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Roadmap to CNI Fall 2012 Member Meeting, Dec 10-11,
2012
A Guide to the Fall 2012
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Fall 2012 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Capital Hilton
Hotel in Washington, DC on December 10 and 11, 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 10. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be followed by
three rounds of parallel breakout sessions. As we did last fall, we
added an extra round of breakout sessions on Monday in order to take
advantage of a large number of very high quality and timely proposals
for sessions. Tuesday, December 11, 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 10, after which participants can enjoy
a wide range of dining opportunities in Washington.
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.
We expect to have free wireless access available throughout the
meeting; details will be available at registration.
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
2012-2013 Program Plan. The Program Plan will be distributed at the
meeting (and will be available electronically on the Coalition's
website,
www.cni.org by December
12). 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 2:15 PM on Tuesday, will be
given by Hunter R. Rawlings III, President of the Association of
American Universities (AAU). As former president of both the
University of Iowa and Cornell University, and now as the leader of
the AAU, Hunter Rawlings has an extraordinary vantage point for
understanding how higher education in the United States is changing in
response to a very wide range of pressures and new opportunities; he
will share some of his perspectives on these developments, and help us
to better understand the broad context for our collective efforts to
support and advance the scholarly enterprise.
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 2012-2013 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 website
following the meeting for those who were unable to attend. We will
also be capturing a few sessions for later re-distribution, some using
traditional video capture and some using a new voice over visuals
system we are evaluating.
Many CNI member institutions are developing an array of capabilities
related to "big data" or e-research as well as new
services to assist researchers with data curation. We are very
pleased to have two special sessions from the German national science
foundation, the DFG, highlighting their new national strategies
supporting information infrastructure funding in the areas of research
data and virtual research environments (VREs); presentations will
include both an overview of the strategy and reports from some of the
related projects.
Tools and services for managing research data either at the
disciplinary level or institutional level will be highlighted in
sessions from the DataONE project and the California Digital Library
and in a talk describing a family of services for data at Oxford. We
will have an update on the DMPTool, which is becoming increasingly
popular as both a way to work with researchers on planning management
of their data as they develop grant proposals, and an entrée into a
dialogue between researchers and information professionals.
Representatives from Elsevier will discuss the role of libraries, data
repositories, and publishers to develop open and sustainable data
infrastructure and will seek the views of the CNI community. ARTstor
and Columbia will describe an open, shareable data resource for
architectural works and the built environment that they are building
in cooperation with the Getty Research Institute.
In order to support research data curation efforts, many institutions
have been looking at staffing requirements and staff training needs.
We will have a session on the new E-Science Institute, sponsored by
DuraSpace and the Digital Library Federation (DLF), which has grown
out of the earlier professional development initiative of the
Association of Research Libraries and DLF.
Research Data Alliance, an emerging organization being launched with
support from the National Science Foundation to develop research data
exchange at a global level, will offer an early look at its agenda and
plans.
Two sessions will focus on text mining: JISC will summarize an
excellent study that it has commissioned dealing with legal, policy
and licensing issues in computational analysis of the scholarly
literature, and Duke University will report on what I believe is one
of the very first institutionally-sponsored strategies for workshops
and services related to text mining.
Innovations in scholarly communication and developments in
publishing will be topics of a number of sessions. We know that
the system of scholarly communication is in flux and a session by Dan
Cohen and Joan Fragaszy Troyano of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for
History and New Media at George Mason University will provide us with
a thought-provoking look at issues including how we collect, screen,
and draw attention to new forms of scholarship and how we might
evaluate scholarly work on the open web.
Other scholarly communications sessions include:
o
Force11, a community of scholars, librarians,
archivists, publishers, and funders looking at the future of research
communications and e-scholarship. This group is particularly
interested in successors to the traditional "page based" digital
scholarly article and has issued an interesting manifesto on the
issues here
o SURFconext, a
nationwide Dutch initiative developing infrastructure for
collaborative services and virtual research environments for
scholars
o Open Annotation
Update, which will provide an update on the work on the Open
Annotation standards effort and look at a number of experimental
systems being developed and deployed based upon this standard to
encourage collaborative annotation of scholarly work in various
disciplines, as well as the prospects for interoperability.
Participants will be invited to provide input on directions for this
important developing initiative
o
Debunking Myths and Establishing Guidelines for the ETD
Lifecycle, describing two initiatives: one developing life cycle
practices for ETDs and culminating with a workshop, and one describing
an important study of the acceptance by science journals of articles
based on research made available in open access ETDs, and clearing up
some long-standing myths about how open access ETDs may endanger the
opportunities for new faculty to publish their research
o
Establishing Infrastructures for Scholarly Publishing,
featuring two projects: one to publish directly in HathiTrust, and one
for hosting open access journals in the library
o Library
Publishing Coalition Project, a preview of a new
multi-institutional initiative getting underway to study and document
the current range of publishing activities in academic libraries and
to envision future community activities
A number of sessions will address digital preservation issues.
David Rosenthal of Stanford recently gave a compelling (and sobering)
talk about economic models and the role of the cloud in digital
preservation at the seminar I co-organize at the University of
California, Berkeley School of Information; I am pleased that he
accepted my invitation to give a version of that talk at this CNI
meeting. You may recall that David gave an important plenary talk on
preservation at a CNI meeting in 2009; the video of that talk has been
one of our most popular web resources. His presentation here will
substantially update and extend that work.
We will also have an update on the Digital Preservation Network (DPN)
by James Hilton and Steven Morales. This project intends to provide a
federated backbone preservation network which would offer secure
digital archiving for the academic community; it was announced in
early 2012 and is now moving into actual implementation and deployment
planning, and progress on the project will be shared with the CNI
community.
Additional sessions on digital preservation are:
o Academic
Preservation Trust, a consortial program that intends to develop a
multi-institutional digital repository system that will serve as one
of the institutional front-end archives connected to the Digital
Preservation Network (DPN)
o Using the
Cloud for Backup, Storage, and Archiving, focusing on three
universities' approaches and experiences using DuraCloud to exploit
distributed cloud based storage
o
Video at Risk, a report on a major series of studies to
understand what parts of research library video collections are most
at risk both from technology evolution (e.g. the obsolescence of VHS
videotape) or because of collection wear, and appropriate policy and
technical responses to mitigate these risks
o
Auditing Distributed Digital Preservation Networks,
reporting on trial audits of digital repository services using an open
source SafeArchive system
A number of sessions will provide insights into developments related
to teaching and learning and new models for educational
materials. We are especially pleased to have two sessions on
different approaches to massive open online courses-MOOCs-one by Duke
University, employing Coursera, and one featuring HarvardX. Both will
explore the motivation to develop such programs, implementation
strategies, and policy issues; the perspective here is institutional,
as opposed to focusing on the faculty experience of teaching a
specific MOOC based course. In addition, we will have two sessions on
e-textbook models, one by the EDUCAUSE/Internet2 e-text pilot,
involving a number of universities and publishers, and one from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which emphasizes device
neutrality, publishing opportunities for faculty, and a platform that
is more accessible than most currently on the market. Illinois is
actively seeking to leverage library holdings for use in e-textbooks
when possible.
Explorations of how organizations are developing new services and
how professional roles are changing are also key components of
CNI's program. Institutions are rethinking services and putting
resources into a variety of new programs.
I have long argued that realistic and cost-effective provisions for
continued access to electronic scholarly resources after graduation is
an essential and largely ignored challenge that is causing multiple
problems for higher education and its relationship to society. In this
context, I am delighted that we will hear a report from JSTOR,
Columbia, Yale, and Duke on a pilot project to make JSTOR resources
available to alumni of participating institutions; the pilot was so
successful that the program is now available to all JSTOR
participants.
Other sessions that address institutional and service issues
include:
o Academic Library
as Makerspace, describing the quick uptake of 3D printing in a
science and engineering library; this technology (sometimes called
"additive manufacturing" is going to have substantial impact both in
consumer marketplaces and in academia, and this is one of the first
efforts to deploy it as institutional infrastructure
o
Wikipedia and Libraries, which will look at the very
interesting "Wikipedian in residence" program now underway at
various memory institutions by exploring how OCLC and the Smithsonian
are adding information to Wikipedia and using it to expose
collections
o
Student Driven Innovation, featuring student
development of mobile apps for the library at the University of
California, Los Angeles as a strategy for speeding up the cycle of
innovation adoption in academia
o
Library Innovation, including a technology prototyping
service that employs undergraduates and a search and discovery
initiative that incorporates graduate students at University of
Illinois as well as a description of a variety of partnership
strategies to advance eResearch programs at Virginia Tech
o Leveraging
Digital Library Infrastructure to Support New Roles, describing
how libraries at University of North Texas, University of Florida, and
University of California, San Diego are rethinking what constitute
core functions in today's research library
A session on demonstrating library value will feature two
initiatives: an Association of Research Libraries project to
understand how libraries contribute to student success and the
Association of College & Research Libraries' Value of Academic
Libraries initiative and its next steps.
A core area of CNI's program has highlighted innovations in digital
library development and institutional repositories.
Projects at this meeting will highlight innovative scholarship
initiatives, collaborative efforts, and the encouragement of new
approaches to exploiting the large corpora of texts and other media
that constitute some large digital libraries.
Sessions include:
o
Developing a Customized, Extensible Application for Digital
Collections, featuring Syracuse University's Marcel Breuer digital
archive along with digital objects from nine institutions
o
Olive, Carnegie Mellon's executable content archive
project
o
Collaborative Statewide Networked Information Content,
featuring a discussion about the Portal to Texas History by two
universities and a program officer from National Endowment for the
Humanities
o Supporting
Community and Open Source Software, describing open source
information management for content in archives, museums, and
libraries
o The Future
of Fedora, providing a report on a recent strategy meeting about
development directions for this widely used repository software
o
Piloting Linked Data, describing how Civil War
digitized materials were enriched for discovery at Emory University
using a linked data strategy
o
Internet2 Net+ Services, which will update us on a new
series of "above-the-network" services that Internet2 is
brokering, focusing on e-content initiatives
o UCLA
Broadcast News Archive, which is developing a new approach to
collecting, organizing and analyzing a very large collection of
television news
o
The HathiTrust Research Center, which is being set up
as a focal point to provide computational access to the HathiTrust
digital corpus for research purposes that involve text mining and
related technologies
An area that has been of long-standing interest to CNI is the
identity and 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. I will be participating in a session along with Daniel
Pitti and Brian Tingle to discuss two important and related identity
management projects in the archival community.
We know our members are always interested in understanding funding
opportunities for digital projects, and we will have a session
with panelists from the National Science Foundation, Institute of
Museum and Library Services, National Endowment for the Humanities,
and National Historic Records and Publications Commission describing
their latest grant programs and soliciting input from CNI attendees on
future priorities.
There is much more, and I invite you to browse the complete list of
breakout sessions and their full abstracts on 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,
including selected video recordings, when they become available to us.
You can also follow the meeting via Twitter, using the hashtag
#cni12f.
I look forward to seeing you in Washington, DC 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. Safe Travels.
Clifford Lynch
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