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Weekly News Digest
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August 20, 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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ProQuest and EBSCO Extend Their Ebook-Purchasing Partnership
ProQuest and EBSCO Information Services agreed to extend their partnership allowing librarians to acquire ProQuest ebook titles through EBSCO’s GOBI Library Solutions platform and EBSCO ebook titles through ProQuest’s OASIS platform. (ProQuest Rialto will also fall under this agreement when it becomes available.) The partnership, which will be in effect for an additional 4 years, began in 2015, after EBSCO acquired YBP Library Solutions (giving it GOBI) and ProQuest acquired Coutts Information Services (giving it OASIS). Customer contracts and account contracts will not change, meaning that librarians can continue to buy ebooks from their preferred vendor and platform.For more information, read the press release.
'This Program Makes It Even Easier to Make Deepfakes' by Samantha Cole
Samantha Cole writes for VICE, “A new method for making deepfakes creates realistic face-swapped videos in real-time, no lengthy training needed. “Unlike previous approaches to making deepfakes—algorithmically-generated videos that make it seem like someone is doing or saying something they didn’t in real life—this method works on any two people without any specific training on their faces.” For more information, read the article.
'Dorm Food: Delivery Robots Coming to 100 College Campuses' by Greg Nichols
Greg Nichols writes the following for ZDNet:The robot delivery wars are officially shifting into hyper-drive. Today, Starship Technologies, which makes a six-wheeled bot for autonomous delivery, is announcing $40 million in Series A funding. … That’s a drop in the bucket compared to behemoth Amazon, which has dived headlong into its own delivery robotics program. … But Starship has an important advantage over Bezos and crew: One heck of a head start. Founded in San Francisco in 2014, the company’s funding announcement coincides with a major milestone as it celebrates its [100,000th] commercial delivery. That’s thought to be more than any other robotics delivery company. … The company introduced robot delivery to university campuses earlier this year in partnership with foodservice management company Sodexo, Inc. … So far, according to internal numbers, Starship’s robots have delivered over 6,000 pizzas, 7,000 gallons of milk, 8,000 coffees, 9,000 sushi rolls, 15,000 bananas, and over 3,700 diapers. Now Starship has indicated plans to expand its service to 100 university campuses in the next 24 months. For more information, read the article.
Clarivate Analytics Rolls Out a Digital Health Research Solution
Clarivate Analytics introduced Cortellis Digital Health Intelligence, which “will help drug, device and technology developers navigate the dynamic digital health landscape with intelligence focused on virtual, consumer-centric solutions (including both hardware and software) that enable health management or patient care in real-life settings.” It features new alliances and deals information, more than 4,000 independent health app reviews, nearly 6,000 press releases on digital health news, and information on discovery, development, and commercialization trends.The database is updated daily and is indexed by digital health topic for easy browsing, filtering, exporting, and data comparison. Cortellis Digital Health Intelligence can be integrated with the suite of Cortellis life science intelligence solutions, providing access to drug pipeline information, company profiles, and more. For more information, read the press release.
'The Amazon Publishing Juggernaut' by Blake Montgomery
Blake Montgomery writes the following for The Atlantic:Founded in 2009, Amazon Publishing is far from the tech giant’s best-known enterprise, but it is a quietly consequential piece of the company’s larger strategy to become a one-stop shop for all your consumer decisions. As Amazon Studios does with movies, Amazon Publishing feeds the content pipelines created by the tech giant’s online storefront and Amazon Prime membership program. At its most extreme, Amazon Publishing is a triumph of vertical engineering: If a reader buys one of its titles on a Kindle, Amazon receives a cut both as publisher and as bookseller—not to mention whatever markup it made on the device in the first place, as well as the amortized value of having created more content to draw people into its various book-subscription offerings. (One literary agent summed it up succinctly to The Wall Street Journal in January: “They aren’t gaming the system. They own the system.”) For more information, read the article.
Choice Rolls Out White Paper on the Importance of Marketing for Academic Libraries
Choice, a publishing unit of ACRL, released a white paper, “Implementing Marketing Plans in the Academic Library: Rules, Roles & Definition” (registration required). It “offers a practical definition of library marketing and examines why it’s integral to successful operations and strong fiscal support.” In addition, it “provides an outline of library marketing strategies and identifies proven follow-through tactics. The work describes specific, actionable steps different types of libraries can take to build effective, sustainable marketing programs that will promote a library’s services, resources, and instruction over the long term.”For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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