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Weekly News Digest
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May 28, 2026 — 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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Ohio University Faculty Members Discuss AI Slop
Alex Semancik writes the following in “What Is ‘AI Slop’: OHIO AI Faculty Experts Explain” for Ohio University:Co-Director of Ohio University’s Human-First AI Initiative Paul Shovlin, Ph.D., said it best, ‘AI is what we make of it.’ … He says that AI literacy is extremely important in terms of educating people about the harms of AI slop, and helping them formulate more holistic, informed understandings of artificial intelligence in general. … If AI slop is ‘digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,’ then responsible generative artificial intelligence usage is productive, thoughtful, task-oriented and human-centered. [The participants in the article] all believe that the benefits of responsible GenAI use ultimately outweigh the harm of AI slop. However attentive, mindful human intervention is ultimately required to reap those benefits in the first place. For more information, read the article.
Clarivate Studies How Students Use AI in ProQuest Research Assistant
ProQuest, part of Clarivate, published a blog post discussing a new report on how students use document-centered AI. It states:Much of the public conversation about AI in education centers on the risk that students will use it to avoid reading, outsource thinking or produce work detached from sources. Those concerns point to a related question: what changes when AI is designed to operate within scholarly content rather than around it? A new report from Clarivate, How students are using Chat with the document, examines that question through observed student behavior in ProQuest Research Assistant. More than 470,000 unique users have used the Research Assistant feature on the ProQuest document page, generating nearly 2 million document level interactions. This scale allows for a meaningful examination of how AI affects student engagement with scholarly content. Further, the Chat With the Document feature has been available for more than six months, providing usage patterns and user feedback that reveal how students are interacting with AI. For more information, read the blog post.
Library of Congress Contributes Digitized Collections to America250 Time Capsule, Stored via Synthetic DNA
The Library of Congress shared the following:As part of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations, the Library of Congress will make a trailblazing contribution to the America250 Time Capsule in Philadelphia in July: a tiny metal vial holding synthetic DNA encoded with digital copies from the Library’s collections. … Working with the University of Washington’s Molecular Information Systems Lab, the Library has converted selected digital data into synthesized DNA strands encased in a metal vial about the length of a pencil eraser. … The encasement includes a small chip containing decoding instructions, ensuring the synthetic DNA sequence can be reassembled into its original digital data when America’s Time Capsule is opened in 2276. … Unlike biological DNA, synthetic DNA is manufactured from chemicals and cannot be used to create or modify living cells or organisms. It does, however, leverage the unique storage and data recovery properties of DNA, offering a promising option for long-term preservation of massive amounts of digital data. For more information, read the press release.
EBSCO Information Services Launches Four Magazine Archive Collections
EBSCO Information Services rolled out four new primary source magazine archives that are “designed to help students and researchers expand their work with unique historical and cultural perspectives across science, outdoor life, photography, and recreation.” They are Field & Stream Magazine Archive, Outdoor Life Magazine Archive, Popular Photography Magazine Archive, and Popular Science Magazine Archive.The press release continues, “Consistent with EBSCO’s magazine archives, the new collections are available as a one-time purchase, allowing libraries to maintain ongoing access to this content. Articles and cover pages are fully indexed and advertisements are individually identified, ensuring researchers and readers can quickly and accurately locate the information they seek.” For more information, read the press release.
Wiley Adds AI-Powered Image Integrity Software to Its Research Exchange Publishing Platform
Wiley “integrated Imagetwin’s leading AI-powered image integrity software into Research Exchange, its award-winning research publishing platform. The integration adds sophisticated AI-powered image detection to the 25+ research integrity checks already embedded in Research Exchange, enabling editors and integrity specialists to identify potentially manipulated or fraudulent images before publication.”The press release continues, “Imagetwin has screened over 500,000 manuscripts using a database of over 150 million academic images. Its technology detects a comprehensive range of integrity issues, including image duplication, manipulation, plagiarism, and AI-generated content. Imagetwin brings detection and analysis capabilities to Research Exchange that go beyond what human review can reliably identify—increasingly important as AI makes image manipulation easier and more convincing.” For more information, read the press release.
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Brandi Scardilli
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