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Weekly News Digest
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August 27, 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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Hoopla Digital Introduces TED BingePasses
Hoopla Digital partnered with TED to include its short-form, expert-led talks and animated educational lessons in five new BingePasses: The BingePasses provide 7 days of free, on-demand access to TED content. New presentations for the TED Talks BingePass will be updated quarterly; there are currently 200 presentations available. The TED-Ed BingePasses offer hundreds of 5–10-minute animated videos from educators paired with subject matter experts. “Hoopla is always looking to expand our educational video catalog and family-friendly content, and this partnership allows us to provide equitable access to TED’s enriching content for library patrons and their families to explore together,” says Cat Zappa, Hoopla Digital’s VP of digital acquisitions. For more information, read the press release.
OverDrive Hires New CTO to Help the Company Expand and Evolve
OverDrive appointed Liz Carrasco as its new CTO. “With more than two decades of senior leadership experience at some of the world’s largest digital media platforms, Carrasco brings deep technical expertise in personalization and streaming at scale to the technology teams behind Libby, Kanopy, and Sora,” the company shares. “In this role, Carrasco will lead OverDrive’s global technology strategy and engineering organization as the company continues to expand and evolve its digital content platforms.” For more information, read the blog post/press release.
AP Shares How Schools Are Approaching AI Literacy
Jocelyn Gecker and Russ Bynum write the following in “Schools Are Starting to Teach AI Literacy. For Many, That Means Helping Kids See Chatbots’ Flaws” for the Associated Press (AP): After initially trying to ban AI use, a growing number of U.S. public schools are trying a new strategy: encouraging classroom experimentation, partly so students can see its shortcomings, including generative AI’s notorious tendency to ‘hallucinate,’ or fabricate information. AI literacy has become a buzzword of this back-to-school season as educators try to strike a balance between equipping students with the skills they need for an AI-driven future while preventing them from outsourcing their thinking to chatbots. For more information, read the article.
Ars Technica Digs Into Amazon’s Use of Rare Books to Train AI
Ashley Belanger writes the following in “Hidden Airtag Reveals Amazon Is Trashing Rare Books to Train AI” for Ars Technica:For the past year or so, booksellers have suspected that AI firms are buying up huge lots of rare books, then destroying them after scanning them to train AI. But this was hard to prove until now, as 404 Media reports that an Airtag hidden in a rare book shows that at least one tech giant, in the race to advance its frontier models, is behind some of the bulk orders: Amazon. … [T]raining models on text from rare books that are difficult to find would seemingly offer an advantage for Amazon, especially since rivals like Anthropic and xAI have publicly stated that they are not training on rare or antique books. For more information, read the article.
Stockholm Schools Implement Library Software From Systematic
Systematic shared the following:Like many other European countries, Sweden is grappling with declining reading skills among children and young people. In response, a new law came into force on 1 July 2025 requiring all Swedish schools to provide a staffed school library with personnel who can actively support pupils. While Sweden already had requirements around school libraries, the new law tightens those rules considerably, with a specific focus on staffing and active library provision. But a staffed library also needs a strong library system. The Danish software company Systematic has just won the tender to supply a new library system to all of Stockholm’s schools. The existing system, Book-IT, which has been in use for over two decades, is being replaced by Cicero—a modern, web-based solution already used by more than 500 public and school libraries across Sweden, as well as a large number of libraries elsewhere in the Nordic region and in Germany. For more information, read the news item.
Psychology Today Examines Where AI Fits Into Historical Tech Fears
Robert Bartholomew writes the following in “AI Hysteria: Is the Sky Really Falling?” for Psychology Today:Job-loss fears once aimed at calculators and sewing machines have resurfaced as warnings that AI will replace entire professions overnight. The biological dread once projected onto radio waves and television sets has reappeared as concern in the press that chatbots are inducing ‘AI psychosis.’ … None of this means every concern about AI is unfounded. There are legitimate questions about labor markets, misinformation, and safety testing that deserve serious engagement. But the shape of the fear, its speed, its intensity, its tendency to outrun the evidence, is exactly the shape every transformative technology has produced before it. We have seen this story many times. Only the technology changes. For more information, read the article.
CNN Reports Results of TikTok Child Privacy Case Settlement
Ramishah Maruf writes the following in “Justice Department Reaches $400 Million Settlement With TikTok Over Child Privacy Case” for CNN:TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, reached a $400 million settlement with the US Justice Department over children’s privacy litigation … , one of the largest amounts yet for a case of this kind. The Justice Department first sued TikTok in 2024, claiming the app failed to stop children from joining the app and unlawfully collected their personal data. That violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the Justice Department said. It’s the latest settlement in an onslaught of lawsuits and scrutiny against major tech companies and social media platforms, alleging harm to children. For more information, read the article.
JSTOR Expands Its Publisher Collections Program
JSTOR announced that its Publisher Collections will expand to 36 publishers in January 2027. It will add 14 presses and renew the 22 that joined when the program launched this past January. “Library participation is also growing with a wide range of institutions in 10 countries participating, from community colleges and small private undergraduate institutions to large public universities,” JSTOR shares. “Developed in partnership with academic libraries and publishers, Publisher Collections is a Books at JSTOR model that offers a streamlined way to acquire and access complete publisher-specific sets from trusted academic publishers. It offers a perpetual JSTOR license to current year title sets from a publisher, access to all of the publishers’ backlist titles on JSTOR for active participants, and an equitable tiered fee structure that has been set by each publisher.” For more information, read the news item.
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Brandi Scardilli
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