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Weekly News Digest
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April 20, 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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Springer Nature's BookSubmarine Streamlines Publication of Theses and Dissertations
Springer Nature launched the BookSubmarine portal, which helps authors from all academic disciplines submit their dissertations or postdoctoral theses for publication and keep tabs on the status of their contracts and submissions. They enter the required data into the portal and select the publication model (OA, basic, or premium), and then expert editors assess their work. If accepted, a manuscript enters production, with Springer Nature providing the typesetting and formatting in XML so it is fully searchable and can be archived. Publications will be available in print and as ebooks on SpringerLink.“The portal is a secure way of storing all documentation and data related to a submission together in one place which makes the overall publication process more streamlined and efficient,” says Dorothee Fetzer, Springer Nature’s editorial director for humanities. “Springer Nature is constantly working on new processes, systems and technologies to improve its services for authors and customer experience.” For more information, read the press release.
U.S. Book Show Shares Plans for Panels and a Notable Speaker
Publishers Weekly released news about its upcoming U.S. Book Show, a new, virtual, 3-day conference and trade fair for the book industry to be held May 25–27, 2021. More than 100 editors and 80-plus publishers and allied vendors will populate the virtual exhibit halls. The book fair will provide 14 panels geared to librarians, booksellers, and publishing professionals, such as Editors’ Picks panels that will promote upcoming titles in literary fiction, young adult novels, comics and graphic novels, and more. Additional panels include Bookselling Today, Political Books: What Does the Post-Trump Landscape Hold?, and Hiring: How to Prioritize Inclusivity in Your Workforce.A key speaker will be Ijeoma Oluo, the author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. She will be talking with HarperCollins Publishers’ executive editor Rakesh Satyal about her forthcoming book, Be a Revolution. For more information, read the press releases here and here.
Advancing Diversity Week Will Advocate for Inclusion in Media and Advertising
MediaVillage and AdvancingDiversity.org are organizing a virtual Advancing Diversity Week, with the theme From Inclusion to Belonging, to be held Sept. 20–23, 2021. Its program will focus on diverse talent outreach, retention, and leadership development for the marketing industry. At the end of the week, the 4th annual Advancing Diversity Hall of Honors induction ceremony will take place. There are 10 inductees for 2021, including Citi, Howard University’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications, and The CW Network.“The media and advertising industry is on a transformational journey to advance diversity from advocacy to activism and we are pleased to be leading the community on this vital voyage,” says Philip McKenzie, MediaVillage’s chief strategy officer and AdvancingDiversity.org’s executive director. “Advancing Diversity Week will bring our 2021 theme ‘From Inclusion to Belonging’ to life across multiple virtual activations this fall and beyond.” For more information and a list of the week’s activities, read the press release.
'Libraries and Pandemics: Past and Present' by Julia Skinner
Julia Skinner writes the following for the JSTOR Daily newsletter:In 1918, World War I was coming to a close, and widespread changes were afoot. It was in some ways a moment similar to today: rapid technological development brought sweeping changes to workplaces and homes. … [A] pandemic began to sweep the globe, killing millions. Libraries across the U.S. helped people stay informed, entertained, and cared for as they disseminated information and resources, shifted their services, and re-imagined how they brought collections to the communities they served. … At the time, medical research held that paper materials, including the books and newspapers at libraries, would harbor contagions from anyone who touched them, and local health officials (not librarians) determined whether or not materials would be destroyed. Librarians and library records lamented the physical loss of books, which were destroyed after being returned from influenza-afflicted homes. … Library services began to change, too, away from a strict focus on classic literature and towards a variety of resources best suited to individual communities. Perhaps the most notable was Forrest Spaulding, a Des Moines, Iowa library director who is said to have destroyed ‘pro-German’ pamphlets by the fistful during the war, doing so at night to avoid backlash. Twenty years later, he changed course dramatically, authoring the Library Bill of Rights, which aims to ensure patrons’ access to information. … The 1918 flu pandemic was the first in which libraries were central to disseminating public health information, spurred by health officials’ struggles to share updates with communities during the 1916 Polio epidemic. This new library role in educating the public, combined with shifts in library focuses towards usable information, made libraries partners in many public awareness campaigns, from public health to nuclear safety, in the coming decades. For more information, read the article.
EFF and DuckDuckGo Partner for More Secure Internet Browsing
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) updated its HTTPS Everywhere browser extension with rulesets from DuckDuckGo’s Smarter Encryption technology. EFF notes, “With more domain coverage in Smarter Encryption, HTTPS Everywhere users are provided even more protection. HTTPS Everywhere rulesets will continue to be hosted through this year, giving our partners who use them time to adjust. We will stop taking new requests for domains to be added at the end of May.”“DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption has a list of millions of HTTPS-encrypted websites, generated by continually crawling the web instead of through crowdsourcing, which will give HTTPS Everywhere users more coverage for secure browsing,” says Alexis Hancock, manager of HTTPS Everywhere. EFF’s “pioneering work with the HTTPS Everywhere extension took privacy protection in a new and needed direction, seamlessly upgrading people to secure website connections,” says Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s founder and CEO. “We’re delighted that EFF has now entrusted DuckDuckGo to power HTTPS Everywhere going forward, using our next generation Smarter Encryption dataset.” For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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