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Weekly News Digest

May 28, 2020 — 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.

COVID-19 NEWS: 'Public Libraries Innovate to Serve Vulnerable Populations on the Front Lines of COVID-19'

Public libraries across the U.S. and Canada are taking bold and innovative measures to mitigate the inequitable impact of COVID-19 on children, low-income families, communities of color, people experiencing homelessness and other high-risk populations. Through dynamic partnerships with local government, new digital service models, reimagined library spaces and other innovative approaches, these new efforts reflect a rapid evolution of the public library’s essential role in the era of COVID-19.

‘Public libraries are first responders in the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. As COVID-19 magnifies the systemic gaps between the haves and have nots in our societies, libraries are bravely stepping up—and into new frontiers—in order to fulfill their core function of ensuring equitable access to information and services,’ says Susan Benton, ULC’s president and CEO.

ULC notes that libraries are currently collecting, creating, and distributing personal protective equipment; fighting food insecurity; offering equitable access to emergency supplies; facilitating free COVID-19 testing; tracing its spread; and aiding people who are experiencing homelessness.

For more information, read the press release.

The U.S. Copyright Office's DMCA Section 512 Study Results Draw Copyright Alliance Response

The report issued by the U.S. Copyright Office today came to a conclusion we have long known to be true: ‘the operation of the section 512 safe harbor system today is unbalanced.’ This report is extremely important to the copyright community and many others who are integral players in the online copyright enforcement ecosystem, and is the product of almost five years of thoughtful and comprehensive deliberation by the Copyright Office and the many stakeholders who have participated in the process. It contemplates numerous complex and difficult issues relating to online copyright enforcement, while specifically evaluating the impact and effectiveness of the safe harbor provisions contained in Section 512, which was enacted by Congress in 1998 as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). We very much appreciate all the hard work that went into the final report, and look forward to reviewing it in detail in the coming days.

For more information and the rest of Kupferschmid’s statement, read the press release.

Gale Digital Scholar Lab Gains Integrated Learning Center

According to the press release, “This creates an entirely new structure for teaching best practices, research principles and the iterative nature of digital scholarship, in a manner that’s teachable and repeatable, putting research and learning first.” The Learning Center offers information on common digital humanities terms, an FAQ about the lab, video tutorials, interactive sample projects, and more.

“Gale Digital Scholar Lab is widely seen as a platform to introduce textual analysis and digital information literacy to users at many academic levels both in and outside of the classroom,” says Marc Cormier, Gale’s director of product management for the humanities. “We created the Learning Center to provide faculty and students the guidance to understand and execute each stage of the Lab’s text analysis workflow. …”

For more information, read the press release.

Patron Point Adds SignUp Resource From Demco Software

For more information, read the announcement.

COVID-19 NEWS: 'More Harm Than Good? Twitter Struggles to Label Misleading COVID-19 Tweets'

Automated technology that Twitter began using this month to label tweets containing coronavirus misinformation is making mistakes, raising concerns about the company’s reliance on artificial intelligence to review content.

On May 11, Twitter started labeling tweets that spread a conspiracy theory about 5G causing the coronavirus. Authorities believe the false theory prompted some people to set fires to cell towers. 

Twitter will remove misleading tweets that encourage people to engage in behavior such as damaging cell towers. Other tweets that don’t incite the same level of harm but include false or disputed claims should get a label that directs users to trusted information. The label reads ‘Get the facts about COVID-19’ and takes users to a page with curated tweets that debunk the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory.

Twitter’s technology, though, has made scores of mistakes, applying labels to tweets that refute the conspiracy theory and provide accurate information. … In one case, Twitter applied the label to tweets that shared a page the company itself had published titled ‘No, 5G isn’t causing coronavirus.’ Tweets with words such as 5G, coronavirus, COVID-19 or hashtags #5Gcoronavirus have also been mistakenly labeled. …

‘We are building and testing new tools so we can scale our application of these labels appropriately. There will be mistakes along the way,’ a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. ‘We appreciate your patience as we work to get this right, but this is why we are taking an iterative approach, so that we can learn and make adjustments along the way.’

For more information, read the article.