Synergy

Encore Synergy (www.encoreforlibraries.com) transforms how users discover what libraries have to offer by uniting articles, books/ebooks, local digital collections, and more in a single search. A content-neutral platform, Encore Synergy delivers real-time article information directly from the sources libraries select. Regardless of the ILS being used or level of staff expertise, it provides a reliable solution that makes adding the latest discovery features simple. Using modern Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) design, Encore Synergy supports Web Services technologies that can be tailored to meet the needs of any library. What’s more, the dedicated Encore Services Team backs the product with in-library installation, hosted options (SaaS), and more. With Encore, it’s all right here.

Try It!

• Universidad de Sevilla
• University of Colorado, Boulder

These libraries are using the new Cobalt skin option (pictured) available in Encore 4.1. This free option continues our pattern of providing the most effective and elegant discovery interface. Cobalt features a two-column layout, with a subject and community tags facet in the left column (rather than a tag cloud). A new color scheme and fonts highlight the streamlined browse entries and redesigned record display. A free option for all Encore customers, Cobalt is an alternative to the existing Pearl and Citrus skins.

Other Encore 4.1 Features

For Encore Synergy customers, the Encore 4.1 feature set includes Article Portfolios for contextual research
and expanded facets for article sources.

Both Encore Synergy and Encore Discovery customers will enjoy a new Advanced Search feature, enhanced BookCart and requesting features, and “You Might Also Like” recommendations to promote related titles within your collection.

For more on this release, Innovative customers can view the recent webinar for public Libraries or the webinar for academic libraries. If you are interested in finding out more about Encore write info@encoreforlibraries.com.

Encore Synergy’s Portfolios integrate as many sources as needed—from article sources such as HeinOnline to aggregators like EBSCO and Proquest. There is no limit to the content, and no need to normalize data or load it into a central database. Encore Synergy is content neutral with more library control and more targeted resources than any pre-packaged aggregation.

Best of all, Synergy Portfolios presents different sources to different users with library-defined labels that are meaningful to your community. For example, medical students can focus their research on scholarly medical sources simply by selecting the Health & Medical portfolio, while undergraduates can continue to use the General Research portfolio to see a broader spectrum of sources. Sources that are relevant for multiple groups can appear in multiple Portfolios. And any user who is not familiar with specific database names can take advantage of Portfolios displaying the names of general subject areas to determine which group of sources will be most relevant for a current research task.

Portfolios are available with Encore Synergy 4.1 (currently in beta). Please contact us at about sources you would like to present to your users!

The two webinars addressed new developments that leverage Web Services technology to provide a richer, broader library discovery experience than ever before. The sessions were presented by John McCullough, Vice President of the Encore Division at Innovative Interfaces, and Sarah Hickman Auger, Product Manager for Encore at Innovative Interfaces.

Highlights from Encore Synergy 4.1 include Article Discovery Portfolios for contextual research, expanded facets for article sources, new Advanced Search features, enhanced BookCart and requesting features, “You Might Also Like” recommendations (using NoveList® Select) to promote related titles within your collection, plus a new Cobalt skin inspired by usability testing and user feedback. ]]> http://encoreforlibraries.com/2011/03/10/library-discovery/feed/ 0