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Roadmap to the Dec 14-15, 2009 CNI Fall
Meeting
A Guide to the Fall 2009
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Fall 2009 CNI membership meeting, to be held at the Renaissance
Washington Hotel in Washington, DC on December 14 and 15, offers a
wide range of presentations that advance and report on CNI's programs,
showcase projects underway at 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 14. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will
be followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions.
Tuesday, December 15, 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 14, 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
Following tradition, I have reserved the opening plenary session to
address key developments in networked information and the landscape of
scholarship, discuss progress on the Coalition's agenda, and highlight
selected initiatives from the 2009-2010 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 14). I look forward to sharing
the Coalition's continually evolving strategy with you, as well as
discussing current issues. The opening plenary will include a
generous amount of time for questions and discussion, and I am eager
to hear your comments.
Professor Bernard Frischer of the University of Virginia will present
the closing keynote session, which will start at 2:15PM on Tuesday.
I have long followed and admired Bernie's pioneering work on the
application of three-dimensional visualization and imaging
technologies to the humanities (you can read his full biography on the
CNI Web site or in the agenda book), and I am delighted that he has
agreed to join us for our Fall meeting. Many of you may be
familiar with the remarkable "Rome Reborn" project, which created
a very detailed reconstruction of the ancient city (including
evidentiary provenance of the presentation); a version of this is now
available through Google Earth, marking a milestone in the novel
dissemination of scholarly work in ways that invite broad and creative
reuse. Bernie, who has recently completed a tour as Director of
the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, has been at
the center of the evolving relationships between technology and
humanistic scholarship, and I think we will all learn a great deal
from his presentation.
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 2009-2010
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 both
institutional and disciplinary needs. This year, we have three
sessions that highlight concerted efforts to develop institutional
strategies for a wide range of digital content; sessions will be led
by Yale University, describing work spanning libraries, archives, and
museums on campus; by Duke and Dartmouth Universities (discussing a
Mellon-funded planning initiative), and by the Library of Congress,
along with New York Public Library, and Harvard. In a more
technical vein, the University of Rochester will highlight
improvements made to their institutional repository software and
related services in order to increase use of the repository by
faculty.
Initiatives as well as policies related to the management, curation
and preservation of data sets in the context of e-research continue to
be key areas of interest for CNI. We will have a presentation on
the two initial projects awarded funding from the National Science
Foundation's DataNet program: DataONE and the Data Conservancy;
while we were able to introduce these at our Spring 2009 meeting, both
projects have made a great deal of progress since then. Also at
the national level, we will have a briefing on the new Board on
Research Data and Information at the National Research Council, and a
discussion of the recently released report from the National Academies
on their research data study, which made recommendations to
institutions concerning data integrity, access, and stewardship.
The Association of Research Libraries will present data from their
recent survey of e-science and data support services in their member
libraries. In the humanities, there is also concerted activity
on data-intensive research. Some exciting projects from the
National Endowment for the Humanities/Department of Energy High
Performance Computing Competition will be featured, and we will also
have a session on the current status of the Bamboo Planning Project,
which is seeking to identify critical elements of institutional and
cross-institutional cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. On a
more technical level, the Inter University Consortium for Political
and Social Research (ICPSR) will present a session on methods for
protecting and distributing confidential research data, which is a
persistent problem in many disciplines. Our colleagues from the
Dutch SURF Foundation will discuss their efforts to understand the
infrastructure needs for "enhanced publications," journal articles
which may be supplemented by data sets or other key research
supplements. This is a philosophically somewhat different
(article-centric) strategy for data stewardship that is receiving
substantial attention as part of several European repository
initiatives.
The production of new knowledge in the digital environment continues
to have an impact on the traditional models we developed in academe
for the dissemination of scholarly content. We will have a
report and a look into the future from the American Council of Learned
Societies' (ACLS) Humanities E-book project, which has made great
strides since its inception ten years ago. At Columbia
University, the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship has
combined forces with the Fordham University Press to create an online
book that encourages continuing interaction between author and
readers. The California Digital Library (CDL) is emphasizing
their capabilities for innovative digital publishing, encouraging
faculty to employ them as publishers.
Sessions on digital library initiatives range from those that focus on
broad questions to multi-national initiatives to tools that enhance
access and use for researchers, students, and the public. Rice
University will report on research into the feasibility of creating a
university library offering primarily digital collections; the
researchers took a broad view and incorporated socio-cultural,
technical, policy, and economics into their analysis. A
colleague from the German science foundation (DFG) will report on a
number of initiatives of the Knowledge Exchange, where her
organization, along with the Dutch SURF Foundation, UK's Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC), and the Denmark Electronic
Research Library have combined to develop an information and
communications technology (ICT) infrastructure for higher education
and research. A number of partners are working on a National
Science Foundation-funded digital library network for Crisis, Tragedy
and Recovery, and they will present an update on topics including
automated text mining, storytelling technologies, and expert
recommendations. With the development of the ARTstor Shared
Shelf Initiative, university partners along with ARTstor and scholarly
societies will be able to combine images created by individuals with
those held by institutions as well as those in the ARTstor collection
through a common software platform.
As digital collections increase in number, size, and complexity, there
is a growing need for new tools for researchers and scholars.
Stanford University will demonstrate the versatile uses of Blacklight,
originally developed at University of Virginia, to provide a library
"discovery layer," serve as a front-end to repositories, or serve as
a catalogers' tool. The University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill and Brigham Young University will showcase tools that enhance the
access to geographically oriented information in digital libraries.
Libraries are also developing tools that enable readers, whether
members of the general public or scholars, to have a role in the
annotation or editing of digital resources; a project from the
National Library of Australia allows readers to provide text
correction and annotation, and one from JSTOR enables community
editing of auction catalogs. A tool from the Internet Archive,
Bookserver, enables content creators to publish catalogs of their
digital works so that customers can find content from many sources
that they may want to read on a variety of devices. NC State
will describe access to mobile content and services via its recently
upgraded mobile Web site and will also describe a mobile pilot project
using geotagging and geolocation to improve discovery and access of
some digitized special collections content. Another session will
feature portals developed for specific inter-institutional scientific
research communities; the portals aim to seamlessly integrate
information from a variety of sources for researchers.
Sustainability is an ongoing challenge, whether for community open
source projects or for operational services that serve disciplinary
scholarly communities. Cornell will discuss the economics of a
community-based sustainability model for the pioneering arXiv preprint
repository. DuraSpace will discuss some exciting new models
being developed to support "solution community" efforts;
prototypes are underway in data curation, preservation and archiving,
and scholars' workbench and small archives. Brigham Young
University will present its work with Millenniata Inc. to develop
write once, read forever disc technology, which offers a very
different economic profile from traditional digital preservation
approaches.
As usual, we strive to bring our members the latest developments in
infrastructural technologies and services. The new Chief
Technology Officer of Internet2 will join us to talk about plans and
architectural choices for the next generation of high-performance
networking for research and education; there are very interesting
connections here to evolving strategies for data curation and
management. Two sessions will describe technologies to enhance
the use of web-based content. In a session on the Interoperable
Annotation Collaboration, Herbert Van de Sompel and Robert Sanderson
of Los Alamos National Laboratory will describe the development of an
interoperable annotation environment that will allow heterogeneous
annotation clients to annotate distributed scholarly collections; this
is a capability that research communities in many disciplines have
been seeking. In a session on Memento, which has received some
recent press coverage, Van de Sompel, Sanderson, and Michael Nelson of
Old Dominion University will propose a framework in which archived web
resources can be reached via the URI of their original, enabling
searchers to quickly reach versions of Web pages for specified
dates.
The digital environment is shaping our use of and attitude towards a
variety of educational resources. The role of gaming in
teaching, research, and libraries of liberal arts colleges and
universities will be explored in a session by Bryan Alexander of the
National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE).
The University of Michigan will describe their analysis, through a
business feasibility study, faculty survey, and interviews, of the
possible adoption of digital textbooks by faculty; they also explored
faculty interest in authorship of alternatives to mainstream
commercial textbooks.
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has been
operating a program in which post-doctoral fellows, drawn primarily
from the humanities, have been immersed in issues related to
libraries, information technology and digital humanities; the leaders
of this program, along with several fellows, will discuss its
implications for the transformation of academic libraries.
Finally, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) will
provide an update on a recent report and a wide variety of initiatives
and also will discuss current grant programs.
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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