We have a wonderful pair of plenary speakers for our upcoming Member meeting in San Antonio on April 4-5, 2013.

Herbert van de Sompel will open the conference with a talk titled "From the Version of Record to a Version of the Record".  This should be quite extraordinary, based on the conversations that Herbert and I have been having, because instead of focusing deeply on one of the portfolio of important projects that Herbert has worked on in recent years, such as Momento, or Resource Synchronization, or Object Reuse and Exchange, in this talk Herbert steps back and looks at the long term trends shaping our digital scholarly record and the technologies and architectures needed to manage these changes. He juxtaposes the evolving worldwide web and our understanding of it to the way we have thought about digital archives over time. It is very unusual to see this sort of examination of the broad picture across time, of understanding information technologies as products of their times and contexts, of characterizing shifting conceptual paradigms, and yet I cannot stress how essential I believe such insights are to developing the collective wisdom to craft future generations of networked information technologies and services. I am delighted that Herbert is able to join us to share his thinking.

We will close the meeting with the first public presentation from Ithaka S+R on the key findings of their 2012 United States Faculty survey. This large-scale survey, which has taken place every three years since 2000, is one of the best sources for understanding both the current state and evolution of  faculty needs and perceptions about libraries, scholarly publishing, and the collection and discovery of information resources. This data should offer important insights on where faculty stand with regard to developments ranging from research data management to scholarly publishing alternatives to e-books, and also help us to see where the trend lines are going, and how rapidly. Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld from Ithaka will guide us through the survey findings, after which Judy Russell, Dean of LIbraries at the University of Florida and a member of the survey project advisory board, will offer perspectives on the finding as a campus and library community leader.  An interesting new development in this generation of the faculty survey is a provision to administer a localized version at a specific campus (and then compare campus to national results), and Judy will report on her experiences with a pilot version of such a localized study.

You can find more details on both plenaries, including biographies of the presenters, here:

http://www.cni.org/events/membership-meetings/upcoming-meeting/spring-2013/s13-plenary-sessions/

I hope that many of our members will be able to join us in San Antonio this April for these splendid plenary sessions. I will note that just today we have largely finalized the breakout session list, which also includes a wide range of excellent presentations, and will be sharing that soon.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI