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Weekly News Digest
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February 1, 2018 — 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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The British Library Provides Free Access to Medieval Manuscripts
The British Library made 50-plus rare medieval manuscripts and early print editions freely available via its Discovering Literature: Medieval resource. These English texts date from the 8th to the 16th centuries and include the single surviving manuscript of Beowulf, the first complete translation of the Bible into English, an illustrated print edition of The Canterbury Tales, and the first English-language work written by a woman. There are also more than 20 articles focusing on gender, faith, and heroism that were written by modern scholars.For more information, read the press release.
Library Marketing and Communications Conference Goes Nonprofit; Shares 2018 Info
The Library Marketing and Communications Conference (LMCC) has been incorporated as the new not-for-profit organization Library Marketing Conference Group (LMCG). Its mission “is to advance, promote and support the knowledge and understanding of marketing and communications among library professionals, library staff and those who work in or with all types of libraries and information centers.” The inaugural LMCG board members are Jennifer Burke (president), Joan M. Barnes (VP), Joan Petit (secretary), and Barbara Fullerton (treasurer). More board members will be recruited.LMCG will continue to hold the LMCC, as well as consider hosting and sponsoring other events on library marketing. The 2018 conference will be held in St. Louis at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch on Nov. 14 and 15. For more information, visit the LMCC website.
Barnes & Noble Recruits Beta Testers for New App
Michael Kozlowski posted on Good e-Reader that “Barnes and Noble is looking for beta testers for a new e-reading and ebook discovery app for Android and iOS. The company posted a message on Facebook looking for people who read a ton of books to get involved and offer their feedback.” Beta testers will download the app and send Barnes & Noble feedback, which the company will incorporate into readying the app for public use.For more information, read the blog post.
Cochrane Asks for Medical Research Platform Volunteers
Cochrane is seeking participants for the citizen science platform Cochrane Crowd and partner platforms Mark2Cure and Stall Catchers to help improve medical research and treatment. Cochrane Crowd identifies studies that show the best possible evidence of the effectiveness of a health treatment. Health researchers and practitioners can access these studies from a central register. Mark2Cure volunteers help the process of biomedical discovery by extracting information from biomedical abstracts to give researchers data on NGLY1-deficiency, a rare disease. Stall Catchers is a game that helps with Alzheimer’s research. Players analyze movies from a live mouse brain to find signs of stalls (clogged blood vessels). Interested volunteers do not need any special medical knowledge to join these platforms.For more information, read the news.
EDP Sciences Pledges Support for I4OC
EDP Sciences joined the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a collaboration among scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties that aims to promote the availability of open, structured, and separable data on citations. It asks that publishers ensure that references in academic articles are made publicly available so they can be distributed through Crossref’s services. I4OC also endeavors to make a global public web of linked scholarly citation data, create new services over the open citation data, and develop a public citation graph that explores connections between disciplines.For more information, read the press release.
EveryLibrary Webinar Will Address Libraries, Social Media, and Politics
On Feb. 15, 2018, EveryLibrary is hosting a free webinar titled Libraries, Social Media, and Politics: Do You Know What to Post? Sponsored by Kixal, the webinar will address the results of a survey by Dustin Fife and Mary Naylor Stephens, who studied “the ambiguity surrounding libraries and social media when it comes to politics. Most library professionals feel like they have little direction regarding politics and social media and unnecessarily censor themselves on topics that they should be discussing.” Fife and Stephens will provide practical advice for engaging with political topics. The webinar will be recorded and archived for later viewing.For more information, visit the website.
Springer Nature Unveils Program for Data Management Support
Springer Nature is providing new support services to help researchers manage and share data. According to the press release, “Following a successful pilot offering data deposition support to Springer Nature authors, announced in April 2017 and extended to all researchers in January 2018, a wider range of research data services are now being introduced for institutions and funders.” Research data editors will curate and enhance metadata before it is deposited in repositories to make content more discoverable and reusable (and compliant with FAIR data principles). Additionally, editors will help authors write summaries and data availability statements, as well as provide webinars, workshops, and other resources for promoting best practices in data management.For more information, read the press release.
Odilo Makes Its Content Available to SimplyE Libraries
Odilo’s digital library of 1.4 million titles (ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, movies, etc.), including content in Spanish and other languages, is now available to SimplyE’s partner libraries. They can choose from a variety of business models to access the content—pay-per-use, one copy-one user, simultaneous users, and/or subscription content licensing options.For more information, read the press release.
Thomson Reuters Rolls Out Data Privacy Advisor
Thomson Reuters launched Data Privacy Advisor, a specialized data privacy research solution that mines the company’s global legal and regulatory information and expansive data privacy guidance. Data privacy professionals at multinational businesses and law firms in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada can use it to obtain a deeper understanding of law and privacy obligations across multiple jurisdictions. It also has a question-answering feature in beta that addresses global privacy compliance. Called Ask Watson a Question, it was built by the Thomson Reuters Center for Cognitive Computing and IBM Watson.For more information, read the press release.
ActivityPub Becomes a W3C Recommendation
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced that the ActivityPub decentralized social networking protocol is now one of its official recommendations. It is based on the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format and “provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content,” according to the press release. With ActivityPub, software developers can build social network offerings into their systems. “Adding ActivityPub support allows interoperable social networking between applications with entirely different codebases.”For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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