|
Roadmap for the Fall 2010 CNI Member
Meeting
A Guide to the Fall 2010
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Fall 2010 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Crystal
Gateway Marriott Hotel in Arlington, Virginia on December 13 and 14,
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 digital information.
As always, we have strived to present sessions that reflect
late-breaking developments and also take advantage of our venue in the
Washington, DC area 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 13. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will
be followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions.
Tuesday, December 14, 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 7:00 PM on Monday evening, December 13,
after which participants can enjoy a wide range of dining
opportunities in the Crystal City and Washington areas. Downtown
Washington, DC is a quick taxi ride or accessible via the METRO, which
is directly connected to the Crystal Gateway hotel.
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
As is usual at our fall meetings, I have reserved the opening plenary
session to address key developments in networked information, discuss
progress on the Coalition's agenda, and highlight selected initiatives
from the 2010-2011 Program Plan. This year, I'll also announce a
special project that we have planned to recognize the Coalition's 20th
anniversary. 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
13). 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 closing plenary, scheduled to start at 2:15PM on Tuesday, will be
given by Professor Dan Cohen, the Director of the Center for History
and New Media at George Mason University. Dan is well known to
many within the CNI community as one of the leaders of the new
generation of humanists making very sophisticated use of digital media
and tools; you may have read about some of his research work with the
Google book corpus recently in the New York Times. Or you
may have used Zotero; Dan has led the development of this project,
funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to extend the Firefox
browser with a highly sophisticated citation manager that exploits
social networking. He worked closely with the late Roy
Rosenzweig on their milestone book Digital History, and has
also authored Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and
Victorian Faith on his research into the intellectual history of
Victorian-era mathematics. Among his many other contributions,
he has been a great help to me in recent years as an at-large member
of the CNI steering committee.
Dan has a new book, The Ivory Tower and the Open Web, coming
out in 2011; in his plenary address he will explore some of the key
theses of this work, which looks at the interplay and disconnects
between the traditional scholarly communication system and the new
genres of communication that continue to develop on the Web. I
continue to be fascinated by Dan's ability to draw out insightful new
relationships between seemingly disparate developments and to reframe
questions about the future of scholarship. I can guarantee that
this will be a deeply thought-provoking discussion.
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 2010-2011
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.
A major continuing theme at this meeting is developments in
cyberinfrastructure and data curation. We are delighted to have
Alan Blatecky of the National Science Foundation (NSF) present an
overall update on NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century
Science and Engineering. Over the past year, NSF has had a
number of advisory task forces that are now reporting back with
recommendations to inform the development of this framework, so this
is an ideal time to assess developments. National level
cyberinfrastructure work must link up with campus-based strategies;
we'll have a presentation by Sally Jackson, CIO at the University of
Illinois, on the impact of institutional cyberinfrastructure on
research initiatives. Another important development has been the
announcement that NSF will join the National Institutes of Health in
requiring data management plans as part of grant applications,
effective January 2011; while this has been expected, details only
began to be available in October, and many of our member institutions
are now moving very quickly to ensure that they can support their
faculty in responding to these mandates. Princeton and Purdue
will describe their institutional models for data management and
participants are encouraged to discuss what is developing on their
campuses. We will also have a session on preserving social
science research data using Fedora.
In the past two years, linked open data has received a lot of
attention as a model for making data-particularly scientific
data-available and for interconnecting a wide range of data
resources. Uptake, however, has been patchy. We will have
a panel that critically examines the prospects and barriers for linked
open data, which I hope will help us gain a more balanced assessment
of the technologies and related organizational and social
initiatives.
Myron Gutmann, NSF's newly-appointed Assistant Director for Social,
Behavioral and Economic Sciences, issued an extraordinary public call
for views on the new opportunities and priorities for social sciences
research in 2020. Myron and Amy Friedlander will present an
initial survey and analysis of responses to this call and offer
preliminary thoughts on how the research agenda in these disciplines
may evolve.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has produced an
exceptionally good set of scenarios sketching possible futures for the
research enterprise; I think these will find wide applicability in
institutional strategic planning efforts. Karla Strieb, who led
the ARL work, will present these scenarios and discuss ways in which
they might be employed.
Several briefings will focus on issues related to scholarly
communications, repositories, and publishing. Representatives
from the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and Duke
University Press will discuss various models of scholarly publishing
and collaborative strategies. ProQuest will describe
developments in the company's thesis and dissertation publishing
program. We will have a session on a project that is looking at
a LOCKSS solution of open access materials from German institutional
repositories. Representatives from the Center for Research
Libraries and Portico will discuss a certification and assessment
process for trusted digital repositories from the perspectives of
auditor and repository operator.
As libraries approach digitization of their own collections, a common
stumbling block is what to do about materials that may still be under
copyright protection. Three universities will describe their
policies, strategies, and workflows for these types of materials in
their digitization projects.
We will have a report on the OCLC Research Survey of Special
Collections, which provides perspectives on the challenges and
opportunities for these materials in the digital environment.
Stanford University will describe its framework, involving librarians
from various units, for adding Web materials to its collections.
The Library of Congress will provide an update on its National Digital
Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and its
initiatives for 2011; they are tackling some very complex issues
related to born-digital collections. David Kirsch of the
University of Maryland has been doing some outstanding work on the
public interest in the long-term preservation of private business and
organizational records and will report on his recent work in this area
within the NDIIPP.
There has been a good deal of interest in the possible applications of
computer forensics techniques to the ingest and management of personal
digital archives; probably the deepest examination of the
possibilities here has been the work of Matthew Kirschenbaum and his
colleagues at the University of Maryland, which were presented earlier
this year in an excellent symposium that I was fortunate to be able to
attend. They have prepared a major report on these issues, and
will summarize this work for us.
A number of sessions will demonstrate the wide variety of work that is
taking place related to digital scholarship, particularly in the
humanities. One briefing will highlight a unique collection of
Cuban theater materials at the University of Miami. Another will
focus on jazz discography and a collaborative Web site developed at
Columbia University. The University of Nebraska and Brown
University will describe their programs for working with digital
humanities scholars and will also discuss the facilities and staff
that support this work. At the University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA), a new laboratory for digital cultural heritage will
provide a state-of-the-art facility for collaborative work on digital
initiatives, involving faculty, librarians, IT, and students.
Another session will describe innovative digital humanities
initiatives in liberal arts colleges, bringing undergraduates into
direct contact with the work of digital scholars.
Bamboo, a large-scale, multi-institutional program to support digital
humanities has moved from planning to implementation, with a focused
agenda that emphasizes the development of common virtual research
environments and tools and resources that can interoperate within
them. We'll have a presentation on this new stage of the
initiative, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation.
As digital collections increase in number, size, and complexity, there
is a growing need for new tools for librarians, researchers and
scholars. Annotation of resources in the digital environment has
been an ongoing area of tool development, and we will have a report
from Herbert Van de Sompel, Robert Sanderson, and Tim Cole about
progress being made by the Open Annotation project. The bX
Recommender service will assist the discovery process in online
libraries, using an approach that is informed by data about user
search behavior. The University of Georgia will discuss its
trial of a central index discovery tool and the University of Nevada
Las Vegas will report on its survey of vendor "Web-scale"
discovery services. We will have reports from two projects at
the National Library of Medicine, one that will describe the
infrastructure of the new MedlinePlus Connect service and one that
provides an update on NLM DTDs. In a project funded by the DFG
(German Science Foundation), researchers are focusing on techniques to
automate the processing of historic documents when optical character
recognition (OCR) is not possible; they will describe their Venod
system. We will also have a report from MIT on the updating of
the popular Exhibit tool.
Sessions focusing on campus IT projects include an institutional
reorganization and revamping of IT services at Cornell University, as
well as a project at Emory University that seeks to understand
cloud-based capacity for a variety of digital projects.
A number of sessions will provide insights into new developments
related to teaching and learning and the educational process.
Ira Fuchs, in his new role at EDUCAUSE, will discuss the recently
launched Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative, which will be
making grants to projects that show promise for dramatically improving
college readiness and completion. We will learn about the new
EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) project Evidence of Impact, which
seeks to understand ways in which institutions are currently gathering
and analyzing evidence of the impact of technology-based innovations
in teaching and learning. CNI's Joan Lippincott will join ELI's
Malcolm Brown in presenting this session. VTLS Inc. will present
its system for multi-channel streaming media of course presentations
and the way in which it can enhance learning. Columbia
University and ARTstor will discuss multimedia analysis software that
can be used by students to tag, annotate, clip, and embed images,
audio, and video into individual and group multimedia projects.
An innovative project that reaches out to library users is the Public
WOW interface and display at Case Western Reserve University Library;
it highlights all types of library usage data, raising awareness of
the many ways people use the library.
Finally, the Association of College & Research Libraries will
highlight findings from their Value of Academic Libraries initiative
and describe next steps.
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, including selected video recordings, when they
available to us. You can also follow the meeting via Twitter,
using the hashtag #cni10f.
I look forward to seeing you in Arlington, Virginia 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
|