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Weekly News Digest
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September 26, 2023 — 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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U.S. Copyright Office Extends AI and Copyright Comment Period Until Oct. 30
The U.S. Copyright Office announced that it has “extended the deadline to submit comments in response to its August 30, 2023, notice of inquiry regarding artificial intelligence and copyright. The new deadlines will ensure that members of the public have sufficient time to prepare fulsome responses to the Office’s questions so the Office can proceed with its inquiry with the benefit of a complete record of public input and feedback.” The new deadline for initial comments is Oct. 30.For more information, read the news item.
Library Juice Academy Adds Its Courses to Skilltype's Database of Training Resources
Library Juice Academy announced the following:Library Juice Academy has partnered with Skilltype to include 200 of their courses in Skilltype’s curated index of trainings, enabling employers and their staff who use Skilltype to make them a part of their overall professional development programming. Skilltype will recommend upcoming Library Juice classes to users who have expressed interest in the topics that match their professional development goals. For more information, read the press release.
Authors Guild Rallies Prominent Authors to Join Class Action Suit Against OpenAI
Jennifer Korn reports the following for CNN Business:A group of famous fiction writers joined the Authors Guild in filing a class action suit against OpenAI on [Sept. 20], alleging the company’s technology is illegally using their copyrighted work. The complaint claims that OpenAI, the company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT, is copying famous works in acts of ‘flagrant and harmful’ copyright infringement and feeding manuscripts into algorithms to help train systems on how to create more human-like text responses. George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen are among the 17 prominent authors who joined the suit. … For more information, read the article.
ALA Announces LeVar Burton as Honorary Chair of Banned Books Week
ALA shared the following:Beloved reading advocate, writer, and television and film star LeVar Burton will lead this year’s Banned Books Week, which takes place October 1–7, 2023. Burton is the first actor to serve as honorary chair of Banned Books Week, an annual weeklong event that highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas. … Burton will headline a live virtual conversation with Banned Books Week Youth Honorary Chair Da’Taeveyon Daniels about censorship and advocacy at 8:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, October 4. The event will stream live on Instagram (@banned_books_week). Visit BannedBooksWeek.org for more details. For more information, read the press release.
Clarivate Introduces an Academia & Government Innovation Incubator and Buys an AI Platform
Clarivate “established an Academia & Government Innovation Incubator. This will further accelerate its strategy to drive innovation, utilize artificial intelligence and introduce novel solutions for its academic users and customers.” The incubator’s first program to aid in student success is helped along by Clarivate’s acquisition of Alethea, “an AI-powered students’ content engagement platform created by Pangea. Alethea facilitates meaningful engagement with academic texts, class readings, and assignments through personalized and adaptive guidance.”For more information, read the press release.
Law Library of Congress Publishes Report on Global AI Legislation
Kayahan Cantekin, a foreign law specialist in the Global Legal Research Directorate of the Law Library of Congress, writes the following in “Introducing the Law Library’s New Multi-jurisdiction Report on Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Around the World” for the Law Library of Congress’ In Custodia Legis blog:We are proud to announce that our new multi-jurisdiction report Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Around the World is now available. The report includes a list of jurisdictions around the world in which primary and secondary legislation that refers to AI has been enacted or proposed, together with the relevant citations of the laws and links to their texts, where available. The report also includes a list of international organizations which have adopted documents referring to AI, or where such documents have been proposed for adoption. A comparative summary introducing the lists lays out certain common trends that are observed in the content of the legislation and documents that are included in the lists. For more information, read the blog post.
EveryLibrary and Girls Who Code Help Libraries Provide Free Coding Programs
EveryLibrary and Girls Who Code (GWC) teamed up to help libraries offer free coding programs.“Join us for our webinar on September 28th to learn about Girls Who Code’s pipeline of free programs to support girls and non-binary students in computer science from primary education through their early careers. You’ll hear directly from GWC’s Director of Community Partnerships & Outreach, Emily Ong, and Idaho Commission for Libraries’ Youth Services Consultant, Jennifer Redford,” the EveryLibrary Institute shares. “Attendees will learn how to implement coding and sisterhood activities that encourage positive social-emotional development and engage young learners from historically underrepresented groups in tech. Through a walkthrough of GWC’s Clubs program, you’ll learn how to develop girls-supportive and inclusive coding programs for 3rd–12th grade students of all genders, no matter your level of experience with coding.” For more information, read the news item.
AM and Preservica Enable Quartex Users to Publish and Preserve Their Collections
Preservica partnered with AM to create “an integration that enables users of AM’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, Quartex, to publish engaging, interactive, and accessible digital archives and to effortlessly preserve their collections, including assets and metadata, to prevent loss and degradation in the future using Preservica’s Active Digital Preservation technology. … Preservica’s Active Digital Preservation system, brings information forward over time, moving files from old formats to current formats, ensuring it remains readable.”For more information, read the press release.
Access Partnership Announces the Availability of This Year's State of Broadband Report
Access Partnership announced the following:The annual State of Broadband Report—co-authored this year by Access Partnership as a Knowledge Partner—was released during the Broadband Commission’s Annual Fall Meeting in New York [Sept. 16]. … Overall, the global offline population has continued to decline this year, falling to 2.6 billion people from an estimated 2.7 billion people in 2022. This year’s report revealed that this demand for connectivity, particularly in the un- and under-connected Global South, has shifted from emerging to substantial and sustained. It recommends that policymakers take stock of lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, where connectivity’s pivotal role in everything from health to education to transactions was thrown into stark relief, as well as prioritising investing in communications infrastructure. For more information, read the press release.
Elicit Gets Seed Funding to Enhance Its Machine Learning-Based Research Aid Product
Elicit “uses language models to extract data from and summarize research papers” and aims to reduce hallucinations (i.e., inaccurate answers provided by AI tools), per its website. “It streamlines the research process by finding relevant papers, extracting key information, and organizing the information into concepts,” a blog post explains.Elicit announced that it has raised $9 million in seed funding and has become an independent public benefit corporation. (It originated at Ought, a nonprofit research lab.) The funding will go toward developing Elicit’s product and expanding its team. “Like Ought, our mission is to scale up good reasoning using machine learning, starting with researchers,” the blog post notes. “Along with the fundraise, we are launching a new version of Elicit that not only performs paper searches but also discovers concepts across papers.” For more information, read the blog post.
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Brandi Scardilli
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