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Weekly News Digest
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September 19, 2017 — 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.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
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Directories for Publications by Marginalized Communities Will Soon Debut
The Educopia Institute and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) are working on digital directories for African-American and LGBT+ newspapers and periodicals that are in print, microfilm, and digital formats. “In this project, we are creating and releasing an open data collection framework and methodology for information about newspapers by and for marginalized communities,” according to the Educopia Institute. The datasets for the directories will be openly available, and the organizations will release the project’s findings and recommendations for next steps.“To succeed, we need participation from libraries, archives, and museums of all sizes, types, and statures. Whether you have one page or full runs, your content matters and needs to be represented.” The data-gathering phase with these institutions will end on Sept. 30, 2017. For more information, read the article.
Clarivate Analytics Reveals Its 2017 Citation Laureates
Clarivate Analytics announced its 2017 Citation Laureates—scientists and economists whose publications have been cited so often that they could be recipients of a Nobel Prize in the future. The laureates come from the fields of physiology, medicine, physics, chemistry, and economics. They are chosen using data from the Web of Science. For the first time, Russian scientists join the list of laureates. In the 15 years Clarivate Analytics has been creating the list, 43 laureates have received Nobel Prizes.For more information, read the press release.
UNESCO and NAMLE Plan Media Literacy Events
UNESCO announced that Global Media and Information Literacy Week 2017 will be Oct. 25–Nov. 1. The sixth annual event’s theme is Media and Information Literacy in Critical Times: Re-imagining Ways of Learning and Information Environments. The activities (including the Seventh Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue Conference) to be held during the week “are important opportunities for stakeholders globally to celebrate the progress achieved towards the process of ‘[media and information literacy] for all,’” according to UNESCO.The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) announced its own event: U.S.-based Media Literacy Week, to be held Nov. 6–10. It is designed to “bring attention and visibility to media literacy education” and “showcase the work of amazing media literacy educators and organizations around the country.” NAMLE provides a list of suggested activities, such as creating a film festival of youth media projects, hosting a webinar about news literacy, or taking students on a tour of a local television station. For more information on Global Media and Information Literacy Week, view the website. For more information on Media Literacy Week, view the website.
Udacity Creates New Self-Driving Cars Course
Udacity created a new Nanodegree program, Intro to Self-Driving Cars. The company already has a full self-driving car program designed for experienced software engineers. Now, “anyone with minimal programming experience” can “taste the thrills of building self-driving cars.” The program covers machine learning, object-oriented programming, probabilistic robotics, and more. Graduates will get guaranteed entry into the advanced Self-Driving Car Engineer program.For more information, read the blog post.
Google Promotes Your Local Library
Google added ebook listings to its search results. It has integrated public library catalogs into the results, allowing users to access links to their local library when looking for a book title. Read more about this development on The Digital Reader.
Adam Matthew Starts Using Handwritten Text Recognition
Adam Matthew is using artificial intelligence to add full-text search technology—handwritten text recognition (HTR)—to its digital manuscript collections, starting with Colonial America’s third module, The American Revolution. It features handwritten documents about North America dating from 1606 to 1822, which are now fully searchable. “The HTR application uses complex algorithms and artificial intelligence to determine possible combinations of characters in manuscripts,” according to Adam Matthew. “This enables relevant handwritten text to be identified at document level, allowing users to easily navigate between highlighted search results.”For more information, read the press release.
ALA Taps New Strategic Advisors
Jon Peha and Sari Feldman became senior fellows of ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP). They are tasked with providing “strategic advice on our national policy advocacy,” according to Alan Inouye, OITP’s director.Peha is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and former chief technologist of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He was also assistant director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “Peha will provide ALA with counsel on the broad range of telecommunications issues from net neutrality and network engineering to spectrum and universal service,” Inouye writes. Feldman is the executive director of the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Ohio and is a past president of ALA and the Public Library Association (PLA). She was co-chair of the ALA Digital Content Working Group. According to Inouye, “Feldman will provide guidance on e-book and digital content issues as well as library broadband policy and implementation.” For more information, read the blog post.
SAGE Campus Provides Data Science Courses
SAGE launched SAGE Campus, a series of online data science courses for social science researchers. According to the press release, the first set of courses includes the following:For more information, read the press release.
Library of Congress Opens Online Space for Interactive Use of Resources
The Library of Congress (LC) introduced Labs, an “online space that will host a changing selection of experiments, projects, events and resources designed to encourage creative use of the Library’s digital collections.” One of its first features is Beyond Words, “a website that invites the public to identify cartoons and photographs in historic newspapers and provide captions that will turn images into searchable data.” Labs will also have a gallery of projects from various parties connected with the LC, blog posts, and video presentations.For more information, read the press release.
Elsevier Rolls Out ScienceDirect Topics for Quick Information Retrieval
Elsevier introduced ScienceDirect Topics, a free layer of content that gives researchers and scientists a quick snapshot of definitions, related terms, and relevant excerpts on scientific topics (from Elsevier’s books) so they can get up-to-speed on subjects outside of their own disciplines. ScienceDirect Topics has 80,000 pages on the life sciences, biomedical sciences, and neuroscience and is accessible “directly from hyperlinked key terms in journal articles, or via searching on the site, to learn quickly about a topic without disrupting [the user’s] research workflow,” according to Elsevier.For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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