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Roadmap to the Spring 2009 CNI Member Meeting,
April 6-7,
A Guide to the Spring 2009
Coalition for Networked Information Task Force Meeting
The Spring 2009 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held at the Hyatt
Regency Hotel in Minneapolis, Minnesota on April 6 and 7, 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 customary "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 6. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be
followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday,
April 7, 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 6, 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
We will open the meeting with a plenary address from David S. H.
Rosenthal exploring sustainable approaches to format obsolescence in
digital preservation. David, who is well known to our community
for his pioneering work in partnership with Vicky Reich on the LOCKSS
("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") preservation system, has
had a distinguished career as an engineer at Carnegie Mellon, Sun
Microsystems, Nvidia, Vitria, and Stanford University. David has
been doing some very deep thinking in the last few years about the
interactions between the evolution of information technology over time
and the social, technical, and economic factors that enable digital
preservation, particularly at very large scale. He will look at
changing fundamental understandings of threats and challenges in
digital preservation starting from Jeff Rothenberg's 1995
Scientific American article "Ensuring the Longevity of
Digital Documents" and moving onwards to the present and the
future, with emphasis on the emerging recognition that economic and
social sustainability may well be the overarching long-term barrier.
I have been lucky enough to have a preview of some of this material
and I believe that it will change the way many of us are thinking
about the digital preservation challenge.
David and Vicky will also have a follow-on breakout on Tuesday where
they will connect some of this thinking more explicitly to recent
failures in the financial and economic system and draw lessons for the
future development of preservation strategies.
Our closing plenary on Tuesday afternoon will be devoted to
introducing the two pending US National Science Foundation (NSF)
DataNet grants for 2009 (it is expected there will be two or three
more in 2010); while these awards were approved by the National
Science Board in December 2008, I believe that this will be the first
major public presentation of the projects. DataNet is a
large-scale, $100 million program being run by the Office of
Cyberinfrastructure at NSF intended to build capability in scientific
and scholarly data curation, management and reuse through the
development of collaborative, five year, multi-institutional
programs. One DataNet project, called the Data Conservancy, is
led by Johns Hopkins University and will be described by Sayeed
Choudhury, Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs and Director of
the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries.
The second is based at the University of New Mexico under the
direction of William Michener; Patricia Cruse, Director of Digital
Preservation at the California Digital Library, one of the key
collaborating institutions, will discuss this project. Both
Sayeed and Patricia are long time leaders within our community.
DataNet projects are going to be very important in helping us to
understand and meet the challenges that e-science and e-research are
rapidly presenting for our institutions and for the future of
scholarship broadly, and also in establishing the foundations of
inter-institutional collaborations that may help us to take collective
actions in data stewardship.
Highlighted Breakout Sessions
I will not attempt a comprehensive summary of breakout sessions here;
we offer a great wealth and diversity of material. 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. 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.
The management of large-scale data sets in e-research has been a key
theme for CNI's program in recent years. One of our project
briefing sessions will describe how the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) Libraries has been building a program to not only
manage and curate large data sets for their researchers, but also to
provide expertise and outreach to support their faculty's scholarship
and to build partnerships with these faculty. Archeology is a
discipline where there has been growing interest in digital
documentation of scholarship recently. The digital library of
the American School for Classical Studies in Athens has developed a
system for the management for archaeological data that supports
semantic networking.
The use of the scholarly literature continues to evolve. Some
scholars are using data-mining and other techniques on large
publication sets such as JSTOR, which is supporting such use and
providing a site, "Showcase," where it brings together many of its
advanced technology initiatives. This is an area of growing
interest to many researchers, one where traditional publishers and
aggregators have had difficulty structuring appropriate technical and
licensing arrangements to facilitate such text mining, and JSTOR is
trying to pioneer on several fronts here. Addressing the need
for standard ways of citing data obtained through large, publicly
available datasets is becoming a more pressing concern, and both
producers and users of data have an interest in developing
straightforward and viable systems. A project funded by the
German Research Foundation (DFG) is examining potential solutions and
will report on their progress.
In another, discipline-specific example of methods to link literature
with information resources, Cornell librarians are working with
faculty to develop a system, using OpenURL, to link citations in
Classical literature with the many digital resources and services
currently available in the Classics field.
Last year, CNI sponsored a workshop on authors, identity management
and the scholarly communication system with the intention of
understanding, connecting, and, where appropriate, helping to
coordinate a range of developments related to authorial identity and
name authority in the digital environment. As a follow-on to
this conversation, Thomson Reuters will provide an update after their
first year of experience with their ResearcherID system, which gives
researchers the ability to create a unique, persistent identity and
profile for their research output, and to use this tool to
disambiguate citations to their work.
Following up on another thread from the CNI workshop, I'm very pleased
we will have a report on a project called "People of the Founding
Era," which is developing tools that will help structure, record and
share prosopographical information related to people represented in
scholarly digital editions so that researchers may more easily
explore, for example, groups such as farmers or slaves, and also to
allow the scholars constructing such editions to more effectively
build on each other's work.
Finally, closer to traditional identity management and authorization
concerns, we will be hosting a discussion on a number of issues
related to the InCommon Federation and the development of
infrastructure to support inter-institutional collaboration and
resource sharing.
We'll have several sessions focused on innovative technologies in a
digital library design setting. In a project at the University
of Kentucky, in partnership with the Kentuckiana Digital Library, they
are designing a system to enable users to search audio files by word
and then link to the exact spot on the audio where the word(s)
occurs. The system employs a process of digital preparation that
has an interface designed to mimic a video game. Another session
will outline the goals and developments related to the adoption of the
JPEG 2000 standard for image format.
Several sessions will explore software and workflow solutions that may
have broad applicability. The Open Library Environment (OLE)
project will provide an update on their work to develop a
community-designed, open source alternative to libraries' integrated
library systems. At a more specialized level, Indiana
University, in partnership with IBM, developed a digital library
system for music that they hope to provide as open source software
with additional partnerships from the community. At Northwestern
University, they have developed a software project to create an
automated workflow to link its book scanner to both the online public
access catalog (OPAC) and the institutional repository.
Sessions that reflect on lessons from major digital library projects
and critically examine efforts as they reach new stages or completion
are an important part of CNI's meetings. This spring, we will
have an opportunity to learn from Katherine Kott, leader of the
Digital Library Federation's Aquifer project, as she will reflect on
the collaborative initiative and draw conclusions that should benefit
many other efforts.
Institutional repository services - and indeed repository services
more broadly - continue to mature. I'll host a session that will
discuss the current state of play for institutional repositories
broadly, including some coverage of a recent international meeting to
map out strategies for networks of institutional repositories going
forward. OCLC Programs and Research will share their
perspectives on next steps for repository services based on some of
their ongoing research. We will learn about the current status
of DuraSpace, a potential service that would be developed jointly by
the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons to overlay storage systems
such as commerical storage "clouds" with additional functionality
suitable for repository and preservation applications. A session
by Rice University will provide their current thinking on how to
structure partnership relationships in building repositories with
collaborators outside of the institution. And a session by Duke
University will focus on the organizational and technical
infrastructure they have developed to manage more than 30 distinct
collections of digital content and the tools that they believe could
be useful to the community at large.
A number of sessions will explore what types of environments and
services today's information users, seekers, and creators need and how
libraries and information technology providers are innovating to meet
those needs. As a result of the difficult economic climate, many
universities and colleges are postponing renovation and building
projects. CNI's Joan Lippincott will give some suggestions about
strategies institutions can employ to improve facilities and services
while waiting for major funding to become available. The
University of Alabama will describe how the repurposing of some
library space provided a platform for collaboration with other campus
units.
We have seen an explosion of social networking and recommender systems
and now some innovative services are emerging that take these
technologies into academic, research and cultural settings.
ARTstor is finding new ways to enhance the value of its collections
and services. Recently, they released their Associated Images
feature that uses collaborative filtering to anonymously mine user
preference data. In their CNI session, ARTstor representatives
will describe the choices they made in developing their software
features and will encourage discussion by participants of how to
provide particularly meaningful results to user communities. As
another example of collaborative filtering technologies, the Ex Libris
Group will report on its bX initiative, which leverages information
gathered by link resolvers to recommend other resources of potential
interest to users who make initial queries.
I think one of the most exciting areas today is the linkage between
social networking systems, collections and exhibitions, and the
practices of description, curation and contextualization. One of
the best examples of this is the wonderful Flickr Commons program as a
forum for such interactions, and I am delighted that the Library of
Congress will be able to report on its project mounting collections of
photographs in the Commons; this project has been unusually well
studied and documented, and we can learn a great deal from their
analysis.
A key technical underpinning for many kinds of social and scholarly
interaction has been large-scale, cross-site annotation systems;
progress on widely adopted and robust systems in this area has long
been problematic. A late-breaking session led by Tim Cole will
describe the plans for such a project, which has just received funding
from The Andrew W. Mellon foundation.
As an outcome of a series of Mellon Foundation-sponsored summer
workshops on scholarly communication, the University of Minnesota is
creating a virtual research community site for the field of bioethics
and related fields, called EthicShare. They will be exploring
the capability of social networking tools and virtual communities in
facilitating collaborative research and the role that libraries should
play in providing support for these virtual organizations. As
yet another example of applying social networking tools, ProQuest has
developed "GradShare" to provide a virtual space where graduate
students can share information about challenges they face; the site
has been piloted with nine universities.
Many institutions are implementing strategies to capture and
distribute reusable teaching and learning content; Northwestern
University will describe their goals and how they are realized in
their Media Space service. At Carleton College, a group carried
out a research study to better understand the support for visual
materials needed in the teaching and learning program; they learned
about faculty concerns, types of curricular support needed by students
and faculty, and student preferences for study spaces.
We face new leadership challenges in today's environment, and
information technology and library leaders are rethinking their roles
and the ways they need to manage within the university. We will
have two sessions that will explore leadership themes - a team from
University of Minnesota will share a case study of the relationship of
their centralized Office of Information Technology with other units
across campus, emphasizing such issues as developing shared goals,
balance of power, and realities of cross-functional work. A
group of future leaders of research libraries will offer a session in
which they identify key issues for the transformation of university
libraries and report on a survey of their peers, examining their
perceptions of changing user needs, organizational structures, and the
need for forging new relationships within and beyond the campus.
Kevin Guthrie of Ithaka will provide an update on the realignment of
Ithaka, JSTOR, and Aluka and the implications for the community.
We will have a session on the Council on Library and Information
Resources (CLIR) Hidden Collections project, a large-scale national
initiative to provide greater visibility to the contents of previously
uncataloged special collections and archival resources funded by the
Mellon Foundation.
Finally, I have invited members of the program team at GENI, the
NSF-funded Global Environment for Network Innovations, to join us to
present an update on this major program intended to create the next
generation of networking research test bed. GENI, currently in a
design and prototyping phase, promises to play an important role in
the development of new protocols, distributed architectures and
network based services. I'd invite you to think creatively about how
GENI might be used for research in next-generation networked
information applications.
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 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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