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Roadmap for the Spring 2013 CNI Member Meeting, San
Antoni
A Guide to the Spring 2013
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Spring 2013 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Westin
Riverwalk Hotel in San Antonio, Texas 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 Thursday,
April 4. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be followed by
three rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Friday, 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 Thursday, April 4, after which
participants can enjoy a free evening along San Antonio's delightful
Riverwalk.
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 in your packets or at the registration table.
The Plenary Sessions
We have a wonderful pair of plenary
speakers for our meeting. 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 Memento,
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 World Wide 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 S+R 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 findings 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/mm/spring-2013/s13-plenary-sessions/ .
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 2012-2013 Program Plan (www.cni.org/program) 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.
The management of 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. Working in
partnerships, many institutions are making advances in their
capabilities to host stewardship services for large data sets and to
make the datasets more accessible for reuse. In the United Kingdom
(UK), the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) has been working with
individual universities to increase their capacity to deliver research
management services, and we will hear about their challenges and
successes, with particular attention to how this work can be applied
outside the UK. The DataShare project has created a website that
enables investigators at the University of California campuses to
publish all of their research outputs, including data, images, and
software so that they may be found and shared more easily. We will
have an update on the DuraCloud for Research project, which provides
enhanced cloud storage for research data. We will learn about two
projects funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG): one that
focuses on providing a means for researchers in economics to access
datasets in order to replicate research results of their peers, and
one that is building a directory for research data repositories. I
know you will be intrigued by the tools that are being developed
through the Digital Science company, which is a spin-off from Nature
Publishing and works with a portfolio of innovative startups as well
as internally developed projects; their software and platforms are
driving innovation in the use of data and in the capabilities of
extracting metrics of use; some CNI attendees will remember a plenary
session by Timo Hannay (now Digital Science's Managing Director) a few
years ago that pre-figured many of the ideas now coming to
fruition.
As higher education institutions and funders place increasing emphasis
on e-research and data curation, we need highly qualified individuals
to work in this area. The Council on Library and Information Resources
(CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, working in partnership with
the Digital Library Federation (DLF) is reorienting this very
successful program to focus more strongly on data curation issues.
Many of the project briefings address a variety of themes related
to scholarly communication. I am delighted that my colleague
Michael Buckland, University of California, Berkeley, and Ryan Shaw,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will report on their work
to re-think the editing process for major texts in the humanities.
Their presentation will provide insight into ways in which technology
can aid scholarly editing projects through collaborative, shared
access among scholars and curators; it has rich connections to
evolving thinking about name infrastructure and scholarly identity.
They will also discuss their efforts to exploit linked data in these
scholarly edition projects.
Other scholarly communications sessions include:
o
Scholarly Communication: New Models for Digital Scholarship
Workflows, reporting on an NSF-sponsored workshop, held at the
University of Pittsburgh, focusing on capturing, documenting, and
reporting information associated with each stage of the scholarly
workflow in order to expand global data and knowledge
infrastructures
o
Personal Archiving and Scholarly Workflow: An Exploratory
Study of Penn State Faculty, that addresses scholarly workflow of
individual faculty in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences
from the perspective of archiving at the level of the individual
scholar, and also identifies critical digital literacies for
faculty
o Hypothes.is:
Annotating the World's Knowledge, where Peter Brantley will
describe this initiative to leverage new identity systems, web
standards, and distributed storage to encourage commentary and
discourse across different kinds of media and representations
o Digital
Humanities Revisited, which will raise issues related to library
involvement in digital humanities work, drawing on perspectives from
the University of Alabama and the wider community
o
Publication and Research Roles for Libraries Using Spectral
Imaging Data, which will describe UCLA's work with an early
manuscript project that uses spectral imaging of palimpsests and
requires complex collaboration between technologists, scholars and
librarians to uncover erased or deteriorated texts
o Two Institutions, Two
Perspectives, One Partnership, in which the University of Oregon
and Oregon State University describe their collaborative partnership
around digital scholarship and publishing
o Using the Amazon
Cloud to Host Digital Scholarship Projects, addressing how Emory
University is using this solution for some innovative projects that
need an environment less restrictive than those provided by the local
institution
o
Strategies for Fostering a Culture of Open Access,
where representatives from the Coalition of Open Access Policy
Institutions will share their strategies for gaining faculty buy-in,
developing outreach programs, and tying Open Access policies to the
land grant mission
A core area of CNI's program has highlighted innovations in digital
library content development. The Chinese Canadian Stories project
from two universities in British Columbia is a fascinating initiative
that brings narratives, a Chinese Head Tax Register, and other
materials together and encourages user interaction through an
educational video game, an interactive kiosk that presents materials
in three languages, and educational materials for grade school
students across the country. The Database of the Smokies, developed by
the University of Tennessee Libraries, is a complex reference resource
that includes rich image material, manuscripts, websites, and
published items that are linked to a comprehensive bibliography of the
region. The project includes a crowd-sourcing mechanism that
encourages contributions from sophisticated users. Indiana University
and Northwestern University have worked to develop the Avalon Media
System, an open source system that will enable libraries and archives
to curate, distribute, and provide online access to their audio and
video collections, something that should benefit many other
universities. Representatives from Baylor University will describe the
structured project management environment that they employ in their
digitization program, handling thousands of items per year ranging
from medieval manuscripts to sheet music to historical maps.
In the related area of institutional repositories, two
briefings will discuss next stages of repository projects. A report
from University of Hong Kong will describe how that institution
extended the model of its institutional repository to become a vehicle
for sharing information on people, grants, and patents. Their Scholars
Hubalso provides visualizations of networks of authors and metrics on
use of content extracted from external sources. At Arizona State
University, after successfully developing repository infrastructure,
they are now focusing on building content, assuring sustainability,
and fostering new uses for the content in the repository.
I will moderate a panel on developments in scholarly identity
management, which will also be the topic of the Executive
Roundtable held at this meeting. The panelists will provide insight
into areas where international systematic approaches and institutional
interests intersect. One of these areas is in capturing data needed
for metrics related to research impact of individuals and their
publications. We will also have a report from a Jisc-funded project
that has analyzed best practices in this area and has made some
recommendations regarding taxonomy, methodology and
interoperability.
CNI continues to feature sessions that address the preservation
of a wide variety of content related to our cultural heritage. I am
always delighted when David Rosenthal of Stanford presents at our
meetings, and he will be joined by Kris Carpenter Negulescu of the
Internet Archive to discuss the very substantial and not yet well
recognized preservation challenges that are emerging as the character
of the web changes. We will also have a technical update on the
Digital Preservation Network (DPN), which is providing a preservation
backbone for digital information and has high visibility in
information technology, library, and academic administration sectors.
Continuing our ongoing examination of the economics of campus-based
research data storage services, a session by Kent State University
will describe their local system for high-volume, medium-term storage
of digital items and will provide information on its costs.
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.
A session from bepress will share their thinking about their Digital
Commons Network, which is enhancing the browsing experience across
distributed institutional repositories; they will not only highlight
the success this system has had in attracting repository contributors,
but also explore how this method might be generalized to incorporate a
range of repository platforms.
Other sessions on information access and discovery include:
o Bibliographic
Framework Initiative, an update on the major developmental effort
led by the Library of Congress, to retool bibliographic data exchange,
looking beyond the traditional MARC framework
o Discovery
Turned Inside Out: Using schema.org and Google Site Search with
Library Digital Collections, in which Duke University is looking
at how to leverage traffic driven to their digital collections from
external search engines as well as looking at Google Site Search as a
potential replacement for their current discovery services; this
project includes one of the first reports on campus experience with
the schema.org initiative
o
Update on NISO's Open Discovery Initiative, which is
recommending best practice in index-based library discovery services
in a document that will be released soon after the CNI meeting
Linked data is a topic of interest to many in our CNI
constituency. Rob Sanderson of Los Alamos Labs has some important
perspectives to share with us on the successes and potential failures
of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and linked data; I was
fortunate to see an earlier version of this talk a few months ago; I
would rate it as one of the most enlightening and realistic
evaluations of where this technology stands, and I am grateful that
Rob has agreed to update and reprise this work for the CNI community.
We will also have a talk on Tuft's planning project applying linked
data in the context of archival description.
Intellectual property policies continue to dictate many of the
ways in which academe addresses access to and stewardship of digital
content. The University of Michigan will give us an update on a
collaborative project involving 14 institutions that are helping to
determine the copyright status of books in HathiTrust, with the
particular aim of making more content that is in the public domain
available through that digital library. We will also hear about a new
initiative, SIPX, which is an online copyright management,
distribution and analytics system, first used at Stanford.
Teaching and learning will be the topic of a number of
sessions, some focusing on the learning process and others on the
technical and economic aspects of digital learning materials. A
fascinating study of student use of digital resources for learning
will be presented by the University of Central Florida and the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; this talk will challenge
your preconceptions and encourage you to think about new ways of
presenting content to our students.
Other sessions highlighting teaching and learning include:
o
ZSRx: An Information Literacy MOOC, presented by Wake
Forest University, which will have just completed delivering the
program, targeting parents and alumni for participation in the MOOC.
This is an interesting example of a phenomenon I think we will see
much more of: MOOC platforms and approaches being used to deliver
learning materials that do not correlate directly to traditional
courses
o
ECAR Student Study, describing the annual EDUCAUSE
Center for Applied Research (ECAR) initiative, highlighting findings,
and discussing how institutions can become involved in the work
o
Administering and Assessing Four E-Textbook Pilots, a
project at the State University of New York, Buffalo, that will
provide data on a hot topic
o
Providing Library Course Reserves Solely in the Context of
Blackboard While Leveraging the Summon API, which is a novel
approach to leveraging library licensed content in a way that will be
most convenient to students and faculty
o The Move Towards
Open Standards: Enabling Next Generation Digital Learning, which
will provide an update from the IMS Global Learning Consortium, the
leading organization addressing standards for content in this
environment
Finally, we will have some sessions that describe innovations at
the campus level. The new Hunt Library at North Carolina State
University is notable for its engaging design and for the truly
cutting edge array of technologies that have been made available for
their researchers and students. We will have a session featuring their
new core services such as "project cloud space" and a discussion
of the type of staffing they have put into place to support their
technologies and services. At Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University (Virginia Tech), they developed the LibX project to
integrate librarians into users' webflow; the talk will focus on the
implications of disruptive organizational change and resulting
innovation in services. Dean Krafft of Cornell University will give us
his perspectives on the realities of implementing a new IT model after
an outside consultant's report three years ago, and he will discuss
the challenges of their new goal of "intentional
interdependence."
I invite you to browse the complete list of breakout sessions and
their full abstracts at the CNI website:
www.cni.org/mm/spring-2013/s13-project-briefings-presentations/. 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 recording the plenary
sessions and capturing a few selected breakout sessions using voice
over visuals and making those available after the meeting. There will
be a list of the breakouts we plan to capture at the registration
table, but please keep in mind that these session captures do not
include the discussion part of the breakout, and that we occasionally
have problems with the captures. There's no substitute for being there
in person!
You can follow the meeting on Twitter by using the hashtag
#cni13s.
I look forward to seeing you in San Antonio this April. 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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