Over 365,000 Historic Books Made Available Online with Autonomy
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Online Research Platform Goes Live
CAMBRIDGE, England - Autonomy, an HP Company, today announced that Mimas, a world-class academic data centre based at the University of Manchester which provides researchers in the UK with key information assets, has launched a new pioneering search and discovery platform on behalf of JISC Collections - JISC Historic Books, powered by Autonomy IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer).
Part of the JISC eCollections service, this new platform gives the UK academic community access to vast amounts of digitized content across a wide range of disciplines. This revolutionizes research in the UK by suggesting relevant content automatically and in real time, and opens up a world of resources to students and researchers.
"Autonomy's ability to infinitely scale is absolutely central to the project," said Vic Lyte, Head of Technology Services at Mimas. "It is easy for us to add new content as and when needed, and IDOL automatically works its magic by understanding concepts within the data and serving it up to the appropriate users according to what they are looking for. This represents a massive advance for the research community, showing, for the first time in this sector, how meaning based technology can be used to unlock some of our country's most valuable assets - its literature."
JISC Historic Books contains the full text or page images of over 300,000 books published in Britain before 1800. The service, developed for JISC Collections and the British Library, draws content from two of the best-known and longest-established early book collections, Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). This is combined with the British Library Nineteenth Century Collection, offering digitized versions of more than 65,000 original editions from the nineteenth century, covering philosophy, history, poetry and literature. The collection extends to over 25 million pages of rare and previously inaccessible content.
"The new platform brings together digitized collections of historic books which are otherwise distributed on different publisher platforms or not otherwise available," explained Lorraine Estelle, CEO of JISC Collections. "It provides UK academic researchers and students with a single sign-on and interface to a vast corpus of primary source material."
"We're delighted that JISC Historic Books, and our partnership with JISC, JISC Collections and Mimas, enable Higher Education users to explore and research many thousands of texts - whether they're classics or the hitherto more obscure end of the spectrum," says Caroline Brazier, the British Library's Director of Scholarship and Collections. "Shelves and shelves of books, that could previously only be read in our St Pancras Reading Rooms, by one reader at a time, are now simultaneously and instantly available to thousands of JISC eCollections members' users."
"Autonomy is delighted to be part of this innovative project, helping to ensure that 25 Terabytes of invaluable digital libraries are now made available to the academic community in a truly meaningful way," said Nigel Hutchinson, VP Autonomy Power Solutions, EMEA. "Autonomy's unique ability to understand meaning in information is transforming the way researchers and users access and interact with content, opening the possibility to solve some of the great academic questions."
JISC Journal Archives, also part of the JISC eCollections service, uses IDOL to provide meaning based discovery across more than 3.75 million articles from the archives of over 600 journals of major publishers and societies, such as Taylor & Francis, Royal Society of Chemistry, Oxford University Press, ProQuest, Institute of Physics, Institution of Civil Engineers, Brill, and Cambridge University Press.
Researchers are now able to benefit from cross-search and access to a range of national repositories, search results that are clustered according to conceptual themes, and guided navigation of search results. IDOL also offers the possibility to develop capabilities for customized recommendations based on users' search histories, and at-a-glance overviews of topics relevant to fellow researchers.
Please visit www.autonomy.com/idolserver to find out more.
Please visit Mimas at mimas.ac.uk/news/2012/03/autonomy/
About Autonomy
Autonomy, an HP Company, is a global leader in software that processes human information, or unstructured data, including social media, email, video, audio, text and web pages, etc. Autonomy's powerful management and analytic tools for structured information together with its ability to extract meaning in real time from all forms of information, regardless of format, is a unique tool for companies seeking to get the most out of their data. Autonomy's product portfolio helps power companies through enterprise search analytics, business process management and OEM operations. Autonomy also offers information governance solutions in areas such as eDiscovery, content management and compliance, as well as marketing solutions that help companies grow revenue, such as web content management, online marketing optimization and rich media management.
Please visit www.autonomy.com to find out more.
About HP
HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world's largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.
About Mimas
http://mimas.ac.uk
Mimas is an organisation of experts. Its role is to support the advancement of knowledge, powering world-class research and teaching. Technology is at the heart of everything Mimas does. As a nationally designated data centre, Mimas hosts a significant number of the UK's research information assets - and builds applications to help people make the most of this rich resource. Based at The University of Manchester as a Centre of Excellence, Mimas benefits from collaboration with one of the UK's largest universities. Mimas has a longstanding relationship with JISC, developing services that support teaching, learning and research, and strong connections with research councils, especially the ESRC. Mimas also partners with commercial groups, universities and colleges, government agencies, and national libraries and archives.
About JISC eCollections
http://www.jiscecollections.ac.uk
JISC eCollections consolidates and hosts more than 15m pounds Sterling of journals, books and multimedia archives on behalf of UK education institutions. The service comprises three separate platforms, each of which contains a number of resources, such as Early English Books Online (part of JISC Historic Books, www.jischistoricbooks.ac.uk/), ITN News sources (part of JISC MediaHub, jiscmediahub.ac.uk/) or an individual publisher's journal archive (part of JISC Journal Archives, www.jiscjournalarchives.ac.uk/). The platforms maximise usage of this content by increasing its visibility to end users and simplifying the user journey for each type of resource. Institutions can join for an annual service fee, which is ringfenced for reinvestment in the long-term maintenance and development of the service.
About JISC Collections
http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk
JISC Collections is a membership organisation, established by the UK Higher and Further Education funding councils, to support the procurement of digital content for education and research in the UK. We are uniquely placed to provide our members with:
o expertise in negotiating and procurement, within the scholarly communications sector, to save librarians time and money
o high-quality e-resource collections selected for academic research, teaching and learning
o best pricing and licensing, using our collective influence to obtain value for money
o environmental scanning and research into innovative resources, licensing models and evaluation tools
o shared knowledge about e-resource acquisition and research.
About The British Library
www.bl.uk
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world's greatest research libraries. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The Library's collection has developed over 250 years and exceeds 150 million separate items representing every age of written civilisation and includes books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, photographs, newspapers and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages. Up to 10 million people visit the British Library website - www.bl.uk - every year where they can view up to 4 million digitised collection items and over 40 million pages.
Autonomy Editorial Contacts:
Vanessa Colomar
Autonomy (UK)
+44 207 104 5778
vanessa.colomar@autonomy.com
Lucy Davies
Edelman (UK)
+44 203 3047 2304
lucy.davies@edelman.com
SOURCE Autonomy Corporation, an HP Company
Web Site: www.bl.uk
