Article is a digest of the most important parts of the thesis with the same title that was successfully defended at the Institute of Information Studies & Librarianship of the Faculty of Philosophy & Arts at the Charles University in Prague. It analyses current state of information services for iron and steel industry in Czech Republic. Furthermore, the current standing of the Czech metallurgical industry with its specific aspects is analysed. Contemporary trends of information support and knowledge management in business companies are discussed in the next part. Finally, some preselected information e-sources related to metallurgical industry are outlined.

Modern technologies changed the requirements users have for searching in scientific databases. User not only expects to find the needed document, he also expects to find a suitable offer of related documents. Automated endorsement systems based on different principles work e.g. for online bookstores and library catalogues. A new tool bX was developed for scientific materials. This article deals with how it works, its benefits and deployment.

Citing information resources correctly is still a current issue. Correct citations are required from both researchers and faculty staff when writing articles for specialized magazines and students when writing theses. That's why sophisticated tools were created to make this task simpler for users. So called bibliographic managers enable users to create and manage large bibliographies and format them at once into one of hundreds of citation standards. There are both free and commercial products available. SFX is able to cooperate with e.g. RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero and the Czech Citace.com systems for automatic metadata collection, but the cooperation can work also in the opposite direction when bibliographic managers link to full texts via a predefined SFX instance. To sum up, cooperation of SFX and bibliographic managers can be very beneficial to users.

An ERMS is a software that assists the library in managing all the details related to its subscriptions to electronic content. The ILS has not necessarily evolved to accommodate all aspects of managing electronic content but it is possible for the ERMS to be well-integrated with an ILS. The article deals with advantages of the ERM System Verde by Ex Libris. Verde was successfully implemented at Charles University in Prague.

Competitive Intelligence is gathering, analyzing and plotting information about competitors, products and customers. These methods are used to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of competitors. Competitive Intelligence is an ethical and legal business practice. In the Czech Republic a new project called Portál CI (www.portalci.cz) has been launched at Masaryk University. It serves as a platform for competitive intelligence professional and students. It provides access to a number of expert articles, methods, instructions and interviews.

The text gives information about a newly launched web portal BiblioHelp. It deals with sense, aims and mission of the project itself. It is occupied with information web architecture and function possibilities too which the portal BiblioHelp has at its disposal.

This article briefly introduces Academic Earth – an educational project which provides full video courses and lectures from the top American universities and some of the highly recognized world’s scholars publicly available. The project was officially launched in March 2009 with the goal of “providing everyone on earth access to a world-class education”.

Nowadays remote access to electronic information resources is a standard service provided by most libraries. There are several technologies in use including Shibboleth which is to become the most widely used remote access method. Since SFX normally works with licensed electronic resources, it is already prepared for cooperation with these technologies. In the ideal case user has already been logged in before the attempt to access licensed content. But even when trying to access the licensed resource without implicit privileges SFX is able to navigate user efficiently and enable him to work with requested source of information.