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Roadmap for the Spring 2012 CNI Member Meeting,
Baltimore,
A Guide to the Spring 2012
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Spring 2012 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Sheraton
Inner Harbor Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland on April 2 and 3,
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 2. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be
followed by three rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday,
April 3, 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 2, 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 website, 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 James Duderstadt, President Emeritus of the
University of Michigan and currently University Professor of Science
and Technology there, will join us as our opening speaker. He
has been a prominent, articulate and thoughtfulleader in higher
education and research policy for decades, with an extensive record of
public service (you can find details on our website). Of
particular relevance to the CNI community is his involvement with the
evolution of ideas about research cyberinfrastructure, and his
encouragement of new interdisciplinary collaborations involving
computer and information scientists with researchers in many other
disciplines through the creation of the School of Information at
Michigan and the development of what was originally called the Media
Union (now the Duderstadt Center). He chaired the National
Academies committee that published the key 2002 report Preparing
for the Revolution: Information Technology and the Future of the
Research University, and he has been a member of the current
Academies committee studying the future of the research university.
In his talk, Duderstadt will look broadly at the social and
technological trends driving the restructuring of higher education,
the future role of the research university, and the changing
understandings of teaching and learning, scholarship, and
engagement.
Our closing plenary session on Tuesday will feature Professor Phillip
Long, Director of the Centre for Educational Innovation and
Technology, University of Queensland. Phil also maintains a
connection to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where
he worked to support change in learning, and is currently a visiting
researcher there. For many years, Phil has been at the forefront
of the innovative use of technology in teaching and learning, and he
is both inspirational and pragmatic, but always deeply sensitive to
the actual realities of teachers and students. His recent work
in Australia has given him a genuinely global perspective on these
issues. Phil's current interests focus on emerging technologies,
the cognitive interactions of learners with technology, and learning
spaces, both physical and virtual. His wide-ranging presentation
will explore current trends in higher education, such as the emergence
of massive open online courses, the rise of community-generated
learning content, learning analytics, and mobility, and their
potential to genuinely change the higher education
landscape.
These two plenary sessions should complement each other to provide a
thought-provoking view of the interactions between developments
driving change from within the academy and the external forces
reshaping the role of the academy within the broader society.
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 2011-2012 Program Plan
(www.cni.org/program/2011-2012/) and also 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 website following the meeting.
David Weinberger's recently published book Too Big to Know was
hailed by John Seely Brown as a "stunning and profound book on how
our concept of knowledge is changing in the age of the Net." I
am thrilled that David will lead a session in which he will describe
some themes from the book and then encourage discussion of how
changing knowledge affects all of us. David will also be a
co-presenter in a session on the Digital Public Library of America
(DPLA), focusing on the service platform, particularly the metadata
server, for that project, which will make some very interesting
capabilities available to the library community and to the public.
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
several sessions that deal with aspects of the federal government
policy on data management. As the newly appointed co-chair of
the National Academies' Board on Research Data and Information, I will
lead a session describing the priorities and activities of that
group. José-Marie Griffiths, who chaired the National Science
Board's Data Policy Task Force, will describe their findings and
facilitate a discussion of the challenges related to data access and
preservation for higher education, publishing, and other
organizations. Presenters from the University of North Texas and
the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) will provide
an overview of federal policies on data management and will describe
the role and education needs of information professionals who are
involved with data management. We will have an update on the
multi-institution project to develop a data management planning tool
that can be used with researchers as part of their grant proposals;
this work has moved ahead substantially and should have wide
application.
Several sessions will highlight collections and tools that are being
developed for researchers. They include a German project on
climate data, the National Science Foundation's (NSF) EarthCube
program for Geoscience, and a University of Toronto portal for
geospatial resources. Johns Hopkins University will present
findings of a feasibility study for a National Science Foundation open
access repository. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) had
PubMedCentral available as a repository where researchers could place
their papers prior to enacting their open access mandate; there is
nothing similar to fill the same role in other disciplines. This
session - particularly timely in light of the proposed legislation on
open access to journal articles produced as part of federal grants -
will help us look at some options and think about what is necessary to
extend funder-driven open access mandates beyond NIH.
For many of the meeting attendees, this will be a first opportunity to
hear from James Hilton of the University of Virginia about a planned
digital preservation network (DPN). This is a significant and
large-scale undertaking, which is, as far as I know, the first attempt
to build a digital preservation system coming directly out of the
university world rather than from the science agencies. The
session will describe system architecture and strategies. We
will have a presentation from the California Digital Library on their
work to develop an economic model for long-term preservation; we have
had several sessions on this key topic at past CNI meetings, including
a plenary by David Rosenthal of Stanford University. It is
important for the community to make progress in understanding the
economics of digital preservation. Community projects also face
sustainability issues, and we will have a discussion from DuraSpace
about their organizational strategy.
It is also important that we address the preservation of a wide
variety of content related to our cultural heritage. Colleagues
from New York University, George Mason University, and the Internet
Archive will address the challenges of collecting materials from an
evolving social movement, in this case the "Occupy" movement.
The University of California Santa Cruz has the enviable charge to
preserve the Grateful Dead Archive; they will describe the elements of
the collection, the challenges they perceive, and the community
involvement that they are fostering. An important project on
standards and practices for newspaper preservation will be represented
and we will learn about their findings and challenges.
As institutions' digital collections - digital libraries and
repositories - mature, they are rethinking priorities, establishing
new modes of operation, and experimenting with new models. The
California Digital Library and the Public Knowledge Project have
recently developed a partnership to help realize the development of a
fully integrated, open-source institutional repository and journal
publication service. The University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill is addressing their need to grow capacity and encourage
innovation. The Ontario Council of Libraries has taken a very
interesting approach to developing very large, locally-hosted
collections of digital content, both for articles and e-books; their
rationale and implementation should be of wide interest. JSTOR
is also experimenting with new models, opening up access to
independent scholars; a session will describe the initial stages of
that new program and what they are learning. Taking a more
technical approach, the University of Kentucky will describe their
open-source content management system and their process for quickly
digitizing and loading complete archival collections.
Large collections of digital materials need new perspectives and
solutions for information access and retrieval, particularly as the
ecology of discovery and access systems becomes ever more complex.
There is increasing discussion in the community about the value of
linked data, and presenters from Stanford and the University of
Rochester will address that topic from conceptual and campus
perspectives. The University of Utah will provide us with
information on their studies of why Google Scholar has difficulties
indexing institutional repositories; there has been recent discussion
on a number of listservs about their study and potential remedies.
A presentation from EBSCO Publishing will describe their data driven
approach to developing relevant search results for users.
ARTstor and two of its academic partners will discuss interoperating
requirements for a system in which images from ARTstor must fit in
with software employed by institutions for their various
repositories. ExLibris will discuss the challenges of providing
the most relevant search results to users and the factors that go into
producing the best results.
The meeting will present some projects related to changes in scholarly
communication and the role of libraries and information technology in
providing services and developing collaborations to support
innovation. Ithaka S+R will present results from the first in a
series of studies on Research Support Services for Scholars; the focus
will be on services for academic historians. The University of
Oregon has developed a collaboration between the librarians, faculty,
and graduate students who are involved in research on gender, new
media, and technology; they will describe their developing
partnership. A session by the University of Kansas will
describe, from both library and IT perspectives, the use of a
management consultant to improve effectiveness of the
organization.
Two sessions will address topics related to federal information.
One will provide an update on a multi-institution project to preserve
federal government websites at the end of the Bush administration and
describe plans for a similar exercise in 2012-2013. The other
session will focus on opportunities and challenges for the Federal
Depository Library Program (FDLP) in the 21st century technology
environment.
CNI has been focusing attention on new approaches to identity
management, biography, and bibliography in academic institutions,
including connections to areas as diverse as authority control, campus
and federated identity management systems, and institutional
repositories. Ken Klingenstein of Internet2 and Renee Shuey of
Pennsylvania State University will provide an update on their work in
federated identity management. Following the CNI membership
meeting, we will be hosting a day-long invitational workshop on
scholarly identity management and will issue a report; I'll also be
doing a CNI Conversations podcast summary of the meeting and related
developments.
We will have some sessions focusing on innovative technologies and
tools in library and information environments. The University of
Utah is doing some fascinating work to use technologies to recover
content that has been lost or obscured due to human or natural causes,
such as floods; their retroReveal process is open-source and they hope
to build a community of users and contributors. Herbert van de
Sompel will describe a project for a web-based approach for resource
synchronization.
It is important that we continue to find ways to leverage the
increasing amount of scholarly information in digital form for
research and teaching. The Sakai Open Academic Environment
project is addressing content authoring, sharing, and discovery as
well as standard learning management system functionality; we will
have an update on this important work.
Finally, we will have two sessions that feature innovations in
teaching and learning. Project SCARLET in the UK is using
augmented reality technologies and mobile devices to enhance students'
experiences in interaction with library special collections
materials. Gardner Campbell, a well-known speaker in teaching
and learning circles, will describe a course aimed at helping
participants thrive and innovate within the framework of new
technologies; he has given this course at a number of institutions and
with participants ranging from undergraduates to faculty and staff
members. He will likely whet our appetites to participate in one
of his future classes. Our invitational executive roundtable at
this meeting will cover multiple devices and platforms and will look
at some of the emerging mobile platform issues in more depth; we'll be
issuing a report from this session following the meeting. (I
should also note that last December, we had an outstanding roundtable
on risk management and disaster planning; I've included the report
from that meeting in your registration packet in case you missed
it.)
I invite you to browse the complete list of breakout sessions and
their full abstracts at the CNI website. 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 #cni12s.
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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