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Weekly News Digest
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November 17, 2016 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.
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IMLS Promotes STEM Education Through Video Games
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), along with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and E-Line Media, announced the winners of the fifth annual National STEM Video Game Challenge, which aims to get students interested in STEM fields through video games. The 24 winning middle and high school students were selected from nearly 3,000 entries for their video game design concepts. For example, Kimberly Do, a high school student from Florida, designed “Escape Velocity,” which teaches players the physics behind orbital trajectories and allows them to explore space as they work toward rescuing a lost shuttle crew. Each winner receives $1,000 in cash, a subscription to E-Line Media’s Gamestar Mechanic, and a Curiosity Box from Vsauce.For more information, read the press release.
Clarivate Analytics Reveals New Functionality for EndNote
Clarivate Analytics rolled out EndNote X8, the newest version of its software for helping researchers, librarians, and students find, manage, and create bibliographies, citations, and references. Updates include support for sharing an entire EndNote research library, references, PDFs, and annotations with up to 100 people; the ability to collaborate on a shared library in real time; unlimited cloud storage at no additional cost; and the addition of a built-in activity feed that shows new members and tracks changes made to shared libraries by collaborators.For more information, read the press release.
ELECTION ANALYSIS: The New Administration and the Information Industry
Outsell, Inc.’s Hugh Logue writes, “In our industry, digital products want open borders, yet they are strangled by regulation that perhaps this regime can remedy. His macroeconomic policies aren’t very clear. As for global politics, Trump is the great unknown and there will be uncertainty as leaders try to uncover his international policies. In the end, however, the world learns to live with whoever is elected because the alternative of not engaging is simply not an option. And so the story unfolds.”Read the blog post.
ELECTION ANALYSIS: The New Administration and Libraries
TeleRead’s David Rothman writes, “Ebooks, pbooks, and libraries are hardly in the center of Donald Trump’s radar, but I can’t help but wonder what’s ahead. … Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has called for the defunding of the Institute of Library and Museum Services, and I doubt that IMLS is high on the list of Trump’s priorities. Hard to say. Ryan showed up at the swear-in of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and gave a well-crafted speech. Maybe he will surprise us. Don’t count on it, however. … Trump’s election was a setback to well-off people who want to blur the distinction between public and academic libraries. Academics—among … those most likely to be in charge of a combined public-academic approach—tend not to be as sensitive to family literacy and other mass needs as public librarians are.”Read the article.
ELECTION ANALYSIS: The New Administration and Intellectual Property
For Morning Consult, Timothy Molino writes, “Given Trump’s interest in trade and competition concerns with China, would this mean a more aggressive posture on patent eligibility within the U.S. IP system to protect America’s inventors? Or would this lead to a clash that he doesn’t want to have? Does the Trump appointee to the Supreme Court mean an IP friendly judge? Once the empty seat is filled, will the Supreme Court continue to prioritize patent cases like it has in recent years?”For Lexology, R. David Pore and David R. Marsh write, “Given President-elect Trump's protectionist statements on trade and foreign policy, including his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it is reasonable to presume his policies on intellectual property also will focus on strengthening protections for US companies. It remains unclear what specific policies the new administration will push in 2017, but most congressional Republicans will likely seek to educate the Trump Administration's IP policy agenda.” Read the Morning Consult article and the Lexology article.
SAGE Helps Students Better Prepare for Their Classes
SAGE partnered with Perusall to allow access to selected SAGE textbooks via the Perusall ebook platform and social annotation tool. Students and instructors can use Perusall to annotate digital texts together, connect with classmates, and respond to questions directly from digital texts before class.For more information, read the press release.
The USDA and CHORUS Commit to Public Access to Research
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) and CHORUS signed a memorandum of understanding that allows the organizations to work together to advance public access to reports from USDA-funded research. The USDA currently links from its PubAg portal to content available on CHORUS publisher members’ sites. “Closer collaboration between the two organizations aims to further increase public access to publications covered by the PubAg/AGRICOLA systems,” according to the press release.For more information, read the press release.
ELECTION ANALYSIS: The New Administration and the Tech Industry
Forbes released a nearly 3-minute video analyzing how the new administration will affect the technology industry, including how it could compel Apple to manufacture its products in the U.S. and the idea of executive branch control of the internet.Watch the video.
ELECTION ANALYSIS: The New Administration and Net Neutrality
The Washington Post’s Brian Fung writes, “President-elect Donald Trump could eviscerate some of the most significant tech policies of the 21st century, all but erasing President Obama's Internet agenda and undoing years of effort by lawmakers, tech companies and consumer advocates to limit the power of large, established corporations, analysts say.”Bloomberg Technology’s Joshua Brustein writes, “As with many issues, trying to glean the intentions of the incoming administration requires translating a few off-hand comments into a plan for public policy. Trump hasn’t spent a lot of time talking about net neutrality. But his baseline hostility to government regulation and a two-year-old tweet calling the FCC’s rules an 'attack on the internet' have stoked expectations that net neutrality will be on the chopping block in early 2017. In a sense, it doesn’t matter how much Trump personally cares about this issue. Other Republicans do, and having control of Congress and the White House frees them up to enact a philosophy they held before the election.” Business Insider’s Jeff Dunn writes, “Trump didn't explain why he thought net neutrality would specifically target conservative media, but it's worth noting that, in principle, preventing ISPs from giving a leg up to any online source would seem to ensure that a conservative news outlet could deliver stories without technical handicaps.” Read the Washington Post article, the Bloomberg Technology article, and the Business Insider article.
Plum Analytics Goes All In on Clinical Practice Guidelines
Plum Analytics expanded the Clinical Citations metrics in its PlumX Suite to include clinical practice guidelines indexed in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed. This will provide a new way to see the impact of research when tracking citations in clinical practice guidelines and help clinical and translational science researchers understand what types of research impact clinical topics and guidelines. PubMed has indexed more than 21,000 clinical practice guidelines.For more information, read the press release.
ELECTION ANALYSIS: The New Administration and the Economy
InsideSources’ Iain Murray writes, “President-elect Donald J. Trump now has a huge opportunity to make some big changes that improve people’s lives and livelihoods. Over the last eight years, the Obama administration heaped piles of regulation on top of businesses and their financiers. Trump can help get the economy moving again by implementing some meaningful regulatory relief, by himself and with Congress.”Read the article.
ELECTION ANALYSIS: The New Administration and Climate Change
The New York Times’ Coral Davenport writes, “Global warming may indeed be the sharpest example of how policy in Washington will change under a Trump administration. President Obama has said his efforts to establish the United States as the global leader in climate policy are his proudest legacy. But if Mr. Trump makes good on his campaign promises, experts in climate change policy warn, that legacy would unravel quickly. The world, then, may have no way to avoid the most devastating consequences of global warming, including rising sea levels, extreme droughts and food shortages, and more powerful floods and storms.”Read the article.
ELECTION ANALYSIS: 'The US Election, a Need for Curation, and the Power of Story'
The Scholarly Kitchen’s David Crotty writes, “The Scholarly Kitchen is not a political blog, but we are all affected by political events (see Brexit as an example). There’s almost no way to predict the impact we’ll see on scholarly publishing, as a minority of US voters has elected a completely unpredictable President. … There’s no one reason why the election went the way it did, and trying to reduce everything to a simple answer is to ignore the many complex factors involved. But Andrews makes a convincing point about the power of story, and how one candidate did a much better job of telling a simple story than did the other.”Read the blog post.
ELECTION ANALYSIS: 'Librarians Leaving the Country'
The Annoyed Librarian writes, “It’s hard to take seriously all the Americans who claim they’re going to move to Canada or wherever if so-and-so President is elected. It always seems to me like an implicit insult to all the political refugees in the world seeking asylum in other countries. I can just imagine some Syrian refugee fleeing death and destruction listening to some coddled American professionals saying they want to move from America. Some people have no perspective.”Read the blog post.
ELECTION ANALYSIS: ALA Releases Kindness-Focused Book List
The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), published a book list “to share the message of creating unity, acting with kindness toward others, and promoting peace.” It is designed for “librarians, parents, caregivers, teachers, and other caring adults faced with children asking tough questions about the recent election and looking at positive ways to take action.”Read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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