|
Roadmap to the December 2007 CNI Meeting,
Washington DC
A Guide to the Fall 2007
Coalition for Networked Information Task Force Meeting
The Fall 2007 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held at the Renaissance
Washington Hotel in Washington, DC on December 10 and 11, offers a
wide range of presentations that advance and report on CNI's programs,
showcase projects underway at Task Force member institutions, and
highlight important national and international developments.
Here is the "roadmap" to the sessions at the meeting, which
includes both plenary events and an extensive series of breakout
sessions focusing on current developments in networked information.
As always, we have strived to present sessions that reflect
late-breaking developments and also take advantage of our venue in
Washington, DC to provide opportunities to interact with policy makers
and funders.
As usual, the CNI meeting proper is preceded by an optional
orientation session for new attendees - both representatives of new
member organizations and new representatives or alternate delegates
from existing member organizations - at 11:30 AM; guests are also
welcome. Refreshments are available for all at 12:15 PM on
Monday, December 10. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will
be followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions.
Tuesday, December 11, includes additional rounds of parallel breakout
sessions, lunch and the closing keynote, concluding around 3:30 PM.
Along with plenary and breakout sessions, the meeting includes
generous break time for informal networking with colleagues and a
reception which will run till 7:00 PM on the evening of Monday,
December 10, after which participants can enjoy a wide range of dining
opportunities in the Washington area.
In conjunction with our meeting, CNI is co-sponsoring the 3rd
International Digital Curation Conference, which will also be held at
the Renaissance Washington; it opens with a reception on the evening
of December 11 and runs through December 13. Separate, fee
registration is required. Information is at
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2007/.
The CNI meeting agenda is subject to last minute changes, particularly
in the breakout sessions, and you can find the most current
information on our Web site,
www.cni.org, and on the announcements board near the registration
desk at the meeting.
The Plenary Sessions
Following tradition, I have reserved the opening plenary session to
address key developments in networked information, discuss progress on
the Coalition's agenda, and highlight selected initiatives from the
2007-2008 Program Plan. The Program Plan will be distributed
at the meeting (and will be available electronically on the
Coalition's Web site,
www.cni.org around December
10). I look forward to sharing the Coalition's continually
evolving strategy with you, as well as discussing current issues.
The opening plenary will include time for questions and discussion,
and I am eager to hear your comments.
The opening plenary will also include the presentation of the second
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards for Technology Collaboration.
These awards recognize non-profit organizations that have demonstrated
exceptional leadership in the collaborative development of open source
software through the contribution of substantial self-funded
organizational resources. You can find out more about the
awards, and the stellar award jury (which includes several recipients
of CNI's Paul Evan Peters award) at http://rit.mellon.org/awards/. The awards will be presented by Sir
Tim Berners-Lee.
The closing plenary, scheduled to start at 2:15 PM on Tuesday, will be
given by Dr. Timo Hannay, the Publishing Director for Nature.com.
The Nature Publishing Group has been at the forefront of a wide range
of experiments helping to define the future of the scholarly journal
in the digital world; they've worked with new models of peer review,
the accommodation of text mining, issues involving the linkages
between data and articles that are going to be increasingly common in
an e-science environment, and linkages to social software
environments. I'm delighted that Timo can join us to report on
these important experiments, to discuss what has and hasn't worked,
and to share his thinking about the future of the scholarly
communications process.
Highlighted Breakout Sessions
I will not attempt to comprehensively summarize the wealth of breakout
sessions here. However, I want to note particularly some
sessions that have strong connections to the Coalition's 2007-2008
Program Plan and also a few other sessions of special interest,
and to provide some additional context for a few sessions that may be
helpful to attendees in making session choices. We have a packed
agenda of breakout sessions, and as always will try to put material
from these sessions on our Web site following the meeting for those
who were unable to attend.
Work on issues related to institutional repositories,
discipline-related repositories, and management of locally produced
scholarship is becoming more mature and responsive to disciplinary
needs. A number of sessions will report on initiatives related
to the management of data in repositories; these will include a
session describing three inter-related Australian initiatives to
support institutional e-research, one on the eCrystals Federation in
the UK, and one on a data cyberinfrastructure collaboration between
the University of California San Diego Library and the San Diego
Supercomputer Center.
The support of the life sciences in an e-science environment is
particularly demanding in terms of requirements to interconnect
various types of databases with each other and with the literature.
We will feature two sessions in this area. The National Library
of Medicine will report on a project to link a number of genotype and
phenotype databases. A second session focusing on two
biology-related projects will include discussion of a distributed
digital repository of biological data and a biodiversity heritage
library that will, among other things, link literature to taxonomic,
geographic, or other relevant databases.
Another session that will focus on scientific initiatives will be
presented by Lee Dirks of Microsoft Research; he will provide an
overview of his organization's work and invite attendees to influence
the future direction of Microsoft's efforts in this arena.
Other sessions will examine some of the technical implementation
issues related to repositories. Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl
Lagoze, and their colleagues will describe their Mellon-funded OAI-ORE
project to work on cross-repository interoperability, which follows on
from a workshop that CNI co-sponsored last year. The University
of Maryland will discuss the technical challenges of implementing a
Fedora-based digital library repository that includes a number of
object types. We will have a session on the newly constituted
Fedora Commons, which will evolve the Fedora repository framework and
build a new model of community participation.
Two projects will describe collaborative initiatives to build digital
libraries, one in Texas, highlighting a federated search tool, and one
in Memphis, Tennessee, focusing on the use of the digital library in
teaching and learning and in the surrounding community. A
briefing on a project to develop a massive 2D and 3D dataset from
cultural heritage sites in China will be described, and we will be
treated to images from the project. We will also have an update
on the Digital Library Federation's Aquifer initiative, focusing on
their project on American Social History.
A session on use of the Nutch/Lucerne open source tool to generate
search indexes of archival Web content of very large sites, such as
those of national libraries and archives, will be presented by the
Internet Archive.
A variety of challenges raised by the large-scale National Science
Digital Library (NSDL) are being studied at Columbia University, and
we will learn about what they are finding in their examinations of
three separate issues related to NSDL: editorial enhancement of
content, virtual learning worlds, and use of a community sign-on for
identity management.
Use of Shibboleth as authentication and access control in a Texas
federation will be described, and the policy, business practice, and
user experience issues of implementing Shibboleth on five campuses
will also be highlighted.
Recent developments in intellectual property policy and legislation,
including discussion of digital fair use, orphan works, and
e-reserves, along with the work of the Section 108 Study Group
convened by the Library of Congress, will be presented by James Neal
of Columbia University. OCLC will highlight results of a study
of how libraries involved in large-scale digitization efforts are
approaching copyright issues; they will also discuss what they have
found about public domain works in those collections in comparison to
in-copyright titles, and foster dialogue about potential discovery and
delivery services of digital content.
A number of initiatives are examining or implementing new models of
publishing in the digital environment. A researcher from Johns
Hopkins will present a survey and evaluation of various open source
electronic publishing systems such as DPubS, GNU EPrints, Open Journal
Systems, and others. One of the key developers of the Public
Knowledge Project will present an overview of the software's journal
and conference capabilities and plans for future development. A
project at the Rochester Institute of Technology is developing an
application for converting selected wiki content for output into
portable documents.
We will have some interesting sessions on digital preservation,
including one on international perspectives and one on a project
funded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and
Preservation Program, MetaArchive. In addition, a session on the
Global Digital Format Registry will describe some of the technical
infrastructure essential for preservation initiatives.
A number of sessions will explore what types of services today's
information users, seekers, and creators need and how libraries and
information technology providers are innovating to meet those needs.
Indiana University and Indiana University-Purdue University
Indianapolis are collaborating with ChaCha Search, Inc. to offer a new
service designed to integrate machine-based search with skilled human
guides to respond to online queries. The University of
Pennsylvania held a video mashup contest in conjunction with a
university-wide reading of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture; we
will learn about the project and see some of the student videos.
A program at Ohio University employing Internet voice and video to
deliver real-time services in libraries will be described.
Developing new ways of integrating library content and services into
course Web sites or departmental Web sites will be discussed by Oregon
State University and Syracuse University.
Two briefings will report on implementations of enhancements of
library catalogs to include recommender features - one in a German
university scientific library and LibraryThing at San Francisco State
University; a briefing by the State & University Library (Aarhus,
Denmark) will describe the Summa open source search system, a
discovery layer which is separate from the library catalog's business
layer and allows increased flexibility.
Two sessions will describe plans for innovative, technology-intensive
facilities; one at Indiana University will focus on building an
environment with specialized services for faculty and graduate
students; one at George Mason University will offer a range of
services to students and faculty, focusing on the convergence of
information literacy, technology fluency, and media literacy.
CNI works closely with a number of other organizations, and we will
have forums on some important initiatives including a report from the
Association of College and Research Libraries on their efforts to
coordinate the compilation of a research agenda for scholarly
communication and an update on the Modern Language Association's Task
Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, which
includes issues related to digital scholarship. In these
sessions, participants will be encouraged to provide critiques and
feedback on the reports.
Finally, let me mention just three other sessions. Roger
Schonfeld of Ithaka will present the findings of a study of citation
patterns of journal articles that are in digital form versus those
that are available only in print; this study seeks to take a deeper
look into the use of digital collections, focusing on the use of
digital journal collections by scholars since most studies conflate
use statistics that include both researcher and student access.
Ken Klingenstein of Internet2 and the University of Colorado, Boulder
and Lois Brooks of Stanford University will challenge librarians and
information professionals to take a leadership role in helping the
campus community to more effectively deploy emerging collaboration
tools and to address issues, such as privacy, that accompany their
implementation; they are hoping for a lively and thought-provoking
discussion. John Unsworth, of the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, will moderate a panel of representatives from
digital humanities centers, seeking to understand their role and
contribution to e-scholarship in light of the American Council of
Learned Society's report on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and
Social Sciences.
There is much more, and I invite you to browse the complete list of
breakout sessions on the CNI Web site; session abstracts will be
available online by December 5th. In many cases you will find
these abstracts include pointers to reference material that you may
find useful to explore prior to the session, and after the meeting, we
will add material from the actual presentations when it is available
to us.
I look forward to seeing you in Washington, DC this December for what
promises to be another extremely worthwhile meeting. Please
contact me (cliff@cni.org), or Joan Lippincott, CNI's Associate
Director (joan@cni.org) if we can provide you with any additional
information on the meeting.
Clifford Lynch
|