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Roadmap to the Spring 2101 CNI Member Meeting,
April 12-13
A Guide to the Spring 2010
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Spring 2010 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Waterfront
Marriott Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland on April 12 and 13, offers a
wide range of presentations that advance and report on CNI's programs,
showcase projects underway at CNI 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 12. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be
followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday,
April 13, 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 12, after
which participants can enjoy a free evening in Baltimore.
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 announcements board will also have information about wireless
access in the meeting room areas.
The Plenary Sessions
We will open the meeting with a plenary address that examines the
implementation issues that arise from open access mandates or
policies, and the ways in which different institutions are approaching
these challenges. These open access mandates or policies may
arise from institutional decisions such as faculty senate resolutions
at school or university-wide levels, or from conditions imposed by
public funding agencies such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health
or by private foundations; they call for faculty publications to be
made openly available through various mechanisms and subject to
various embargo periods or other limitations. The roles of
individual faculty, of libraries, and of publishers in meeting these
obligations are still very much in flux, as are the specifics of the
obligations imposed from various sources. We'll hear from
representatives from Harvard University (a pioneer adopter of
faculty-driven policy on a school-by-school basis), the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (a pioneer adopter at an institutional level),
and the University of Kansas (the first public university in the US to
adopt an instructional mandate), as well as from the National Center
for Atmospheric Research, the first major laboratory in the US to
adopt such a policy.
There's been a great deal of discussion about the pros and cons of
various approaches to open access from a policy perspective; the
questions of practical implementation, which will be our focus here,
are vital both from an operational perspective at CNI member
institutions and because we need to understand them in order to inform
more effective future policy development. I'll be moderating
this plenary panel, and I think we will all learn a great deal from
it.
Our closing plenary on Tuesday afternoon will be by Dr. Liz Lyon, the
Director of UKLON at the University of Bath. Also the Associate
Director of the JISC-funded Digital Curation Centre hosted at the
University of Edinburgh, Liz has been deeply involved in
cyberinfrastructure and e-research, data curation, and digital
libraries both in the UK and internationally, and she has authored
several highly influential major studies of developments in these
areas, most recently the 2009 report Open Science at Web Scale
(available online at
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/opensciencerpt.aspx),
which she will use as a point of departure for her plenary
presentation. Liz, who has a doctorate in biochemistry, offers
us a particularly strong understanding of the ways in which the
practices and norms of science are evolving (both in traditional
venues and through novel developments like the re-emergence of
"citizen science") and the implications of this evolution for
research universities. Her presentation should be very helpful
in identifying leading-edge experiments, developments and trends that
CNI member institutions will want to continue to track
carefully.
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 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. 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, and sessions at this meeting
explore the progress that is being made in many areas. One
session will highlight work at Johns Hopkins University on the capture
and curation of data along the publication path; they are paired with
a project that is part of a large initiative in the Netherlands to
explore the relationship of datasets to article publication. The
Dutch project features a publishing and archival infrastructure for
the enhanced publication (articles plus data, photos, drawings, etc.)
of an archaeology journal. Another session will describe
standards-related work: a National Information Standards
Organization (NISO) representative and representatives from the
DataCite project will discuss developing standards and best practices
for article supplemental materials, such as datasets. This is
emerging is a central issue for scholarly publishers, particularly in
the sciences, and work is taking place at both the national and
international levels. Another presentation will feature a
humanities e-research project that entails the amalgamation and
interoperability of rich data related to a Hellenic and pre-Hellenic
sanctuary; while it's a separate project, it connects strongly to
ideas and themes from Bernard Frischer's plenary presentation at the
last CNI meeting (video of this is linked from the CNI Web site).
The meeting will present a wide variety of perspectives and projects
related to changes in scholarly communication and the role of
libraries and information technology in providing infrastructure and
services to support innovation. Three presentations will feature
research on faculty attitudes and practices. The first reports
on the University of California, Berkeley Center for the Study of
Higher Education's massive Mellon-funded study of faculty's views of
the research and publication process. A second presents Ithaka's
most recent survey of faculty's attitudes to digital technologies and
resources in their roles as authors, teachers, and researchers, and
explores how these attitudes have shifted across almost a decade of
such surveys. In addition, a study by OCLC and the UK Research
Information Network focuses on the research life cycle and identifies
patterns, gaps, and issues from the researchers' point of view.
In support of research, the VIVO project, begun at Cornell and now
being scaled up through a multi-institutional NIH-funded initiative,
serves as a social networking platform for researchers designed to
encourage multi-disciplinary collaborations.
In order to make more parts of its local collection available to
faculty in digital form, Columbia University has begun a program to
more directly involve curators in the process of migrating these
collections to digital form; they will describe their strategy, tools,
and services. Several presenters will discuss the Big Digital
Machine, which intends to aggregate and integrate a set of
capabilities to provide universities with the ability to manage
scholarly output.
We'll have a number of sessions focused on innovative technologies and
tools in digital library environments. In a joint session, the
Smithsonian and the National Library of Australia will present new
tools for the discovery process. An innovative project by
Library of Congress and Stanford will feature work to develop
mathematical models and algorithms that support information discovery
in large, multi-format, interdisciplinary archives of digital
content. Web-based GIS tools have been developed by a German
university as a component of the Open Source Initiative to work with a
collection of bio-geographical and ecological information on Mongolian
flora; this is one example of a growing number of projects that
leverage biological data with innovative tools. The Annotator's
Workbench, developed at Indiana University, provides researchers with
a much-needed tool to annotate video and has been used with
collections covering a range of subject areas. The Open
Annotation Collaboration will describe and demonstrate multimedia
tagging features added to the reference management software Zotero;
this group is working incollaboration with the modeling and standards
effort that Herbert Van de Sompel and colleagues described at the fall
2009 meeting (their talkis available on the CNI Web site). The
University of Alabama will describe their Acumen software for digital
object search, retrieval, and rendering.
The rapidly growing InCommon trust federation has emerged as a key
part of the strategy for integrating campus-based and national
cyberinfrastructure and for facilitating resource sharing across
institutions. Over the past year, the organization has carried
out a major round of strategic planning and re-aligned its
relationships with Internet2 and EDUCAUSE. InCommon will provide
an update on their work and strategic directions for the CNI community
at this meeting.
CNI continues to track the development of institutional repository
services - and indeed repository services more broadly - and will
feature several sessions on this topic at the meeting.
Researchers from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill will
provide an update on a project examining the formalization and
enforcement of preservation policies and policy interoperability among
repositories.
We will have an update on DuraCloud, the service developed jointly by
the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons to overlay storage systems
such as commercial storage "clouds" with additional functionality
suitable for repository and preservation applications. A report
from New Zealand will highlight repository and publication management
systems. The California Institute of Technolog will discuss
their transition from ETD-db to EPrints for the management of their
electronic theses and dissertations collection. We will also
have a presentation from University of Massachusetts, Amherst on best
practices for the development and management of subject
repositories.
Howard Besser of New York University and colleagues will provide an
update of their work on preservation of public television video as
part of the National Information Infrastructure and Preservation
Program (NDIIPP).
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. We will have a report on a variety of services at
Cornell University Libraries, including services for mobile devices
that bring the library to the user. Wayne State University will
highlight a new initiative to encourage the use by faculty of new
media and digital collections. An important study from the UK
features some excellent examples of how large data sets are being used
in teaching and learning in the social sciences. Making campus
information available in a way that will be more engaging to students
will be described by Bucknell University.
An absolutely fascinating model project at University of Oregon brings
together a team from the faculty, library, and archives to encourage
undergraduate students, in the context of understanding historical
methodologies and primary source materials, to develop new content
about their experiences at the university and to develop a personal
relationship with the university archives. This is a fabulous idea
that I think deserves consideration for much wider adoption.
Two sessions will explore learning spaces. CNI's Joan Lippincott
along with colleagues from University of Colorado and University of
Pennsylvania will discuss and describe various ways of analyzing
what's working in new or renovated information or learning commons.
A number of libraries are developing spaces designated for faculty and
graduate students; University of Virginia has a Scholars' Lab, and
importantly has a well-developed set of services for its
clientele.
Three sessions on cultural memory institutions - libraries, archives,
and museums - will focus on, respectively, working across the academic
institution on the collections of those organizations, software
products to support the needs of all of these types of institutions,
and common meeting preservation needs of these institutions.
I will be presenting a session on a topic that I have been following
for a number of years and which I believe requires greater attention
by many cultural memory organizations - the need to develop actionable
strategies for curating digital materials that document an
individual's life or history. It is clear that these materials
are becoming an ever greater part of the "personal papers" that
have historically been so important as primary research materials, and
there is now a growing body of very good research on the nature of
these materials and the changing behavior of individuals. I will
report on a recent conference on this topic and lead a conversation on
the implications of these developments.
Finally, we will have three sessions that provide a forum for
discussion of some issues that are on the radar of many in the library
community during this era of economic challenges. Leaders from
the Association of College and Research Libraries will discuss their
current study of return on investment (ROI) of academic libraries and
highlight preliminary findings. David Carlson of Southern
Illinois University Carbondale will lead a discussion of the concept
of an safe harbor initiative that would promote the transition of
journals to open access models while protecting publisher revenue
streams during such a transition. OCLC Research will describe
the "Cloud Library" project that examines how books from academic
libraries could be more effectively sourced through shared print and
digital archives.
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. We will also be videotaping a few selected
sessions, including the closing plenary, and making those available
after the meeting.
I look forward to seeing you in Baltimore 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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