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Weekly News Digest

April 17, 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.

OCLC Describes the Middle Eastern Libraries That Have Selected Its WorldShare Management Services

• The American University of Kurdistan (AUK) [is] located in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. As an American institution, their education program offerings follow the American structure of higher education degrees. AUK’s library collection includes more than 40,000 print books and 500,000 e-books. …
• The Africa Institute Library - Global Studies University, based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, [is] an interdisciplinary research institute specializing in Africa and the African diaspora in the humanities and social sciences. The library offers a rich and diverse collection of physical resources including 4,500 print books and journals, 1,000 print archival materials, and the distinguished Tejumola Collection. As for the digital collection, the library provides access to over 40,000 e-books and a wide array of manuscripts, among other materials. …
• Located in the Kurdistan region of Iraq … , the University of Kurdistan Hewlêr (UKH) offers a wide range of programs in various fields. Their efforts are focused on pursuing excellence in teaching and research, contributing to the development of Kurdistan. UKH’s library is dedicated to serving its community, as well as residents of Kurdistan and the international community interested in Kurdistan’s affairs.

For more information, read the press release.

OpenAI Shortens Its Safety-Testing Timeline

[T]he Financial Times [FT] reported that OpenAI has dramatically minimized its safety testing timeline. … Evaluations are what can surface model risks and other harms, such as whether a user could jailbreak a model to provide instructions for creating a bioweapon. For comparison, sources told FT that OpenAI gave them six months to review GPT-4 before it was released—and that they only found concerning capabilities after two months.

Sources added that OpenAI’s tests are not as thorough as they used to be and lack the necessary time and resources to properly catch and mitigate risks.

For more information, read the article.

Clarivate Augments Its Academic AI Platform With AI Agents and Other Updates

For more information, read the press release.

Thomson Reuters Studies the Use of Gen AI in Professional Sectors

“[P]rofessionals across all sectors increasingly recognize the potential of [gen AI], with positive sentiment rising by 11% compared to last year,” Thomson Reuters notes. “The research indicates that professional services are approaching a critical juncture where technology adoption must be matched with strategic integration. Substantial proportions of respondents anticipate [gen AI] becoming central to their workflows, so organizations face urgent questions about policies, training, client communication, and business models.”

For more information, read the press release.

The Latest News From DPLA

DPLAfest 2025 is in the works: “[T]he Chicago Public Library will host a gathering of our multifaceted community at the Harold Washington Library Center on October 20–21, 2025. The Fest planning committee has begun meeting and will share a call for proposals and registration page soon.”

Related to the executive order gutting IMLS, DPLA notes, “In response to the uncertainties of the moment, we have decided to suspend DPLA network membership dues through the end of the year.”

DPLA shares, “Join us in New York City in April at this year’s IndieLib Forum. On Wednesday, April 16 at NYU’s Engelberg Center, we’re bringing together librarians and indie publishers, in partnership with the Independent Publishers Caucus, Library Futures, and DeMarque.”

DPLA is planning a webinar “with Jefferson Sankara, Senior Software Product Engineer at the Filecoin Foundation, to learn about DPLA’s exploration of decentralized storage technology to ensuring the protection of cultural artifacts and heritage—against both natural and man-made threats, such as natural disasters, loss of funding, or technological failures. We will share the results of a pilot project to upload some of our partner content onto Filecoin’s decentralized storage network.”

For more information, read the news item.

EBSCO Information Services Debuts EBSCO Discovery: Open Education for OER Access

EBSCO Discovery: Open Education replaces Faculty Select, which is retiring on Aug. 31, 2025. It gives faculty members “a single place to search for and find content from top OER providers like OpenStax and Pressbooks and OA providers like DOAJ and JSTOR Open Community Collections, helping institutions meet evolving needs while saving students money.”

For more information, read the press release.

The Library of Congress Gains Archive Showcasing the History of the Circus

For more information, read the news item.

EDMO Develops AI-Driven Solutions to Help Higher Education Institutions With Enrollment

The solutions are:

• Document Intelligence—EDMO’s AI reads and analyzes documents with precision, providing faster, more accurate insights to streamline admissions workflows. 
• Conversation Intelligence—Harness the power of Agentforce, driving personalized conversations to boost engagement and build meaningful connections with prospective students.

EDMO notes, “Agentforce is the agentic layer of the Salesforce platform for deploying autonomous AI agents across any business function. Agentforce includes a set of tools to create and customize agents, as well as a library of pre-built skills for any use case across sales, service, marketing and commerce, MuleSoft, Tableau, Slack, partners and more.”

For more information, read the blog post.

ALA Leadership News

Maria McCauley, director of libraries at Cambridge Public Library in Massachusetts, was elected the 2025–2026 president-elect of ALA. She will be ALA president for the 2026–2027 term. McCauley is a member of:

• Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures
• Public Library Association (PLA)
• Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)
• ALA’s Rainbow Round Table, Sustainability Round Table, Intellectual Freedom Round Table, and International Relations Round Table
• Asian Pacific American Librarians Association
• Chinese American Librarians Association
• The Black Caucus of ALA
• REFORMA
• American Indian Library Association
• Freedom to Read Foundation
• Massachusetts Library Association
• New England Library Association

 Larry Neal, library director of Clinton-Macomb Public Library in Michigan, was elected treasurer of ALA for 2025–2028.

April Dawkins—assistant professor for information, library, and research sciences in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro—is the 2025–2026 president-elect of the American Association of School Librarians (AASL). She will be president for the 2026–2027 term.

Alexia Hudson-Ward—associate director of research, learning, and strategic partnerships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries—was named VP/president-elect of ACRL as of July 2025. She will assume the presidency in July 2026 for a 1-year term.

Teresa Anderson, most recently VP of innovation and outreach at ASIS International, will become the executive director of ACRL on May 19.

Ariana Hussain, teacher librarian at The Blake School in Minnesota, was elected VP/president-elect of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC). This term begins in July 2025, and she will assume the presidency in July 2026 for a 1-year term.

Steve Kelley, head of continuing resources and database management at Wake Forest University, is president-elect of Core; his term begins in July 2025. In July 2026, he becomes president for a 1-year term.

Jamar Rahming, executive director of Wilmington Institute Free Library in Delaware, will be the 2026–2027 PLA president. He serves a 3-year term as president-elect (2025–2026), president, and immediate past-president (2027–2028).

All About Small Language Models

Training a model with hundreds of billions of parameters takes huge computational resources. … Large language models (LLMs) also require considerable computational power each time they answer a request, which makes them notorious energy hogs. …

In response, some researchers are now thinking small. IBM, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all recently released small language models (SLMs) that use a few billion parameters—a fraction of their LLM counterparts.

Small models are not used as general-purpose tools like their larger cousins. But they can excel on specific, more narrowly defined tasks, such as summarizing conversations, answering patient questions as a health care chatbot, and gathering data in smart devices. 

For more information, read the article.