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Weekly News Digest
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February 21, 2019 — 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 Getty Foundation Facilitates Digital Mapping at Historic Sites
The Getty Foundation is issuing four grants that will endorse shared learning opportunities for art historians and support the use of geospatial and digital mapping tools to document and analyze global cultural and historical sites: Pompeii and Florence in Italy, Çatalhöyük in Turkey, and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. According to the press release, “Each of the four projects will create or expand a GIS (Geographic Information System) platform to manage geographic, cultural, and archival data. Several of the projects are also seeking to incorporate digital reconstructions, in the form of three-dimensional models and augmented reality, into their GIS platforms. Once created, these models will provide an enhanced understanding of the historical fabric of spaces, structures and artworks.”“Technology is truly an area that benefits from collaboration, so we’ve brought this approach to our grantmaking,” says Joan Weinstein, acting director of the Getty Foundation. “Funding scholars who work together in a common area, in this case digital mapping, can help them learn from one another and push the whole field forward.” For more information and the list of grant recipients, read the press release.
Springer Nature and BCRF Develop a Project for Sharing Datasets
Springer Nature joined forces with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) for a pilot project enabling researchers to make their datasets accessible with their published articles. Expected to run throughout 2019, the project is designed to promote robust and lasting access to research data. As part of the project, authors with manuscripts accepted for publication by npj Breast Cancer will work with a research data editor—part of Springer Nature’s Research Data Support services team—who will catalog, describe, and share the datasets for the research paper as well as offer advice on de-identifying human participant data and writing detailed data-availability statements. The datasets will be deposited into a newly created repository. For more information, read the press release.
The Library of Congress Helps Preserve Sesame Street for the Future
The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a collaboration between the Library of Congress (LC) and the WGBH Educational Foundation, will preserve a collection of digitized Sesame Street episodes from the past 50 years of the show’s run. Sesame Workshop will donate nearly 4,500 episodes to be incorporated into the AAPB’s record of public media in the U.S. The collection will be available to view on-site at the LC and by appointment at WGBH (in Boston).“As a historian and academic, I can’t stress enough the importance of preserving groundbreaking media like Sesame Street, which was the first TV show to address big issues like poverty, family and the environment in a way that children could understand,” says Kathryn Ostrofsky, author of the forthcoming book Sounding It Out: How Sesame Street Crafted American Culture. “Early episodes of Sesame Street provide a window into the pressing issues of the times, as well as changing views about education. The American Archive of Public Broadcasting’s Sesame Street collection is a critical resource for studying and understanding so many facets of these societal changes.” For more information, read the press release.
eLife Invests in the Texture Manuscript Toolset
eLife has invested in the development of Texture, an open source toolset for manuscript editing and production that can be integrated into publishers’ editorial and content delivery systems. This gesture helps support eLife’s own open source publishing platform: “Collaborating on the development of Texture brings eLife a step closer to its open-source, end-to-end publisher workflow,” eLife notes. Any new features added to Texture will remain open source.Texture was created by Substance Software GmbH and has been supported by organizations including the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and SciELO. eLife says, “Working with Substance to introduce Texture to author proofing and staff quality checks brings the organisation closer to saving time in the production process and reducing the use of external vendors.” For more information, read the press release.
Gale and EveryLibrary Continue to Promote Libraries' Entrepreneurship Resources
Gale and EveryLibrary launched a yearlong nationwide campaign to raise awareness of how libraries support entrepreneurship and startups to coincide with National Entrepreneurship Week, Feb. 16−23, 2019.“Librarians help starters and entrepreneurs shape their ideas into viable products or businesses while helping established small businesses understand and grow their market. That’s why we are so excited to partner with Gale. Their information solutions are the market intelligence and business informatics that every entrepreneur needs to succeed. We want to share the powerful story about librarians and the impact of business reference services to support the local economy and to create individual and family prosperity,” says John Chrastka, EveryLibrary’s executive director. “Public libraries have always played a powerful role in connecting people with the resources and learning they need to be successful in life. However, most entrepreneurs are unaware of the free business resources and staff expertise that their local libraries offer that can guide them throughout every stage of business planning,” says Paul Gazzolo, Gale’s SVP and general manager. “Through our partnership with EveryLibrary, our goal is to change this by driving awareness of the value that libraries provide to the entrepreneurship ecosystem.” For more information, read the post.
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Brandi Scardilli
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