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Roadmap for the Spring 2011 CNI Member Meeting, San
Diego,
A Guide to the Spring 2011
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Spring 2011 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Westin
Gaslamp Quarter Hotel in San Diego, California on April 4 and 5,
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 4. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be
followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday,
April 5, 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 4, after
which participants can enjoy a free evening in San Diego. I've
had two opportunities to visit the San Diego Gaslamp district in the
past year, and it offers a wide range of dining opportunities within
easy walking distance of the Westin.
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.
Information about wireless access in the meeting room areas will be
available at the registration table.
The Plenary Sessions
I am delighted that Christine Borgman, Professor and Presidential
Chair in Information Studies at the University of California, Los
Angeles, will receive the Paul Evan Peters Award during the opening
plenary Session on Monday, April 4.
The Paul Evan Peters award recognizes a career of contributions to
scholarship and intellectual productivity at the highest level;
Chris's work represents just such a level of achievement and
contribution, and is notable as well for its diversity. She is perhaps
best known internationally for her two award-winning monographs,
Scholarship in the Digital Age and From Gutenberg to Global
Information Infrastructure, which together analyze the evolution
of scholarly practice and scholarly communication in the digital age.
Her analytical work, however, is also deeply informed by her own
participation in a wide range of empirical activities such as the
Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. She has been deeply
involved in policy issues around the development of
cyberinfrastructure, and two years ago, Chris chaired a National
Science Foundation (NSF) Task Force on Cyberlearning which took the
first coherent and focused look at the implications of
cyberinfrastucture investments for teaching and learning; she
addressed CNI on the results of this work in 2008.
Her Paul Evan Peters Award Lecture is entitled Information,
Infrastructure and the Internet: Reflections on Three Decades in
Internet Time.
This will be the sixth time that the Paul Evan Peters award has been
presented; the award was created by the Association of Research
Libraries, CNI and EDUCAUSE to honor the memory and contributions of
CNI's founding executive director following his untimely death.
Chris Borgman joins previous recipients Dan Atkins, Tim Berners-Lee,
Vint Cerf, Brewster Kahle and Paul Ginsparg.
Our closing plenary session on Tuesday will feature another UCLA
faculty member, Todd Presner, who is the Chair of the Digital
Humanities Program at UCLA, as well as Director for the Center for
Jewish Studies and a Professor in Germanic Languages, Comparative
Literature and Jewish Studies. He is the founder and director of
the HyperCities project, which is a unique and extremely interesting
platform that uses geographical information systems technology
(building on Google Earth and Google Maps) plus a temporal dimension
to map and analyze a wide range of cultural, historical, and social
dynamics. HyperCities is a tremendous example of how the
creative interaction of a wide range of information technologies with
humanistic methods and inquiry can transform teaching and learning as
well as research in inter-disciplinary humanities.
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 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. 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.
A decade ago, I wrote a long piece on e-books for First Monday,
called "The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital
World." As e-books have turned into a major policy challenge
for libraries, a significant economic factor that is restructuring
parts of the book industry, and an opportunity to reshape thinking at
university presses, I have been thinking about what I got right, what
I got wrong, and where the surprises were. I'm going to share my
current thinking at the CNI meeting and I look forward to a
conversation with you on this rapidly evolving area.
Two other sessions also address topical approaches to libraries and
delivery of content. The California Institute of Technology
(Caltech) will report on its program to loan content, selected by
patron-initiated requests, on Kindles, and the University of Utah and
the University of Michigan will describe their recent experiences with
the Espresso Book Machine for high quality printing on demand, which
offers them a new mechanism for leveraging the digital content their
institutions hold.
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. We have a
set of sessions that deal with aspects of the challenges of data
management. As a follow-up to a session at our December meeting,
representatives from Purdue and the University of Wisconsin will
describe their campus collaborative efforts to assist researchers in
responding to the requirements for inclusion of data management plans
in grant proposals submitted to NSF and the National Institutes of
Health (NIH). We will have an update on the Data Conservancy
project by Sayeed Choudhury and his colleagues; this is one of the two
major funded NSF DataNet projects. UCLA, the Smithsonian, the
California Digital Library and other collaborators are working
together to adapt the UK Digital Curation Centre's tool - Data
Management Plans Online - for use in the United States. A
session from the California Digital Library will describe their work
on a publishing pilot for what they term "data papers," an
approach to publishing data in a citable form that fits in with the
scholarly publishing model. We will have an analysis from OCLC
Research on managing research information, looking at the data life
cycle. And we will also have a session by Rutgers on how the
data life cycle factors into their approach to the data curation
process. For those interested in catching up on developments in
the e-science arena, this meeting will be a great opportunity.
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. Syracuse University will
describe its work on the Marcel Breuer Digital Initiative, developing
applications to enable researchers to use a diverse set of materials
from disparate digital archives.
Some of you may recall a few meetings ago, Tara McPherson of the
University of Southern California (USC) gave a plenary talk about
the Vectors journal, a high-end, extremely customized
exploration of what authoring in new media can bring to the
communication of humanities scholarship. Each article in
Vectors represented, in addition to the author's content, a
significant investment of time of multimedia specialists, which
creates problems with both scale and cost. Very recently, Tara's
group has been working on a complement to Vectors called
Scalar, which intends to capture the some of the best ideas
from Vectors and put them in a more scalable and lower-cost
authoring framework, and they will update us on this
work.
Four other sessions will address the sustainability and cost model
aspects of digital projects. The Public Knowledge Project has
been a very successful open source project, enabling many institutions
and individuals to publish journals and conference proceedings using
its platforms. In a discussion at our meeting, Brian Owen of
Simon Fraser University, will seek input from attendees on paths to
building a sustainable financial model and partnerships for the
initiative. James Shulman of ARTstor, along with several
partners from the university community, will lead a discussion of the
business and fee model of a new Shared Shelf cloud-based cataloging
and asset management system for images. Representatives from the
Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) will describe
their organization's decision to move to a fully open access model for
their major journal and their deliberations as they implemented this
change. Their experience with this transition will offer a valuable
model for other scholarly and professional societies considering the
strategic implications of open access. In addition, we will hear an
update examining how twelve projects analyzed in an Ithaka
sustainability study published two years ago, are faring today, with
emphasis on strategies that have proven robust over time.
It is important that we continue to find ways to leverage the
increasing amount of scholarly information in digital form for
research and teaching. David Flanders from the Joint Information
Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK, a key CNI collaborator, will lead
a discussion of JISC's search for international partners to develop
infrastructure components that build on open access, open
bibliography, open citation, and open data, and that will help realize
the potential of the Web for scholarship. In another innovative
initiative, a representative from Elsevier will describe their
thinking about a new publishing ecosystem that enables institutions to
leverage research content through applications and tools. A
representative from Mendeley will describe a network-based research
catalog that can be used to mine various types of information useful
to researchers.
Martin Warnke, a researcher supported by the DFG, the German science
research agency, will report on his work to develop a collaborative,
networked research environment for the consideration of work
pertaining to art images and visual culture.
Several sessions will address the challenges of digital preservation.
We will have a report from HathiTrust and the Minnesota Digital
Library on their image preservation archive. Another project,
the SAFE-Archive system, an open source product that is being released
this month, will provide provisioning, monitoring, and auditing for
cultural memory institutions. An initiative from the National
Digital Stewardship Alliance and the Educopia Institute is working on
a framework that will assist the community with developing good
practices for distributed digital preservation.
Rob Sanderson from Los Alamos National Laboratory will present an
update on the award-winning Memento system that we first heard about a
little over a year ago. Memento represents a framework for
allowing us to navigate the Web across time, to see sites as they have
developed over time. Since its introduction to the CNI
community, it has garnered substantial adoption and the underlying
technology has matured considerably.
Ken Klingenstein of Internet2 has received substantial funding from
NSF to carry on work on federated identity management in a broad
sense, thinking about persona and preferences and he will report on
those developments. This work will be essential to support
multi-institutional virtual organizations like those coming out of the
NSF DataNet projects or initiatives like VIVO. The latter
project came out of Cornell University but is being carried forward by
a substantial consortium of universities. We will also have a
session updating progress on the VIVO work.
MacKenzie Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
will discuss the ORCID author ID project, which I have mentioned in a
number of contexts, but this is the first time we will have a full
session on this at one of our meetings. Author IDs are a significant
piece of infrastructure that we need in order to do really
high-quality bibliometrics and author identity management in the
networked environment. CNI has been tracking this area since we
convened a workshop on author identity management some years ago; it
has a surprising number of connections to areas as diverse as
authority control, campus and federated identity management systems,
and institutional repositories.
Many of you have seen a book that came out a couple of months ago,
Unlocking the Gates, by Taylor Walsh of Ithaka. Ithaka has
been studying the history of universities and university consortia
efforts to make courses and other learning materials available through
the Internet, with particular emphasis on policy and business model
issues; the book summarizes a range of false starts, successes and
failures in the realm of both open and for-profit education.
Roger Schonfeld will talk about key findings.
We will have some sessions focused on innovative technologies and
tools in library environments. Representatives from JSTOR and
the University of Minnesota will describe their project to make the
university's Web-scale discovery system more discoverable from within
the JSTOR interface. At the University of Utah, they are also
looking at ways to make their digital resources more discoverable by
search engines, and they will report on their findings and plans,
especially in regard to digital repository content. Pepperdine
University will discuss its "move to the cloud," migrating all
library data and library system functionality to the OCLC Web-scale
Management System. The Kuali OLE project, an Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation and community-funded software project addressing academic
library management workflow, is a large-scale open source effort; we
will hear an update on their progress.
A session from OCLC brings together good practices and guidelines from
various efforts looking at special collections content in the digital
environment, with the goal of helping libraries increase access to
those resources.
We have a group of sessions that address a convergence of space,
technology, and services, and each has a different emphasis. At
the University of Calgary, the new library construction is nearing
completion and the facility will house not only the library but will
serve as a hub for the university's press and art museum. Their
briefing will focus on the development of a technology plan that
encompasses knowledge creation, visual display, and new media
support. Columbia University has been developing
discipline-based digital centers (focusing on humanities, social
sciences, and sciences) that provide support for research and learning
in high-end, collaborative, technology-rich environments; their
session at CNI will focus on assessment planning and implementation in
the centers along with lessons learned to date. At the
University of Alabama, the Alabama Digital Humanities Center has been
developed as a collaboration of faculty, the libraries, and the Office
for Information Technology (IT). Alabama's presentation will
describe the collaborative nature of this project and the development
of the physical and intellectual space, emphasizing the
community-building aspects of the project. Emory University has
undertaken a study, supported by the Andrew Mellon W. Foundation, to
investigate existing centers of digital scholarship as input into
their own planning process for development of a Digital Scholarship
Commons. They will discuss what they learned from their visits
to and discussions with five centers of digital scholarship, and their
plans and implementation of a center at Emory.
Loyola University of Chicago will report on three years of library/IT
collaboration on their information commons. Both the library
dean and chief information officer will be presenters. Many
information commons are developed through collaborations, some more
successful than others, and it will be useful to see what they have
learned at Loyola.
Finally, we will have a session by presenters from the University of
Iowa and McMaster University that will focus on teaching and learning
aspects of spaces. The Transform, Interact, Learn, Engage (TILE)
program at Iowa has transformed classrooms into active learning
spaces. We will hear about challenges faced and next steps for
this initiative. The Lyons New Media Center at McMaster
incorporates both technologies and support that serve to encourage
faculty to incorporate new media into their curriculum. The
presentation will highlight student projects in large and small
courses that have been accomplished with the support of the facility
and its services.
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 plenary sessions, and making those available
after the meeting. You can follow the meeting Twitter stream by
using the hashtag #cni11s.
I look forward to seeing you in San Diego 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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