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Roadmap for CNI December 2008
Meeting
A Guide to the Fall 2008
Coalition for Networked Information Task Force Meeting
The Fall 2008 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held at the Renaissance
Washington Hotel in Washington, DC on December 8 and 9, 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 8. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will
be followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions.
Tuesday, December 9, 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 8, after which participants can enjoy a wide range of dining
opportunities in the Washington area.
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
I have again this year reserved the opening plenary session to explore
key developments in networked information, discuss progress on the
Coalition's agenda, and highlight selected initiatives from the
2008-2009 Program Plan. The Program Plan will be distributed in
hardcopy 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 2008
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://matc.mellon.org/. The
awards will be presented by Google's Vint Cerf.
The closing plenary, scheduled to start at 2:15PM on Tuesday, will
focus on the report of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) recent
task force on cyberlearning, "Fostering Learning in the Networked
World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge"
(http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf08204).
This task force, chartered jointly by NSF's Office of
Cyberinfrastructure and its Education and Human Resources Directorate,
explored many aspects of the opportunities created by
cyberinfastructure investments to transform teaching and learning at
all levels; these have received little attention compared to the focus
on cyberinfrastructure in support of research.
The plenary will feature a presentation by Professor Christine Borgman
of the University of California Los Angeles, who served as chair of
the task force. Chris is a well known and prominent information
scientist who has worked across a wide range of policy and technical
areas; recently she has been a co-founder of the Center for Embedded
Network Sensing at UCLA, and also authored the book Scholarship in
the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the
Internet (MIT Press, 2007), a detailed look at the evolution of
scholarly communication and scholarly practice in the era of
e-science, which just received the American Society for Information
Science and Technology Book of the Year award.
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 2008-2009
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, we will try to put material from
these sessions on our Web site following the meeting for those who
were unable to attend. I am particularly pleased that we have a
large number of sessions in which the presenters are explicitly
seeking input on next steps from the CNI meeting attendees; these
opportunities for direct involvement in shaping projects that will
often benefit the community at large are a hallmark of CNI
meetings.
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. Initiatives related to the management of large data sets
in repositories are also of great interest this year. Sessions
on topics in these areas include two briefings on national initiatives
related to data management- in Australia and in Canada. An
initiative at Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis is
building a permanent digital repository in partnership with public
policy experts at a nonprofit organization; they will describe their
process and collaborative relationship. At the University of
Rochester, the library is attempting to understand the needs of the
next generation of academics for repository services by studying
graduate students writing dissertations; they will describe their
results and the new authoring and collaboration tools they have
developed as a result of their study.
Recently, Herbert van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, and their colleagues
issued the production version of the specification for the Object
Reuse and Exchange (ORE) protocols developed under a grant from The
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These will be important both in
inter-repository applications and in integrating repositories into
broader scholarly and scientific workflow; we will have a session
describing developments in this area.
Librarians have been rethinking the future of their integrated library
systems (ILS) and, more broadly, their capabilities for connecting
users with a broad array of information resources and services for a
number of years. We will have presentations from a number of
these initiatives. The eXtensible Catalog initiative provides
libraries with new user interfaces and tools, particularly those that
will bring library metadata into Web environments natively. The
Mellon Foundation is funding the Open Library Environment Project to
plan a community-designed open source alternative to the traditional
ILS. A project at the University of Konstanz in Germany has
developed a visual interface for searching multimedia digital
objects. At North Carolina State University, a number of
initiatives have been implemented to improve access to library
collections and services beyond the traditional catalog, for example
through course management system Web sites or via users' mobile
devices.
Sessions on digital library initiatives range from those that focus on
large-scale digitization projects to specialized collections of
interest to researchers, students, and the public. The
HathiTrust is a newly announced digital repository for research
libraries that will bring together content from large-scale
digitization efforts under the principles of long-term archiving
required by research libraries. A number of partners, including
the Internet Archive, are working to establish a digital library that
will capture and store information related to major crises. An
international initiative is working to find innovative ways to provide
access to the literature of biological diversity, focusing on a schema
to expose the rich data inside existing publications. The Roman
de la Rose digital library project is entering a new phase, shifting
from a focus on digitized manuscripts to a new data-centric view to
provide content for e-scholarship in the humanities. The Society
of Architectural Historians is developing a resources archive as a
collaborative effort to build a large repository of images for
architecture-related research and teaching. The American School
of Classical studies at Athens is developing a repository for data
associated with long-term archaeological projects. RLG Programs
has been investigating library, archive, and museum collaboration and
will present findings from their report on the topic as well as
feature initiatives from the Smithsonian and Princeton University that
focus on management of digital assets of a variety of
types.
The promise of interactive publications has been frequently discussed
but has been elusive to achieve. A team from the National
Library of Medicine (NLM), led by NLM's Director, Dr. Donald Lindberg,
will present their initiatives related to interactivity in
publications and its impact on users. Also in the area of
scholarly publication, we will have a discussion of the recently
released report that the Association of Research Libraries
commissioned from Ithaka exploring emerging genres of digital
scholarship, and faculty practices in employing these new genres.
A session by John Wilbanks of the Creative Commons/Science Commons
will look at knowledge representation and scholarly communication, and
ask participants to think about the ways in which technology,
particularly computable graphs, enable us to do research in new ways,
resulting in new types of technical, legal, and social challenges.
We will have strong coverage of digital preservation, including a
presentation of the Data Audit Framework, which can be used by any
organization to identify, locate, describe and assess how they are
managing their research data assets; it was developed by the HATII
group at University of Glasgow and funded through the UK Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC). Two briefings will focus
on aspects of preservation related to Web resources-one on the very
timely issue of preserving US government Web sites and the other on
developing a collection-building model for harvesting and preserving
Web content. We will have a session highlighting the work of a
partnership for preservation-the MetaArchive Cooperative- that now
includes members in the US and the UK. We will also have a talk
on the notion of "effectiveness" in digital preservation,
challenging the participants to analyze the characteristics of digital
preservation and offering a model and strategy for its
implementation. A project developing a multi-institutional open
source platform for distributed replication of archival content,
employing a type of LOCKSS technology, will be described.
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.
CNI's Joan Lippincott will report on how some libraries are offering
content and services configured for mobile devices and suggestions for
launching a planning process in this area. Syracuse University
employed ethnographic methods to study the use of tools and
information access behavior of faculty, students, and librarians and
identified a number of differences that could lead to barriers to
delivering information services. At George Mason University, an
administrative mandate has led to development of a richly featured
portal environment for graduate programs. Project Bamboo, led by
UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, is exploring how shared
technology services for the humanities can enhance research, learning,
and scholarship; CNI participants will be asked to assist with
planning the evolution of this project.
The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative will invite attendees to participate
in an interactive session to identify key challenges in teaching and
learning with information technology. Susan Metros of the
University of Southern California will describe a contingency plan for
offering a general education project, developed by IT staff working
with librarians and faculty, for students who are affected by events
that close a campus for an extended period of time. In a project
that is receiving attention in the national news, the University of
Richmond is developing two student-focused projects that combine
digital information with teaching and learning: one is the
Voting America project, and the other project aggregates the work of
students to produce a large resource related to American history.
The Digital Bridges project, developed by the Columbia Center for New
Media Teaching and Learning, is dedicated to connecting classroom
study to curated digital collections. At the ResearchChannel,
researchers and academics are able to use a collaborative environment,
Research1, that can also assist in fulfilling public outreach
requirements and foster communication among scientists, educators,
students, and the public.
Finally, our colleagues from American University will present their
important work on copyright balance and fair use in networked
learning, including a discussion of some codes of best practices in
fair use developed by various organizations. Ken Klingenstein of
Internet2 will discuss initiatives related to federated identity and
encourage librarians in particular to become involved in this area,
especially in regards to human interface development, privacy
management, and metadata. In what
promises to be an enlightening and entertaining session, Bryan
Alexander will describe how the National Institute for Technology and
Liberal Education (NITLE) is using a Web-based prediction market to
understand emerging trends in teaching with technology.
There is much more, and I invite you to browse the complete
list of breakout sessions and their full abstracts at the CNI Web
site. 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
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