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Weekly News Digest
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May 3, 2022 — 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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IMLS Works to Establish a National Museum Survey
IMLS, after consulting with scientific experts at the American Institutes for Research, is working on establishing a National Museum Survey (NMS) as part of the Federal Statistical System. The NMS will help inform IMLS initiatives and guide policymakers and practitioners in making decisions for supporting and managing museums. Data will be collected directly from museums to discover the scope and scale of their reach in the U.S. and what social, cultural, and economic roles they play in society.Ten museum experts make up a steering committee that will provide “grounded guidance and feedback regarding field needs, existing research efforts, and technical feedback on the survey design and implementation. These members also present a bridge between IMLS and the entire museum sector and advise on messaging and outreach,” the press release states. After preliminary research, the pilot survey will launch in summer 2023. For more information, read the press release.
CCC Unveils New Knowledge Graph, Buys Ringgold
CCC (Copyright Clearance Center) rolled out CCC Expert View, “a knowledge graph with robust capabilities to help life science companies identify qualified experts, key opinion leaders, and rising stars to build collaboration networks, fuel innovation, and gain business advantage.” For more information, read the press release.CCC also announced that it acquired Ringgold, “a longstanding provider of persistent organization identifiers widely used by the scholarly communications community. With offices in the US and UK, Ringgold is now a wholly owned subsidiary of CCC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.” For more information, read the press release.
Kudos and Impact Science Announce the War & Peace Knowledge Cooperative
Kudos and Impact Science are partnering to create another knowledge cooperative: the War & Peace Knowledge Cooperative. Like the climate change and coronavirus ones before it, this cooperative will help communicate research about war to educators, policymakers, and the public via a collection of easy-to-read summaries. Topics will include conflict prevention and resolution, deterrence and defense, displacement and force migration, cybersecurity, and the rule of law.Publishers are encouraged to nominate content to be added to the War & Peace Knowledge Cooperative. Kudos and Impact Science are also planning cooperatives on AI and equality, diversity, and inclusion, among other topics. For more information, read the blog post.
TLC Expands Its Cataloging Service With New Contributions From Libraries
The Library Corp. (TLC) added new contributed datasets to the ITS•MARC resources. TLC notes that it “established new partnerships to provide libraries with access to recently published titles. The high-quality copy cataloging service from TLC now provides over 81 million records from 23 databases. Of which, school and public library partners contribute 1.2 million records, with more on the way.” Partnering with libraries allows TLC to expand its cataloging data services. Catalogers get resources from various media types, and bibliographic records for recently published titles are easier to find.“It’s wonderful to see so many of our customers share their [cataloging] talents, thereby creating an ever-growing community resource. It’s a partnership between TLC and the library community resulting in benefits to the entire ITS•MARC family,” says Sam Brenizer, TLC’s director of product management. Any subscriber can contribute to the ITS•MARC databases through their cataloging application or at itsmarc.com. For more information, read the news item.
UN Human Rights Council Resolution on Disinformation Draws Mixed Opinions
Access Partnership shared that at the beginning of April, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council adopted a resolution, “Countering disinformation for the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms,” at the request of Ukraine, a UN member state.Access Partnership writes, “The increase of disinformation on social media platforms is allegedly affecting the operation of organisations working in Ukraine to mitigate the consequences of the war by providing humanitarian aid. Member states including Poland, the UK and the US welcomed the resolution. However, some countries declined to approve the text, including China, France, and Venezuela. These nations cited varying degrees of concern surrounding the texts’ lack of detail and its failure to reference the role of social media companies in preventing disinformation on their platforms.” For more information, read the Access Alert.
OverDrive's New Libby Extra Is an Antiques Treasure Trove
OverDrive introduced a new Libby Extra, Kovels, an antiques expert providing identification guides, histories, and other resources on antiques and collectibles. Libraries that add Kovels to Libby will be giving their patrons unlimited access to the site’s content and the current digital version of the Kovels on Antiques & Collectibles monthly newsletter, along with its 47 years’ worth of archives.For more information, read the blog post.
'A Reorganization at Elsevier' by Roger C. Schonfeld
Roger C. Schonfeld writes the following for The Scholarly Kitchen:[On May 2,] Judy Verses start[ed] as Elsevier’s President for Academic & Government (A&G). … Executive moves between major competitors are always interesting, but this announcement is particularly newsworthy, because it is the result of a significant restructuring for Elsevier. With the completion of this new market-based structure, Kumsal Bayazit has now, after three years as Elsevier CEO, truly put her stamp on the company. Since her arrival, Bayazit has expanded the size and diversity of Elsevier’s executive team. In doing so, she has added executive level leadership for each of its three major markets, starting with Health and earlier this year Corporate. With the arrival of Verses for A&G, Elsevier now has three senior executives with the title of president each focused on a separate major market. Ultimately, this new structure marks Elsevier’s emergence beyond a publisher with a single type of product to provide greater accountability as a platform company with differentiated customer needs. For more information, read the blog post.
Ex Libris Esploro Is Now Available to All Academic Institutions
Thanks to an expansion of the Ex Libris higher education cloud platform, the Esploro research information management solution can be implemented at all academic institutions, even if they don’t use the Ex Libris Alma library services platform.The press release notes, “The Ex Libris higher-ed cloud platform provides shared data and services that support end-to-end workflows across Ex Libris solutions and offer open connectivity to other tools in an institution's academic ecosystem. With the Esploro solution, institutions increase the impact of their researchers' scholarship, leverage the wealth of Esploro data for enriching research administration and reporting systems, and reduce the administrative burden on researchers and research office staff.” For more information, read the press release.
University of California Campuses Adopt the Opening the Future OA Model
Nine University of California (UC) campuses have signed up for the Opening the Future collective subscription model for titles from CEU Press and Liverpool University Press. As part of the deal, these campuses will get “unlimited, perpetual access to curated selections of the two publishers’ backlists,” and “the support will enable both publishers to publish new, frontlist books in Open Access (OA) format.” Opening the Future is a funding model that any publisher can adopt; when “libraries subscribe to access a curated package of backlist books and enhance their local collections,” then “their subscription pays for the dissemination of new scholarship, freely available to anyone. This program does not require book processing charges (BPCs) to finance Open Access monograph publishing, and it promotes a business model that enables publishing scholarly monographs without paywalls. The University of California’s participation is an important milestone in the program and underlines the UC’s ongoing strong commitment to opening up access to knowledge globally.”For more information, read the news item.
Bangor University Researchers Develop Technique for Improving Broadband Service
Bangor University in Wales announced that researchers in its Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Centre found a cost-effective method for improving the performance of networks that supply mobile services and broadband to homes and businesses. The university notes that “the new technique is also kinder on the planet. Because of the technique’s lack of complexity, less energy is needed to transmit a given amount of data, so there is less of an environmental cost.”Jianming Tang, director of the DSP Centre, says, “Using advanced digital signal processing, we are manipulating the way in which signals are processed in the receiver to compensate for the effects that usually limit bandwidth and transmission distance. This approach could be used to upgrade existing networks without requiring considerable changes to be made to these networks.” For more information, read the news item.
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Brandi Scardilli
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