On Sunday, Circe and I attended a lunch hosted by Ebsco for public librarians. After feeding us, a few staff spoke about some of their new products and enhancements.
They briefly demonstrated the new interface of Novelist (there is a link right on the homepage of the current interface to see a preview). The new version will be released in about a month, and it seems like it will make the most-commonly used tasks (recommending new authors or series) more prominent and easy to use. They are also now integrating Novelist into the online catalog with their program Novelist Select: it can do some really cool things like recommend other titles and authors, which especially comes in handy when the requested book is unavailable, and it will show series information in title order. Check out the catalog for Houston Public Library, which is already using Novelist in their catalog. It sounds like all current subscribers will get the new interface, but I imagine the catalog integration is an additional cost.
Footnote.com is a new genealogy database; the only one that indexes NARA (I imagine this means something to the genealogy folks out there!).
EBSCOHost is rolling out several new features, too. One that looks good is text-to-speech, which enables the user to select a section of the article, or the entire article, and have it read aloud with voice technology. What I liked about it is that the words being spoken are highlighted as the voice reads them. I could see this being useful for struggling readers. If it's not there already, we should be seeing the audio toolbar on results soon.
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