Information Today, Inc. Corporate Site KMWorld CRM Media Streaming Media Faulkner Speech Technology Unisphere/DBTA
PRIVACY/COOKIES POLICY
Other ITI Websites
American Library Directory Boardwalk Empire Database Trends and Applications DestinationCRM Faulkner Information Services Fulltext Sources Online InfoToday Europe KMWorld Literary Market Place Plexus Publishing Smart Customer Service Speech Technology Streaming Media Streaming Media Europe Streaming Media Producer Unisphere Research



 



News & Events > NewsBreaks
Back Index Forward
Threads bluesky LinkedIn FaceBook Instagram RSS Feed
Weekly News Digest

January 9, 2025 — 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.

The Program for OpenAthens' Access Lab 2025 Is Now Available

OpenAthens shared the following:

We are thrilled to announce our online Access Lab 2025 program, taking place 24–27 February 2025. As OpenAthens turns 30 this year, the Access Lab program celebrates our partnerships and customers’ success around the world.

Access Lab brings together industry leaders, innovators, and thought leaders for an insightful and engaging program. Our online event will run over several days and in multiple time zones and languages so that as many of our global audience can join.

Whether you are a publisher, provider, library or IT professional, Access Lab provides the opportunity to join our global community to share knowledge, challenges and updates from across the industry.

For more information, read the news item.

Paratext Updates Its bird Index With a Browse Publisher Function

Paratext introduced “a substantive enhancement to bird: Base Inventory of Research Databases. The new Browse Publisher function is more than a new feature; it is a unique portal to the entire realm of scholarly publishing.”

bird, which debuted in February 2024, is a catalog and index to more than 8,100 research databases spanning 177 academic departments and 34 formats from 2,000 publishers. Its enhanced functionality can help “selectors and strategists evaluating new research material for libraries” answer questions such as: Who publishes which database? Was the publisher sold, and is the product name the same? Is the library buying the same thing twice?

For more information, read the press release.

Job News From CCC and ByWater Solutions and Honoree News From NISO

CCC announced that Catie Sheret, general counsel for Cambridge University Press & Assessment, has been elected to its board of directors. “Catie brings a wealth of expertise in innovation, operational efficiency, AI governance, and sustainability to CCC’s Board of Directors,” says Tracey Armstrong, president and CEO of CCC. “Her experience in driving educational impact, reducing carbon footprints, and fostering stronger community engagement will be invaluable for CCC as we continue to advance our mission to make copyright work.”

ByWater Solutions has been busy ensuring that its team is poised for success heading into 2025 by promoting Catrina Berka to lead educator and Enica Davis to lead data migration specialist, hiring Heather Harmon—who has experience working in education and public libraries—as a project coordinator, and hiring Sakhir Sohail as a systems administrator; he has nearly 10 years of experience as an infrastructure engineer.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) named Timnit Gebru, executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), as the winner of its 2025 Miles Conrad Award. She will deliver the Miles Conrad Lecture virtually at NISO Plus 2025 on Feb. 12. “We are honored to have Dr. Gebru deliver this year’s Miles Conrad Lecture,” says Jason Griffey, NISO’s director of strategic initiatives. “The award recognizes her critical work on the dangers of biases in AI as the information community grapples with ethics and rapidly advancing technologies. We look forward to hearing her views about the opportunities and risks inherent in the use of AI in an imperfect world.”

CCC Exec Publishes 'A Quick Journey Through the Expanding World of AI and Copyright Litigation'

Catherine Zaller Rowland, VP and general counsel at CCC, writes the following for the CCC blog Velocity of Content:

[T]here has been a proliferation of copyright-related lawsuits involving AI, and the stakes for rightsholders and AI system providers are huge. As of now, there are dozens of lawsuits involving generative AI swirling around the U.S. court system, with several others making their way through courts in Europe and Asia. Most of these involve the unauthorized use of third-party copyrighted works to fuel generative AI systems. Some of them are class action lawsuits, which are not very common in copyright land … and have the potential to involve millions of rightsholders. And it does not end there—there are also lawsuits forcing courts to grapple with whether AI-generated works can be protected by copyright.

So, what can we make of all these lawsuits?

For more information, read the blog post.

Sage Buys Accounting, Finance, Business, and Marketing Titles From Textbook Media Press

Sage acquired “titles in accounting, finance, business, and marketing from Textbook Media Press, a publisher of digital and print higher education textbooks.” Textbook Media Press joins recent acquisitions bolstering Sage’s higher education business offerings, including Chicago Business Press, Hubro Education, and Cambridge Business Publishers.

“We are very excited to further expand our educational offerings for the growing business discipline with a targeted acquisition of titles from Textbook Media Press,” says Reid Hester, VP of Sage’s U.S. College division. “We look forward to working with a new group of successful, committed authors and welcoming new student and instructor customers to Sage.” 

For more information, read the press release.

DPLA Details Its Latest Work and Looks to the Future

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) issued an end-of-2024 email newsletter titled Much Accomplished, Much More to Come. It begins with the organization’s highlighted accomplishments, including the following:
  • In May, DPLA celebrated a tremendous milestone: our landmark, cultural heritage aggregation program reached more than 50 million items, a testament to the work of our network of more than 6,000 institutions and partner hubs.
  • Our partners received more than 2.5 billion page views in 2024. We relaunched our Wikimedia pipeline and, in two months, added more than 400,000 files to Wikimedia Commons. …
  • We made over 1,300 titles that have been removed from schools and libraries available for free through the award-winning Banned Book Club, which is now available nationwide. And, we launched the Banned Book of the Week, highlighting selected titles chosen by our Curation Corps and other librarians from around the country. …
  • We inaugurated IndieLib, a first-of-its-kind, one-day gathering that brought together independent publishers and librarians.
  • We launched a new, groundbreaking digital ownership model that allows libraries to purchase (rather than merely license) and own in perpetuity tens of thousands of ebook and audiobook titles from dozens of independent publishers.
  • With our partners at Lyrasis, we surpassed two million ebooks and audiobooks available in the Palace Marketplace and expanded the number of publishers offering library-friendly options.

Upcoming projects include the following:

We’ll be launching two new programs next year. First, we will begin a program to support the work of our existing Hub partners. Second, we’ll start a fund to onboard new contributors. Both of these programs are in the early stages. We anticipate beginning to distribute funds in the second half of the year.

We will continue our ingestion work throughout the year, keeping pace with our harvest schedule, which is updated here. (To learn more, you can join one of our office hours with Michael Della Bitta.) And we’ll be working to provide libraries with more alternative licensing options through the Palace Marketplace. We’ll also be adding more university presses to the Marketplace and continuing to make more titles available for digital ownership by libraries.  

For more information, visit the website.

S&P Global Buys AI Tool Provider ProntoNLP

S&P Global acquired ProntoNLP, “a leading provider of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tooling, allowing users to derive differentiated insights from unstructured and structured data. ProntoNLP’s proprietary models and LLM-based signal tools will bolster S&P Global’s textual data analytics capabilities,” according to the press release.

It continues, “ProntoNLP utilizes proprietary natural language processing (NLP) capabilities coupled with large language models (LLMs) for fast, efficient and deep analysis of unstructured financial data at scale. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the company offers a set of customizable solutions for event detection and sentiment scoring. ProntoNLP will be integrated within the S&P Global Market Intelligence division of S&P Global, and its intellectual property is expected to power broader enterprise-wide applications.”

For more information, read the press release.

hoopla Digital Unveils a New Way to Borrow TV Shows With SeasonPass

hoopla Digital introduced SeasonPass, which “gives library patrons free, unlimited access to an entire season of TV for a week with one borrow—no holds, no waiting, and no subscription fees required.” At launch, 14 series are available, including the first seasons of The Librarians, Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators, and Midsomer Murders. Participating public libraries get access to SeasonPass for no additional fee.

“SeasonPass is transforming how libraries deliver digital content, enabling them to better serve their communities and maximize their impact,” says Jeff Jankowski, hoopla Digital’s founder. “It’s not just about simplifying access for patrons—it’s about giving libraries the tools they need to provide meaningful, efficient service in an increasingly digital world. This marks an important step forward in supporting libraries as they adapt to the future of content delivery.”

For more information, read the press release.

How Britannica Is Thriving in the 2020s

Michael J. de la Merced writes the following in “Britannica Didn’t Just Survive. It’s an A.I. Company Now.” for The New York Times:

[Encyclopaedia Britannica] was the sort of physical media expected to die in the internet era, and indeed, the encyclopedia’s publisher announced that it was ending the print edition in 2012. Skeptics wondered how Britannica the company could survive in the age of Wikipedia.

The answer was to adapt to the times.

Britannica Group, as the company is now known, runs websites, including Britannica.com and the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, and sells educational software to schools and libraries. It also sells artificial intelligence agent software that underpins applications like customer service chatbots and data retrieval.

For more information, read the article.

The End of Windows 10

Tom Warren writes the following in “Microsoft Would Really Like You to Stop Using Windows 10 This Year” for The Verge:

It’s 2025, and Microsoft is kicking off the year by reminding everyone that support for Windows 10 ends in October. While the company has been trying to entice Windows 10 users to upgrade to Windows 11 with full-screen prompts throughout 2024, it’s now calling 2025 ‘the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh.’

Last year, Microsoft kicked off 2024 by declaring it was ‘the year of the AI PC,’ before launching a range of Copilot Plus PCs several months later. As Microsoft edges closer to the end of Windows 10, it’s making its presence at CES felt this week by declaring that refreshing a Windows 10 PC will be more important than buying a new TV or phone in 2025.

For more information, read the article.



Send correspondence concerning the Weekly News Digest to NewsBreaks Editor Brandi Scardilli
              Back to top