CABI partners with Semantico to launch enhanced life sciences publishing platform

CABI has launched a new and improved version of its database platform CAB Direct, designed and built by Semantico, incorporating the leading bibliographic databases in life science information – CAB Abstracts and Global Health.

The new CAB Direct offers a better experience for students and researchers as they search for important life science information. The content on CAB Direct has not changed, but the new design will improve its discoverability – saving researchers time and effort.

“Researcher behaviours and expectations are evolving, and the new CAB Direct has been created to ensure we are evolving with them,” said Cristina Ashby, Product Development Manager at CABI. “New technologies have offered an excellent opportunity to create a better, more intuitive and effective product.”

Enhancements include:

• An acceleration of the operating speed of the platform, and of the return of search results
• MyCABDirect – a personalised area where users can set-up email alerts and RSS feeds based on their search results; share information, and save important searches
• Faceted searching – users can finely filter information to fit their research needs, based on CABI’s indexing terms and metadata
• The capability to view full text at the search results level
• Improved user experience, through a more intuitive interface
• Suggestions for spelling variations

The new and improved CAB Direct is fully Shibboleth compliant, will also abstract snippet views at search results level; save searches to social book marking sites and provide COUNTER compliant usage statistics.

Semantico not only contributed design and build to the project, but also user research and testing, and deployment of its new marketing tool, FragR, a fragment editor that allows easier communication via the platform.

CABI is also pleased to announce the number of full text articles available on CAB Direct, and all other platforms that host CABI’s products, has reached 50,000 as part of the total database of c. 8.5m bibliographic records. “This milestone highlights a clear and growing benefit to our subscribers,” said Cristina Ashby. “With the substantial number of articles now available, and with a further 10,000 to be added by the end of the year, this collection of material is developing into a body of content that is of considerable importance in its own right.”

Andrea Powell, Executive Director, Publishing, of CABI said: “With the release of CAB Direct II, our original decision to choose Semantico as technology partners has been vindicated. They understood our requirements throughout the project and we were delighted with the emphasis placed not only on innovative and appropriate technologies, but also, and importantly for us, on design and usability in order to ensure that we meet the changing demands of the research community with respect to internet resources. Their strong project management and expert advice has helped us to build, test and launch our new product line in good time and we are delighted with the results – and we are confident that our customers will feel the same way”.

Richard Padley, Managing Director of Semantico said: “The new CAB Direct platform delivers big gains in usability for researchers with fast searches and a carefully tuned faceted approach to navigating search results. Under the hood the service oriented architecture (SOA) has enabled CABI to re-use the power of our search engine within their wider family of subject specific internet resources sites. The SOA approach delivered fast integration and significant improvements to the functionality of those sites as well as the main CAB Direct platform. CABI are highly experienced and innovative and its been a pleasure to work with them on this project.”

For a visual demonstration on how to use the new CAB Direct go to – http://www.cabi.org/cabivideo/CD2LaunchVideo/CD2LaunchVideo.html

To view the new product platform please visit http://www.cabdirect2.org/

Feedback is most welcome and can be emailed to: newcabdirect@cabi.org