The online publisher Ingenta listens to its customers. Its IngentaConnect site was developed in a series of stages that involved customer consultation. This past year, it formed a ten-person IngentaConnect Library Advisory Group to advise the company on the development of its library services and on issues in the information industry. It was ahead of its time in long supporting issue alerts for all its journal titles via RSS feeds. Ingenta also maintains the blog All My Eye to keep its customers informed about what the company is thinking and doing.

The latest release of IngentaConnect features a number of redesigns and the addition of new features. One of the most interesting is the addition of social bookmarking to del.icio.us, Connotea, Furl and other services.

Here is more interesting news: Ingenta has announced that it is the first scholarly hosting service that will employ article linking within Google Scholar that does not require link resolver technology. Its forthcoming service, Full Text@IngentaConnect, will make appropriate copy links to a library's subscribed content using IP address recognition. Ingenta intends to implement this for its 25,000 library customers. Ingenta's press release gives the details.

Go where the users are. This is a central Library 2.0 tenet, and (like it or not) Google Scholar is becoming an established source for academic researchers. It would be useful to survey our users to get an idea of how many use it as a part of their research process. A positive response would argue for a prominent, proxied link to Google Scholar on our Web site so that all our users, both on and off campus, can get the benefit of Ingenta's linking service as well as other subscribed materials. The University of Texas at Austin Web site has long featured both a proxied link and a search box on its main screen.