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Roadmap for Spring CNI Meeting, April 7-8, 2008,
Minneapol
A Guide to the Spring 2008
Coalition for Networked Information Task Force Meeting
The Spring 2008 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held at the Hyatt
Regency Hotel in Minneapolis, Minnesota on April 7 and 8 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 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, April 7. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be
followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday,
April 8, 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 until 7:15 PM on the evening of Monday, April 7, after
which participants can enjoy a free evening in Minneapolis.
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
The Opening Plenary: The Paul Even Peters Award Presentation and
Lecture
I am delighted that Dan Atkins, Director of the United States National
Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure and Professor of
Information, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science at the
University of Michigan, will receive the Paul Evan Peters Award during
the opening plenary Session on Monday, April 7.
The Paul Evan Peters award recognizes a career of contributions to
scholarship and intellectual productivity at the highest level; Dan's
work represents just such a level of achievement and contribution, and
is notable as well for its diversity. Dan served as founding
Dean for the School of Information at the University of Michigan; he
did fundamental and important work in digital libraries and in
computer supported scientific collaboration environments
(co-laboratories), and, earlier in his career, on high performance
computing and computer assisted tomography.
But Dan is best known to many as the chair of the NSF-chartered
committee that wrote the landmark report Revolutionizing Science
and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure (better known as the
"Atkins Report") and for his recent stint as Director of the
National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastucture, where he
has worked tirelessly to translate the report's vision into
practice.
To me, Dan's work has two particularly unusual and wonderful
characteristics. It connects technology developments with social
systems and practices in particularly rich ways. And it involves
"thought leadership" - it frames discussions and developments, it
sets agendas, it contextualizes systems and institutions within broad
national and international needs, priorities and opportunities.
It makes us see new possibilities.
More recently, he has been thinking deeply about the future of higher
education and the roles that technology might play in that future, and
about developments such as open learning environments. In his
Paul Evan Peters lecture, Leadership in the Age of
Cyberinfrastructure-enabled Discovery and Learning, Dan will both
reflect on current developments and explore these ideas.
This will be the fifth time that the Paul Evan Peters award has been
presented; the award was created by the Association of Research
Libraries, CNI and EDUCAUSE to honor the memory and contributions of
CNI's founding executive director following his untimely death.
Dan Atkins joins previous recipients Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf,
Brewster Kahle and Paul Ginsparg.
Closing Plenary
Our closing plenary speaker will be Tara McPherson, who will use her
work on the international electronic journal Vectors as a point
of departure for a wide-reaching inquiry into the nature of scholarly
publishing and scholarly communication in a networked, multimedia
environment, focusing primarily on the humanities. This will
include consideration not just of the system of scholarly
communication, but of the changing nature of the actual scholarship -
the evolving nature of argument, of engagement, of experience of the
work. This moves us far beyond the simple extrapolation of
printed works that characterizes the vast majority of digital
publication today. If you have not seen Vectors
(www.vectorsjournal.org), it is well worth some time in advance of
Tara's talk - it's a unique and enormously rich exploration of
possible futures for scholarly communication. Those already
familiar with Vectors will have some sense of the provocative
exploration we can expect in this plenary session.
Tara McPherson is a faculty member at the School of Cinematic Arts at
the University of Southern California; she is an award-winning author
who has written widely on issues involving culture, gender, race,
representation, and media and the complex ways in which these
interconnect. Recently, she edited the anthology Digital
Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, a volume in the MacArthur
Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning being published by the
MIT press.
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. I do realize that
choosing among so many interesting concurrent sessions can be
frustrating, and as always we will try to put material from the
breakout sessions on our Web site following the meeting.
Development of cyberinfrastructure, whether high performance
networking or tools for researchers, has been an important focus of
CNI's agenda over the past several years. Tim Lance, President
of NYSERNet, Inc., and a member of CNI's Steering Committee will
represent the Internet2 community and seek input from CNI attendees as
part of a community-driven strategic planning process for a national
vision and priorities for advanced networking as a key component of
this evolving cyberinfrastucture.
At a disciplinary (actually, interdisciplinary) level, we will have a
session on nanoHUB, a service that provides access to simulation tools
for research and education via the Open Science Grid and TeraGrid;
this important project is bringing tools to the classroom in science
and engineering.
At the institutional level, a panel from the University of Minnesota
will discuss their assessment of cyberinfrastructure needs of
researchers at their university. At Johns Hopkins, a team is
working with data from the National Virtual Observatory as well as
publications related to the data in a Fedora-based repository.
Their session will describe the use of the Open Archives Initiative
(OAI)-Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) to create an aggregation that
will assist researchers in identifying interrelated sources of
information in this domain.
In other work related to repositories, a session from Rice University
will highlight their efforts to stream audio and video from their
institutional repository. Bucknell University will describe how
they jump-started an institutional repository in a two- month period.
A session from the National Library of New Zealand will describe an
international software development effort for a trusted, national
digital repository for cultural heritage objects.
The CLOCKSS project at Stanford University, which oversees a large,
decentralized repository of scholarly e-content, will describe how
they managed their first case of moving a discontinued journal from a
dark archive to open access, addressing both policy and technical
issues.
A number of sessions will focus on cyberinfrastructure for the
humanities, including a panel on the role of Humanities Centers in the
digital arena; the session will build on a previous session on this
topic at the fall CNI meeting. Developers of a new
multi-institutional, interdisciplinary initiative called Bamboo, will
present their vision for the project which will map out scholarly
practices and common technology challenges across humanities
disciplines. Another briefing, from Cornell University, will
examine disciplinary work practices and assumptions that scholars
bring to interdisciplinary work.
A briefing will highlight a Civil Rights digital library that contains
materials in many formats and includes curricular support materials,
and another session will describe the evolution of a state authors
project, in this case "Alabama Authors" to management via a wiki.
The work of a Mellon-funded initiative, the Persepolis Fortification
Archive, will be described; this project is making a number of
variations of scans of clay tablets and fragments available to users,
and raises important policy issues related to ownership and
preservation of cultural heritage.
There are several developments related to new approaches to the
scholarly communication system and publishing that will be explored in
a variety of briefings. CNI sponsored a workshop on authors,
identity management and the scholarly communication system in February
of this year. Our intention was to begin efforts to understand,
connect, and where appropriate help to coordinate a range of
developments related to authorial identity and name authority in the
digital environment. I will report on the issues that surfaced
and some proposed first steps. In a related session, Thomson
Scientific representatives will describe their ResearcherID system
that gives researchers the ability to create a unique, persistent
identity and profile for their research output. The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation is funding the MESUR project, and we will have a
session on its investigation into mapping a very large reference data
set of usage of scholarly information; the purpose is to explore new
mechanisms for usage-based scholarly evaluation metrics. Two
sessions will explore semantic web technologies to enhance use of
scholarly content: Elsevier's work in bioinformatics will be
described, and we will have an update from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology's SIMILE project, which is developing tools for a
spectrum of data management.
Three briefings will focus on new institutional publishing
initiatives: the DPubS open source digital publishing system,
developed by Cornell and Pennsylvania State University, the Open
Publishing Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which is
focusing on Web 2.0 applications for print on demand, and an overview
of publishing services in ARL libraries.
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.
Delivering new types of services in technology-enabled physical spaces
is an important aspect of many institutions' engagement with students
and their learning. CNI's Joan Lippincott will explore trends in
new types of computer labs and other facilities such as learning
centers and invite discussion of campus strategic planning issues
related to informal, technology-enabled spaces. The University
of Tennessee will describe how the development of their Commons
provided a platform for a transformational reorganization of the
library. The University of Louisville will discuss collaborative
initiatives with campus partners in their Learning Commons.
Developing services for users of mobile devices is an emerging area on
many campuses, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and
the University of California, Merced, will discuss the opportunities
for libraries and the challenges they face in addressing this issue.
McMaster University librarians, who won an Association of College and
Research Libraries award for excellence in academic libraries, will
describe their role in supporting learning in a 2.0 environment.
We will have a presentation from the Federation of American Scientists
discussing their virtual world initiative, which intends to leverage
the capabilities of these environments for scholarly inquiry and
encompasses some important emerging questions about standards and
interoperability.
New tools to enhance user services will be the theme of several
briefings. Twine, an accessible semantic tagging solution, will
be showcased by Sarah Miller from Illinois Wesleyan University, who
was interviewed by the New York Times on her work in this
arena. Speakers from Mannheim University will describe their
work, supported by the German national science foundation, to develop
Web 2.0 services for their library users. The beta
implementation of OCLC's WorldCat Local at the University of
Washington will be the focus of another session.
Many campuses are working to develop more coherent information systems
and better tools for their user communities. At Rutgers, the
library is developing an open source software release platform, and
they will discuss policies and procedures they have created.
Three sessions will focus on collaborations between and among campus
partners, including management of Web content at the University of
California, Irvine, the development of services in the University of
Minnesota's my portal, and Wesleyan University's development of a
unified data storage system.
Finally, we will have two sessions in which speakers will discuss
pressing national policy issues. The recently implemented
National Institutes of Health policy on open access is a development
that has implications for researchers, and campus offices of research
and libraries are assisting their communities in implementing the
requirements of the new policy. Speakers from the University of
Nebraska and the University of Minnesota will describe their
institutions' responses to the policy and Karla Hahn from the
Association of Research Libraries will provide an overview of the new
policy. EDUCAUSE will provide an update on key networking policy
issues, focusing on late-breaking areas of concern to the higher
education community.
There is much more, and I invite you to browse the complete list of
breakout sessions; their full abstracts will be available at the CNI
Web site by March 31st. 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 Minneapolis this April 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
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