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Archive for April, 2011

Countdown to FPinfomart Breakfast Series 2011 – One week to go!

Posted by Jennifer Stein on April 27, 2011

FPinfomart Breakfast Series 2011You may have noticed that it’s been quieter than usual on our blog… all our resources are engaged in final preparations for our annual breakfast series, which is now exactly one week away!  We kick off the series in Vancouver on Wednesday, May 4th.

We look forward to seeing all of you who are already registered.  If you’re still on the fence, here are a few reasons (one per day!) to reserve your seat today.

1. Review enhancements made to the FPinfomart suite of tools during the past year, and ensure you’re getting the most from your subscription.

2. Discover ways to use FPinfomart products as YOUR social media toolkit.

3. Learn about exciting features and tools scheduled for addition to FPinfomart over the next few months.

4. Hear from a panel of  FPinfomart users in various information roles about how their work has evolved in the age of social media.

5. Interact with our team of FPinfomart experts after the presentation, and take the opportunity to have a personalized one-on-one demonstration of the features and functions that intrigue you.

6. Meet and network with dozens of other FPinfomart users, discover and be inspired by the unique ways in which they use FPinfomart.

7. Help us celebrate 25 years of providing information solutions in the Canadian market with a fabulous breakfast!

Convinced that this is an event you shouldn’t miss?  Self-registration takes only a minute to complete.  For complete details (including dates, venues, schedules, and more), see our events page.

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Seeking panelists at our breakfast events in Ottawa and Calgary

Posted by Jennifer Stein on April 21, 2011

Are you registered for our upcoming breakfast event in Ottawa or Calgary?  We are still seeking an one additional two panelists in each of these cities to join our interactive discussion.

This year’s session will conclude with a panel of FPinfomart users who will participate in a live, guided discussion about their use of information and how FPinfomart fits into this space in their daily work. We have had similar customer presentations in the past which have been received very positively by our audiences. We invite you to apply to join our customer panel at your city’s breakfast event! (Please note that our Toronto and Vancouver panels are full).

You would not be asked to discuss any complex use of FPinfomart, and so product expertise is not a requirement. The discussion will center around your use of all types of information in your work, and how it may have changed in the past year or so.

We will provide the questions to the panelists well in advance of the event in order to provide you with time to think about what you might like to say; however we hope that the discussion will take on an organic nature as the panelists interact with each other.

Our Calgary event will be held on Thursday, May 5th, and our Ottawa event will run on Thursday, May 12th.

Please e-mail Jennifer Stein expressing your interest as soon as possible – our event will be here before you know it!

FPinfomart Breakfast Series 2011

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FPinfomart Monthly Newsletter – April 2011

Posted by Jennifer Stein on April 15, 2011

Our monthly newsletter was sent by e-mail on Wednesday. A PDF copy is attached here.

If you do not already receive our newsletter and would like to be added to our distribution list, please see our information page.

 FPinfomart Monthly Newsletter April 2011

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Back To Basics: Session 5 – Broadcast Monitoring on FPinfomart.ca

Posted by Jennifer Stein on April 14, 2011

back to basics

The fifth entry in our Back to Basics series is on the topic of Broadcast Monitoring on FPinfomart.  We monitor 82 Canadian TV channels and 50 Canadian radio stations, with the ability to retrieve broadcast content online within 30 minutes of air time.  This presentation focuses on what’s available and some details about our service.

Broadcast Monitoring on FPinfomart.ca [PDF]

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Staying Up-to-Date with FPinfomart E-mails: Choosing the right e-mail option

Posted by Jennifer Stein on April 11, 2011

FPinfomart offers several outbound e-mail options to send your news results directly to your (or someone else’s) e-mail inbox.  There are similarities and differences between them, and each has potential use-cases, depending on your information needs.  Here we provide a comparison of the various types of FPinfomart e-mails to help you decide when and if to use each one.

E-mail An Article (Multiple Document Selection/Document Tools)

If you discover content on FPinfomart that you’d like to send to a colleague, the quickest way to do so is using the “E-mail” function, which is available both in the Multiple Document Selection bar, or in the Document Tools menu within a full text article display.

Email in Multiple Document Selection

Check the items you wish to e-mail, and then click the Email button in the Multiple Document Selection bar.

doc tools email

Alternatively, read the full text first, then click E-mail in the Document Tools menu to send from the same screen.

Suggested uses for E-mail an article

  • Fulfill a reference request for a single article or articles matching specific criteria.
  • Send an article to yourself for forwarding or later review.
  • Quickly and easily send an interesting article you’ve discovered to a colleague.

Morning E-mail

The FPinfomart Morning e-mail is sent each weekday (M-F) at approximately 6:30 a.m. ET and provides a snapshot of the results of your Personal Profiles at the time the e-mail is sent.  It is important to note that e-mail is best considered to be an overview of the day’s news so far and not a complete list of all content for the day for several reasons:

  • Content arrives in our database continually.  Between the time the e-mail is sent (approx 6:30 a.m.) and when you arrive at work, additional stories may have matched your Profiles.
  • The e-mail contains a story count for each Profile, but the e-mail itself contains only the first 4 hits from each Profile.  You must visit the site to read all content.

Suggested uses for Morning E-mail

  • A reminder to yourself to visit FPinfomart to view your full results
  • An early-day “heads up” to gauge the flavour of the news stories for the day (so far)
  • A quick check in on the volume of content matching your Profiles from the major dailies and morning news.

Alerts

Subscribe to Alerts to receive up-to-the-minute notification of any new content on specific topics.  Alerts are available for Personal Profiles, Managed Profiles, Current Events, Industry News, and Folders.  You can subscribe to a separate Alert for each individual type Profile or Folder.  Manage your Alerts from within the Profile/Folder itself, or from the Alerts page (located from the Settings menu).  Alerts are sent approximately every 30 minutes, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.  An Alert is generated ONLY if new content matching your search criteria is added to the database during that Alert period.  You can have the full text of articles sent via Alerts, or you can subscribe to Summary Alerts which send a list of citations instead.

Suggested uses for Alerts

  • Be notified a.s.a.p. for “hot topics” that require immediate attention or response
  • Send ALL content for a Profile to your e-mail inbox, 24/7
  • Subscribe to Alerts for Shared Folders to be notified when a colleague saves an article to the Folder

Newsletters

Our Newsletter Publisher (part of the Intranet Toolkit) is primarily a tool to allow you to disseminate content you locate on FPinfomart to a specified group of colleagues, who may or may not have their own FPinfomart userID’s.

Although there are several settings within the Newsletter template to allow you to customize the format of your e-mailed Newsletter, the two major options relevant to this discussion are whether to create a “manual” newsletter (you must click “send” to push it out), or an automated newsletter (which is sent without any intervention from you on a pre-selected schedule).

Suggested uses for Newsletters

  • Send content via e-mail to colleagues (or a single colleague) in a tidy, easy-to-read format.  You can use the Newsletter for delivery even for a single-use reference request, if you like its format.
  • Curate content into your Folders and send out a manual newsletter – or, if you have well-honed Personal Profiles (or Managed Profiles) automate your news clippings task with the Automated Newsletter.
  • Replace the Personal Profiles Morning e-mail with a scheduled newsletter sent only to yourself.  This allows you to receive your “daily alert” later in the morning (pick 9 or 10 a.m. delivery for best results) and therefore incorporate more of the current days news, PLUS all news from the previous day which arrived AFTER the previous issue was sent.

Questions about our e-mail options?  Please contact our customer service team, who can help you select the best delivery method for your needs.  Or, consider joining us at one of our upcoming classroom training sessions to learn more.

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New Classroom training dates set for May 2011

Posted by Jennifer Stein on April 8, 2011

We hope to see you at one of our upcoming hands-on classroom training sessions.  They’re always free for current subscribers, and consistently get great feedback from participants.

Our next classroom training sessions will be held in May.  Classes fill up fast – secure your seat today!

  • Edmonton:  Monday, May 16, 2011
  • Calgary:  Tuesday, May 17, 2011
  • Vancouver:  Thursday, May 19, 2011
  • Toronto:  Wednesday, May 25, 2011
  • Ottawa:  Thursday, May 26, 2011

Details and Registration information.

Are you joining us for our FPinfomart Breakfast event coming in early May?  Consider registering for these classes as well – we’ve deliberately scheduled them as a follow-up to our breakfast so you’ll have an opportunity to learn more about the features and functions we’ll present there!

Posted in Training | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Hover over a source title for more information

Posted by Jennifer Stein on April 7, 2011

With over 1,250 news sources on FPinfomart (not including blogs), it can be difficult to keep track of them all – where they’re published; how often they’re published; and how far back our Archives cover that source.  Our newest feature makes finding that information easier, when presented with a list of source titles.

There are two places where you’ll see our entire news source list on one screen:

  1. On the Browse Latest News page / the News “Help” page
  2. On the “show me all sources” source selection screen

We’ve added a “hover for more information” pop-up to source titles in both these types of lists.

The Browse Latest News page and the News “Help” pages both list all News sources by category.  Hyperlinks for each title take you either to the latest edition of that source (from Browse Latest News), or to a page containing more information about that source (from News Help).  Now, hovering over a title will cause a box to pop up providing you with more information about that source – such as geographic location, a description, publication frequency, and most recent issue date.

browse latest pop up

The “show me all sources” screen can be a source (no pun intended!) of frustration if you need to find more information about a source, but don’t want to leave the selection screen for fear of losing all the checkmarks you’ve selected so far.  This screen now allows you to hover over the name of any publication to see the same pop-up box showing useful data about that title – allowing you to decide, in context, whether or not you wish to add that source to your search or Source Library.

source selection pop up

We hope you’ll find these additions to be helpful when faced with a lengthy list of titles!

Posted in Features | Tagged: , , | Comments Off

Toggle Highlighting in Documents & Printer-Friendly Display

Posted by Jennifer Stein on April 6, 2011

Whether it’s in Personal Profiles, Quick Search, or the Archives, having your keywords highlighted within your search results can be an indispensable tool to help you determine relevance of a document.  The ability to quickly scan the text and identify the context in which your search terms were used is likely one you likely use every single day.

What’s New?

These document highlights are great for your own search and retrieval activities, but if you’re preparing documents for another person you may wish to provide them with a “clean” version – i.e. without highlighting.  If you wish to do so without having to change your OWN display settings each time, we now off the ability to toggle full text document highlighting on and off from within the display and printer-friendly screens.

Click the toggle link to turn highlighting off for the current display.  This will override your settings only for the current screen.  You can click again to turn the highlighting back on for the document you’ve displayed.

keywords toggle document

Within a full text document, you'll find the "Keywords" toggle in the Document Tools menu. Click to turn keyword highlighting off for the current view.

keywords toggle printer friendly

In the printer-friendly display, the toggle to turn keyword highlighting on or off is located at the top of the screen. This toggle will work even when multiple documents are displayed in printer-friendly mode.

Display Settings – Did you Know?

In case you’re not already aware, there are a variety of keyword highlighting options available to you, in the Display Settings menu, for both the “peek” (citation) and full document.  Unlike the toggles described above (which operate on the individual document(s) you’ve displayed), these Display Settings will apply site-wide.  Don’t forget to click “Save” to save your changes!

Display Settings Menu

Display Settings

Change your display settings if you prefer a different style of highlighting for Peeks and Documents.

Posted in Features | Tagged: , , | Comments Off

New Feature: Export Citations of Folder Contents to Excel

Posted by Jennifer Stein on April 4, 2011

While FPinfomart offers a built-in suite of Media Analysis tools, we realize that there are times when you’d like to perform your own metrics on various data points surrounding the media content you’ve collected.  Whether it’s simple story counts; a byline or publication frequency counts; or customized measurement using circulation or ad values (such as your organizations definition of “impressions”), getting at the raw data behind the stories can be desirable.

To assist you in this, we now offer the ability to export the contents of an FPinfomart Saved (or Shared) Folder as citations and metadata associated with them to a spreadsheet, in your choice of Excel (xls) or Comma-Separated Values (csv) formats.

To try this feature, visit your Folders page (click the Folder count at the top of any screen).  Click the green “Export” link next to the name of the Folder whose contents you’d like to export.

Export link on Folders

Click the Export link next to the Folder name to create an Excel file containing citations of the Folder contents.

Next, you’ll be asked to select which of the two available file formats you’d like to create.

Export file format

You have a choice of Excel (.xls) or Comma-Separated Values (.csv) formats.

Once your file is created, click the link provided to save a copy to your computer, and open it in your choice of spreadsheet software.

The resultant Excel file will have column headers for each of the exported fields, and a hyperlink back to the original item in your Folder.

Your export file will contain the following columns:  Publication name, Title, Byline, Date of publication, Region, Media type, Tone, Ad Value, Circulation, a link to the article in your Folder, and any Notes that have been added to the document.  The entire contents of your Folder will be exported into this file.

Now that your data is in spreadsheet format, you can create any charts or graphs you desire, or add in any missing or updated data you may have available.

Please note that like all content you obtain from FPinfomart.ca, copyright and redistribution policies apply in accordance with your subscription agreement.  Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

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