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Weekly News Digest
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March 11, 2021 — 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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Taylor & Francis Joins Two Organizations Committed to DEI in Publishing
Taylor & Francis entered two partnerships to help work toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the publishing field: the Joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing (coordinated by the Royal Society of Chemistry) and the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC).The joint commitment initiative has more than 30 publishing organizations coming together “to understand our research community, reflect its diversity, share success to achieve impact, and set minimum standards on which to build.” Goals include “the enablement of diversity data to be self-reported by members of our community which can be shared and analyzed anonymously to understand where action is needed; [and] the creation of subject-specific diversity baselines, with minimum targets to achieve appropriate and inclusive representation of authors, reviewers, and editorial decision-makers.” C4DISC has 10 supporting bodies aiming “to build equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communications and a commitment to respect, listen, and act.” Taylor & Francis is now a sponsor of the coalition and will follow its recommendations for “working practices, training, and guidance for colleagues.” For more information, read the press release.
Creative Commons Web Event Looks at OA and COVID-19
Creative Commons is hosting an online event on March 16, 2021, at 11 a.m. EDT. A New Era of Open? COVID-19 and the Pursuit for Equitable Solutions will “attempt to map out the present and the future of ‘open’ in the era of COVID-19” and build on Creative Commons’ article, “Now Is the Time for Open Access Policies—Here’s Why” from March 2020. The panelists will be Brigitte Vézina (director of policy at Creative Commons), Tarek Loubani (medical director and physician at Glia), Tim Hubbard (professor of bioinformatics in the department of medical and molecular genetics at King’s College London), and Uma Suthersanen (professor of global intellectual property law at Queen Mary University of London).For more information, visit the webpage.
Springer Nature Adds to Its OA Portfolio With Purchase of Atlantis Press
Springer Nature acquired OA publisher Atlantis Press, which specializes in conference proceedings and journals. According to the press release, “Atlantis Press has a strong focus on global emerging markets across the STM disciplines and Social Sciences. Its portfolio of 17 different proceedings series and over 130,000 proceedings articles is recognised around the world. In addition, Atlantis Press has a small but fast growing open access journal business which will also transfer to Springer Nature.”The two companies had previously signed a book-partnership and a co-publication deal in 2010 and 2018 that allowed 115 Atlantis Press print books to be hosted as ebooks on SpringerLink and distributed by Springer Nature. For more information, read the press release.
Kanopy Studies Streaming Video in Academic Libraries
Kanopy released the results of its survey of more than 800 mostly U.S.-based academic librarians, who responded to questions about streaming video trends and challenges. There has been an increasing demand for streaming video options for faculty members and students during the pandemic, and this trend is expected to continue after it ends. Other findings include the following:- 77.2% of survey respondents say diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are “extremely” to “very” important to which streaming videos are offered.
- 25.8% believe they are fully meeting the need for DEI content.
- 24.7% name perpetual access as their favorite acquisition model, with patron- or demand-driven-acquisition the least popular, at 14.9%.
- 16.3% say faculty recommendations is the leading method for video discovery, with the library catalog next, at 15.6%.
- 68.2% believe that incorporating streaming video into class assignments helps with student engagement.
- 52% don’t think it’s the library’s responsibility to provide streaming video for entertainment purposes.
For more information, read the press release.
TLC Adds New and Updated Features to Its CARL Suite of Products
The Library Corp. (TLC) updated its CARL ILS: CARL•X is on version 9.6.8, CARL•Connect Staff is on version 1.6.4, CARL•Connect Discovery is on version 3.6.2.1, and CARL•X APIs are on version 1.9.8.New features include the Damaged Items functionality in CARL•Connect Staff, and there is updated Not Found functionality (now called Wander List) in CARL•Connect Staff. The press release shares that other updates “include capabilities for library staff to withdraw or check in items directly from the Wander List, and display updated status columns and number of title holds for easy reference and convenience. … [There is also] Google Analytics integration, customizable Hold Shelf Expiration days, new tokens in Message Editor, customer-requested spine label sizes, check in sounds, FRBRized title details within mobile, enhanced location settings, and reverse chronological magazine and serials displays.” For more information, read the press release.
CNN Looks at Libraries and Censorship of Children's Books
Scottie Andrew writes the following in “Libraries Oppose Censorship. So They’re Getting Creative When It Comes to Offensive Kids’ Books” for CNN:It’s an ugly surprise present in classics like ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ ‘Peter Pan’ and several Dr. Seuss picture books—racist depictions of indigenous, Black and Asian characters that mar some of the best-loved works in children’s literature. It’s hard to imagine a children's library collection without those titles. It’s up to librarians, then, to determine whether those books and others with racist content still deserve a spot on their shelves, said Deborah Caldwell Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. ‘We may make a reevaluation of those books and their place in the canon,’ she told CNN. ‘It doesn’t mean that people should stop reading the books or not have them in their collection, but they should be thinking critically about the books and how they are shared with young people.’ … Some libraries may move an offending book to the adult collection or historical archives, where it can live as a ‘historical artifact’ that reflects the dominant attitudes of the time it was published. But perhaps the most important consideration a librarian has is the wants and needs of their readers—is a book reflective of the community the library serves? … For more information, read the article.
Library of Congress Presents Its Pandemic Collections
The Library of Congress has been working on documenting the COVID-19 pandemic and is sharing some of what it has collected. Its goal has been “acquiring photographs that document the pandemic’s impact on individuals and communities, capturing artists’ responses to the outbreak, mapping the pandemic’s spread and archiving the world’s response online.” Initiatives have included the following:- In May of 2020, the Library’s Prints & Photographs Division curators and staff specialists carefully selected more than 50 pandemic-related posters for acquisition from the nonprofit Amplifier design lab, and a door opened for receiving digital as well as printed versions of the artworks.
- As part of the Library’s rapid-response collecting efforts, the Prints and Photographs Division is collaborating with the photo-sharing site Flickr to invite contributions of digital photographs and graphic art that show how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted lives, communities, or life in the United States at large.
- MacArthur Award-winning photographer Camilo Vergara donated his first group of COVID-19-related images to the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division shortly after the pandemic took off in March 2020. … His still-growing pandemic photo series, focusing on New York City neighborhoods, now includes more than 2,000 images in the Library’s collection.
- [T]he Music Division has undertaken a strategy to capture our nation’s cultural heritage in this unprecedented time by establishing the Performing Arts COVID-19 Response Collection. This carefully curated collection amasses artistic works along with any accompanying primary source materials that document the performing arts creative response to the pandemic.
- Washington, D.C. artist Toni Lane created a series of powerful, highly personal drawings in response to the question “What [do] you do all day while in quarantine?” which was posed in mid-March 2020 by the director of her gallery, Art Enables.
- The Library’s Geography and Maps Division has been monitoring and collecting data that could be useful for future analysis and understanding the history of the pandemic. For example, the Library is taking snapshots of the data released from the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data, which aggregates rapidly accumulating genomic data from labs around the world during serious disease pandemics, and makes that data available to qualified and registered users.
- The Library has developed and initiated a web collecting plan led by experts in the Science, Technology and Business Division to create a well-balanced collection of archived pandemic-related websites that will be preserved and made available. Subject areas will include government information on the pandemic, social and cultural impacts, scientific material, personal narratives and everyday life.
For more information, read the press release.
'TikTok Will Warn Users Before Posting "Inappropriate or Unkind" Comments' by Jon Porter
Jon Porter writes the following for The Verge:TikTok is rolling out a pop-up today that’s designed to warn users before they post a comment that might be ‘inappropriate or unkind.’ The new feature is one of two being announced that are designed to ‘promote kindness’ on the service. The other is Filter All Comments, so that they only appear once individually approved. The new unkind warning appears if TikTok believes a comment might violate its community guidelines. ‘Would you like to reconsider posting this?’ the pop-up box reads, before encouraging users to ‘Edit’ it, or ‘Post anyway.’ … TikTok has also announced it’s partnering with the Cyberbullying Research Center as it works on more anti-bullying initiatives. For more information, read the article.
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Brandi Scardilli
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