Credo’s Literati Academic Selected for Choice Outstanding Academic Title Honor

Credo, the industry leader for information skills solutions, is proud to announce Literati Academic’s selection as a 2014 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Choice’s 2014 review emphasized the “huge potential” for students and faculty and concluded that Literati Academic is “highly recommended.”

“It is hard to overstate the importance of reference in research and instruction,” said Credo CEO Mike Sweet. “Literati Academic helps students to build research skills, allowing librarians to see positive learning outcomes without having to dedicate extra class time and resources.”

Literati Academic is an online research platform and library teaching tool which offers point-of-need instruction and supports students’ self-directed research. The world class reference content included in Credo’s Academic Core Collection is paired with instructional videos and tutorials that are integrated and embedded into the platform.

Literati addresses several problems faced by students, librarians and professors alike. By making information discoverability more intuitive, librarians need to spend less time helping students find basic sources at the beginning of their research project. Professors can take a flipped learning approach and direct students to on-demand videos and tutorials to hone their research skills, rather than consuming valuable in-class time.  Students can find and use tutorials while they are doing research, without logging in to another resource for help or instruction.

The Literati platform is available for Academic, Public, and K-12 libraries, and has been awarded several prestigious honors in recent years. Literati School was named the 2014 CODiE “Best Education Reference Solution,” and Literati Public the 2013 CODiE “Best General Reference Service.”

Of the thousands of titles reviewed by Choice each year, only a small percentage are named an Outstanding Academic Title.

Credo Announces Compliance with NISO Open Discovery Initiative

First Content Provider to Announce Compliance

October 20, 2014, Boston, Oxford -- Credo, the industry leader for information skills solutions, today announces its conformance with, and endorsement of, the recommendations of the National Information Standards Organization’s Open Discovery Initiative (ODI), making Credo the first reference content provider to do so. Credo’s compliance demonstrates the company’s advocacy for the unique, valuable role that reference plays in research, as well as its commitment to supporting industry standards and best practices in delivering innovative products and services to libraries and their users.

NISO’s ODI group was formed to explore issues around the current generation of library discovery services based on indexed search; and to develop recommended practices to facilitate progress in the further development of these services. The group comprised representatives from content providers, discovery service providers and libraries. Having long recognized the importance of reference content in discovery services, Credo quickly began the process of understanding and ultimately conforming to these guidelines. For example, Credo makes all relevant content available to discovery service providers as full text for indexing, according to ODI’s core set of metadata elements.

“The pace of change in research technology and information discovery is faster than it has ever been, and the need for the industry to provide continuity and best practices has never been greater,” said Credo CEO Mike Sweet. “Credo is proud to endorse NISO’s recommendations by being the first ODI-compliant content provider and by actively participating in Phase Two of the initiative.”

 "We are so pleased by the support from Credo on the Open Discovery Initiative and for their efforts to act quickly to come into compliance with the recommendations,” said Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of NISO.  “We hope others will follow Credo’s leadership in adhering to the ODI principles.”

Credo is committed to making reference content available and accessible to end users at their point of need, and to non-bias with regard to participation in discovery services, ensuring that content is treated equally in all discovery services. A statement of Credo’s participation in Discovery Services according to the ODI conformance checklist is available upon request.

The ODI recommendations can be found here:

http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/13388/rp-19-2014_ODI.pdf