From: "Clifford Lynch" <CNI-ANNOUNCE@cni.org>
Sender: <cgplmgr@cni.org>
To:  CNI-ANNOUNCE
Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:51:01 -0500
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Subject: Roadmap for the Fall 2011 CNI Member Meeting, Arlington, VA, Dec
 12-13
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A Guide to the Fall 2011
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting


The Fall 2011 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Crystal 
Gateway Marriott Hotel in Arlington, Virginia on December 12 and 13, 
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 12.  The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be followed 
by three rounds of parallel breakout sessions.  For this meeting, we 
added an extra round of breakout sessions on Monday in order to take 
advantage of an unprecedented number of proposals for sessions; it's 
clear that the pace of developments is accelerating, and we need to 
be responsive to this.  Tuesday, December 13, includes three 
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 Monday evening, December 12, 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 Metrorail (Metro) transit 
system, 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. I want to look at recent developments and the ways in which 
the landscape is changing, and to outline the developments I expect 
to see in the coming years.  As part of this, I'll discuss progress 
on the Coalition's agenda, and highlight selected initiatives from 
the 2011-2012 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 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 William Michener, Professor and Director of e-Science 
Initiatives for the Libraries of the University of New Mexico, and 
Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation 
(NSF)-funded DataONE project.

Bill is a marine scientist by training, and has spent most of his 
professional career leading large, complex, multi-disciplinary and 
information-intensive ecological, biological and environmental 
science projects; you can find the details of his biography as part 
the plenary session descriptions for the fall meeting. I've had an 
opportunity to get to know Bill Michener a bit over the past years as 
part of the privilege of serving on the DataONE External Advisory 
Board; he is a tremendously energetic and deeply thoughtful person 
who is committed to advancing scholarship, and very sensitive to the 
changing relationships among the scientific enterprise, higher 
education, libraries, science funders, and the public. He's also 
carefully studied successes, failures, and sustainability problems in 
past efforts to use technology to transform scholarly practices and 
cultures at scale.  Bill will share his views on the new landscape of 
science broadly - emphasizing the earth and life sciences - and give 
us insight into how the DataONE project can support and facilitate 
these transformations.

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 2011-2012 
Program Plan, as well as a few other sessions of special interest or 
importance, and to provide some additional context that may be 
helpful to attendees in making 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. We will also be capturing a few sessions on 
video for later re-distribution.

With the imposition of the US NSF requirements for data management 
plans in grant proposals early in 2011, CNI's work in data curation 
has reached a new level of intensity; at this meeting we can see 
member efforts to build common tools or services for broad 
deployment, as well as many exemplar or prototype campus or 
consortial projects and services.  We are delighted to have an update 
from the California Digital Library and University of Virginia on the 
DMPTool, an institutionally-configurable tool which provides online 
guidance and resources to help researchers develop data management 
plans as part of grant proposals.  We will also have an introduction 
to the Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network 
Partnership SEAD Project, funded as part of the NSF DataNet 
initiative, as well as the plenary update on the DataONE Datanet 
work.   Johns Hopkins University will describe their Data Management 
services group, which provides proposal development and planning 
support to their institution's faculty using data management and 
archiving systems developed by the Data Conservancy.  DuraSpace's 
DuraCloud Direct to the Researcher provides enhanced cloud-based 
storage for research data, and we will hear a report on its current 
status.  The University of Nebraska will feature a partnership 
between IT and libraries for seamless data archiving.

As we develop open collections of data, we must also address their 
accessibility.  Tufts and Harvard, with additional partners, are 
collaboratively developing a Web application to discover, preview, 
and retrieve geospatial data from a range of sites.  We also need to 
develop systems for capturing research data, and Rutgers will 
describe a MODS application profile that documents the content, major 
lifecycle events and rights associated with research data.  Two other 
projects focus on assisting researchers with the data lifecycle:  the 
Smithsonian Institution is developing a virtual research environment 
for this purpose and the University of Idaho and partners are 
implementing the Northwest Knowledge Network, a regional approach to 
research data lifecycle management.  A German project also focuses on 
creating a virtual research environment, WissKI, that will 
incorporate a range of primary sources from universities and museums 
and will employ semantic technologies.

We have a particularly strong set of sessions on topics related to 
digital preservation.  David Rosenthal of Stanford, who captivated 
attendees in a plenary session at a 2009 CNI meeting, will discuss a 
model for comparing the cost of local storage with cloud storage.  He 
has developed a framework into which models including interest rates, 
technology evolution and other factors can be plugged and then used 
to explore a wide range of scenarios; this will be of great interest 
to campus IT units trying to design and price long-term reliable 
storage services.

Cornell and Columbia, in a 2CUL study, have produced some startling 
and extremely important information for the library community.  They 
will discuss their finding that only a small part of the libraries' 
e-journal titles are currently being preserved by PORTICO or LOCKSS; 
understanding the details and implications of this will, I believe, 
lead to major rethinking and reprioritizing of our community's 
strategies for protecting our e-journals.  We will learn about major 
national efforts in digital preservation as reported at a conference 
in Estonia in May 2011 along with a report on the first year of the 
National Digital Stewardship Alliance, coordinated by the Library of 
Congress.  Several sessions will address aspects of preservation for 
specialized collections:  game preservation at the University of 
Illinois, executable content at Carnegie Mellon, and older 
reel-to-reel and cassette audio recordings at Columbia.  The Florida 
Center for Library Automation will describe its rewritten DAITSS, a 
preservation repository application.

In the largest of our digital collections, while technical challenges 
continue to be significant, often the issues needing the most 
attention have to do with policies, infrastructure, governance, 
sustainability, collaboration, and funding. HathiTrust, a growing 
multi-institutional collaboration, now has a repository of nearly 10 
million volumes and is developing the next stage of its partnership 
model as it grapples with policy and legal issues as well as setting 
priorities.  Europeana is the major aggregator of digital library 
collections in Europe, and incorporates a wide range of materials, 
including audiovisual materials, special collections, and theses. 
We'll have sessions covering both of these initiatives.

Some specialized digital collections projects in the US are 
developing new collaborations, such as the Open Folklore 
collaboration between the Indiana University Library and the American 
Folklore Society, and some are building new tools to enhance 
specialized collections, such as the Mapping Atlanta project at 
Emory.  At Binghamton University, they are developing a repository 
that focuses on both born digital artifacts as well as unique 
research products; by using the Rosetta tool, they are enhancing 
discovery while providing a digital preservation methodology for 
university digital assets.

Some projects are focusing on more technical issues related to large 
collections, repositories, and digitization.  Hydra assists 
institutions in building a robust and durable digital repository 
system supporting multiple collections with tailored workflows; 
Stanford, Virginia, and Hull were the original partners and now a 
dozen institutions are using the system.  We will also have an update 
on the Exhibit software, which assists institutions in organizing, 
publishing, and navigating linked data on the Web; it is especially 
important for managing and publishing very large collections of any 
type of data.  George Washington University is developing a 
cost-forecasting model for new digitization projects that employ 
robotic arm technology.  The International Standards Organization 
(ISO) has recently approved a new standard against which one can 
assess repositories of digital content and data; we will have a 
report by the Center for Research Libraries on the potential benefits 
of this work.

There are a number of interesting developments related to information 
discovery, access, and retrieval.  These projects are experimenting 
with the need to provide more sophisticated access to the wealth of 
digital information, whether by individuals or by machines.  One 
central idea is that of scholars (or librarians working on their 
behalf) taking control of their records of publication, and using 
measures related to this record as a way of demonstrating the impact 
of scholarly work.  We'll have a session on work that Microsoft's 
Academic Search is doing as an exemplar to support such efforts 
(though I note this is only one example of what is happening in this 
area, albeit an important and unusually transparent one).  In related 
developments, Elsevier is working on machine-readable interfaces to 
scholarly data that are useful for scholarly content and 
bibliometrics.  An area that has been of long-standing interest to 
CNI is the name management problem in the attribution of scholarship 
and the management of the scholarly record; this combines some of the 
traditional library authority work with some components of persistent 
identifiers, authentication, biography, bibliography and other 
topics.  If we put a uniform author identifier system in place, it 
will, over time, greatly increase discoverability of the body of an 
author's work, and in the work on display in the Microsoft Academic 
Search presentation we can see the effects of not having such a 
system.  The ORCID initiative is currently the leading proposal for 
addressing this problem, and they will have a session to report on 
progress and invite participation from CNI attendees.

The State and University Library of Denmark and Cornell University 
are both developing search mechanisms that can be customized for 
various audiences, whether a subject specialty such as engineering or 
a format such as television and radio programs.  Two projects will 
focus on specialized software to access specific types of 
collections:  the National Library of Medicine will feature its video 
search tool and the University of British Columbia will describe its 
CONTENTdm-based interface to historical newspapers.  The 
International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is being 
developed by Stanford, the British Library, and other partners with 
the goal of providing users an unprecedented level of uniform and 
rich access to image based resources that currently reside in many 
discrete silos; this will be an opportunity to catch up on 
developments that I don't think are yet widely known.

Some projects are incorporating user community participation and 
contribution into their systems for discovery and access, including 
the "What's on the Menu?" project at the New York Public Library, 
which has invited the public to transcribe items in a menu collection 
into a structured and reusable form; we will learn about their 
successes and challenges.  A University of Maryland project also 
encouraged social tagging of images by non-experts; this briefing 
will focus on the computational linguistic processing of the 
user-created metadata and on bilingual and multilingual issues in 
social tagging patterns.

We face a continuing need for new and better tools to illuminate user 
behavior.  JSTOR has been amassing 15 years of log data and has been 
working on normalizing and organizing these data in order to 
understand user behavior and trends; we will have a report on this 
work.  The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has been working 
with the Ontario Council of University Libraries to assess the impact 
of networked electronic resources with the implementation of MINES 
for Libraries.

A number of sessions will provide insights into new developments 
related to teaching and learning and the educational process.  CNI's 
Joan Lippincott, along with Malcolm Brown from the EDUCAUSE Learning 
Initiative (ELI) and Jeanne Narum from the Learning Spaces 
Collaboratory (LSC), will focus on current issues and projects that 
address the assessment of learning spaces.

CNI has had a particular interest in programs that foster new types 
of literacy for the digital age.  At this meeting, we have a number 
of sessions that address aspects of this topic.  At the University of 
Pennsylvania and Temple, they are working with undergraduates to 
produce videos as course projects and seeking to understand what 
kinds of support and instruction are needed.  McMaster University is 
working with a large number of students to develop their geospatial 
literacy skills.  The University of Toronto iSchool has a certificate 
program in conceptual curation and pedagogy for conceptual thinking 
that will develop new kinds of analytical skills in future 
information professionals; attendees at the session will be invited 
to join Toronto in some collaborative work.  The University of 
Virginia has focused some resources on moving video and audio into 
the scholarly mainstream.  Their work, using Sakai, Drupal, and 
Kaltura, has been achieving success in the teaching and learning 
arena, and they are also working on moving media into the mainstream 
of scholarly communication.

Another important area in teaching and learning is the re-examination 
of modes of making textbooks available to students.  Indiana 
University has launched an eText program that employs software with 
many of the functionalities that students have requested for digital 
curricular resources; we will hear an update on its implementation.

Several sessions will explore how organizational and professional 
roles are changing or must evolve in our current technology and 
institutional environments.  How do we create information 
organizations that encourage innovation?  Cornell and the University 
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will challenge us to think about ideas 
and organizations that drive technology innovation.  Virginia Tech, 
the University of North Texas, and the MetaArchive Cooperative will 
discuss their thoughts and projects related to new roles for 
supporting and curating digital scholarship, with some case studies 
as examples.  The Association of College & Research Libraries will 
highlight findings from their recent summits that extended the work 
of their Value of Academic Libraries initiative; the summits included 
representatives who contributed perspectives from chief academic 
officers, senior institutional researchers, representatives from 
accrediting associations and higher education organizations.

We will have a session in which presenters explore overall issues 
related to academic and research library publishing strategies; data 
from a survey of ARL libraries and liberal arts colleges from the 
Oberlin Group will be presented.  The session will also feature a 
specific instance of a new type of publishing venture:  the Long 
Civil Rights Movement collaboration is a joint program of the 
University of North Carolina (UNC) Press, the UNC Library, and 
several research centers.  We will hear about the usage of the 
collection, user behavior (including user-contributed annotations), 
and lessons learned.

We know our members are always interested in understanding funding 
opportunities for digital projects, and we will have an update 
session from the Institute for Museum and Library Services on their 
programs for 2012.

CNI was an early leader in the movement to implement electronic 
theses and dissertations.  As this initiative has gained broader 
adoption, there has been concern (particularly from faculty) about 
whether students who provide open access to their theses and 
dissertations, generally via institutional repositories, will damage 
their prospects for publishing this work in a scholarly journal.  The 
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) 2011 
publishers' survey provides real data to challenge the assertions 
that an open access ETD is generally considered to constitute prior 
publication.  This will be of interest to the many CNI institutions 
planning or managing an ETD program.

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 #cni11f.

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