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Weekly News Digest
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July 30, 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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Sage Reveals the Papers That Won Its 10-Year Impact Awards
Sage announced the winners of its seventh annual 10-Year Impact Awards, which recognize “three academic papers that have demonstrated enduring influence over the decade since their publication. This year’s awards honor the most-cited articles published in Sage journals in 2015.” The winners are:“Research impact in the social and behavioral sciences unfolds gradually, through complex and long-term processes that conventional metrics can struggle to capture,” says Ziyad Marar, president of global publishing at Sage. “In one attempt to redress that, the 10-Year Impact Awards recognize scholarship whose influence has endured and often grown over time. This year’s addition of policy citation data helps to illustrate another aspect of that influence, showing how research can shape thinking both within and beyond academia, and ultimately benefit society.” For more information, read the press release.
ARL Explores the Loss of Physical Media Ownership in Libraries
Sally Sax, head of collection strategy and partnerships for MacOdrum Library at Carleton University, writes the following in “Consumers Are Worried About the Loss of Physical Media Ownership. Libraries Are Leading the Conversation.” for the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) blog:A lack of digital ownership rights remains a critical barrier to libraries serving their missions as memory institutions. The closest libraries can get to ownership of commercial digital content is a perpetual access license (PAL), and the marketplace may be deciding that PALs are no longer viable from its perspective. In 2022, Wiley removed over 1,300 ebooks from academic library collections; according to Wiley’s website, perpetual access is not an option for subscribed content. In 2025, Clarivate, one of the largest digital content aggregators, announced they would stop offering libraries perpetual access licenses for ebooks and primary-source digital collections. For more information, read the blog post.
Book Riot Exposes the Resources Used by Book Banners
Kelly Jensen writes the following in “The Tools Book Banners Are Using to Target Books in 2026” for Book Riot:People who are banning books have been developing a range of tools to do their work over the last five years. These include review and ratings websites where a volunteer or two read a book, write up a report, and then anyone can use those reports—quotes cherrypicked, interpretation aligned with narrow worldviews, and often, numeric or letter grade ratings that they’ve made up to create meaning—to start the challenge process. This is what Moms for Liberty did with their now-defunct BookLooks; it’s what the groups behind RatedBooks do, which subsumed BookLooks’ reviews upon its closure. It’s lazy and disingenuous, and it’s exactly the kind of plagiarism that students in school would be failed for doing. Yet there are plenty of library and school boards, as well as legislators, who think this is good enough to deny young people access to books. For more information, read the article.
TechCrunch Shares How Libraries Are Helping People Think Critically About AI
Amanda Silberling writes the following in “Librarians Are Hosting Viral ‘Avoiding AI’ Workshops for People Who Are Fed Up With Big Tech” for TechCrunch:AI naysayers know that this technology is far broader than just chatbots and deepfake apps. [Maine librarian Hannah] Cyrus mentioned how useful optical character recognition is for scanning old documents at the library. But for her and the people who go to her workshops, the anti-AI movement isn’t about rejecting technology altogether so much as it is about advocating for more control, agency, and freedom in how people use technology. For more information, read the article.
The Scholarly Kitchen Looks at the Types of OA Business Models
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, founder and principal of Librarian in the Loop, LLC, writes the following in “Categorizing Open Access Business Models” for The Scholarly Kitchen:In my view, models for funding open access journal article publishing can be sorted into three categories, organized by who pays and what they pay for: transactional, collective action, and subvention. These categories do not describe the ‘color’ of the resulting article—all of them produce a ‘gold’ article, i.e., the version of record is open on the publisher platform—but the financial mechanism that funds it. Sorting the models this way does not make them simpler than they are. The complexity is worth tracking. But it helps to clarify what is actually different from one arrangement to the next, and therefore what is at stake when a library or a publisher chooses among them. For more information, read the blog post.
Indeed Formalizes Its Ownership of Glassdoor
Siobhan Fagan writes the following in “Glassdoor’s Long Merger With Indeed Is Finally Done” for Reworked: Indeed began notifying customers … that Glassdoor is officially part of Indeed, Inc. as of July 1. The customer email said the Glassdoor brand and product still exist, and the single sign-on introduced earlier this year will continue to work across both sites. … July 1 just formalized the inevitable. Recruit acquired Indeed in October 2012 and Glassdoor in June 2018, keeping them as separate brands with separate leadership. But the businesses have been converging for years: a 2020 partnership let employers post to both sites through Indeed’s ad products, bundled the two companies’ employer-branding tools and pooled Glassdoor and Indeed reviews inside a single employer dashboard. For more information, read the news item.
Popular Children's TV Brands Join the Hoopla Digital SeasonPass Program
Hoopla Digital partnered with Moonbug “to expand access to family friendly entertainment through five new SeasonPasses featuring globally recognized children’s brands including CoComelon, Blippi and other popular Moonbug franchises.” SeasonPasses bundle a season of TV into one borrow for 7 days.“As demand for streaming-first, family-friendly programming grows, partnerships with leading children’s entertainment companies like Moonbug help libraries keep pace with evolving patron expectations,” says Cat Zappa, VP of digital acquisitions at Hoopla Digital. “We’re thrilled to expand Hoopla’s children’s content offerings of over 320,000 titles with a partner whose globally recognized brands resonate with families around the world.” For more information, read the press release.
Ithaka S+R Explores Challenging Questions About AI in Higher Education
Managing director Martin Kurzweil writes the following in “How AI Is Reshaping the Value of Higher Education: A New Issue Brief,” a blog post for Ithaka S+R:AI touches all of the basic assumptions that underlie how we think about the value of postsecondary education and academic research: what students need to learn, how they learn, how institutions operate, and how universities contribute to the production and dissemination of knowledge. The immediate questions it raises are urgent and real. Students need AI literacy and training on work-relevant AI tools. Faculty need to rethink assignments and assessment. Institutions are trying to understand how AI improves (or complicates) operational workflows. Researchers need to understand how AI will affect methods, workflows, funding, and infrastructure. Libraries and publishers need to manage new tools for discovery, access, rights, and trust. For more information, read the blog post.
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Brandi Scardilli
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