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Roadmap for the Fall 2013 CNI Member
Meeting
A Guide to the Fall 2013
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Fall 2013 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Capital Hilton
Hotel in Washington, DC on December 9 and 10, 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 9. 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 10, 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 9, 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; those staying in the CNI hotel room block at the Hilton
should also have free wireless access in their rooms. 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
2013-2014 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 recent events and 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 Eszter Hargittai, Delaney Family Professor in the
Communication Studies Department and Faculty Associate of the
Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Over
the last few years, Eszter and I have served together on the Princeton
University Visiting Committee on Information Technology, and I have
learned a great deal from her about information technology adoption,
understanding, skills, and practices among university students
(actual, prospective, and future). Her work is highly data driven, and
stands in sharp contrast to some of the hyperbole and anecdote that
have shaped many popular assumptions about technology and higher
education in recent decades. She also makes very important connections
in the relationship between fluency with technology and what we might
call information literacy in its broadest and most powerful
sense.
You can read Eszter's full bio and an abstract of her talk on the CNI
website.
I am delighted that Eszter has agreed to come and share her work with
our community, and I think that you will find it genuinely thought
provoking.
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 2013-2014 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 redistribution, some using
traditional video capture and some using a voice over visuals capture
system.
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. Our meeting
sessions range from international initiatives to campus programs
addressing the needs of researchers in specific disciplines. The
Research Data Alliance, a new organization supported by the US
National Science Foundation (NSF), the government of Australia and the
European Commission to develop research data exchange at a global
level, will offer an update on its agenda and plans. Another key
recent development is the formation of the SHARE initiative, a
cross-institutional coordination framework to insure access to the
products of federally funded research, in particular publications and
the data underlying published research. SHARE is a collaboration
between the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association
of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and
Land-grant Universities (APLU). A panel will highlight developments
from some of the NSF-funded DataNet projects.
We will hear reports from studies by OCLC and members of ARL on the
status of university-wide data policy planning. 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 more extended dialogue
between researchers and information professionals.
Notre Dame will describe its work to jump start data curation
activities on campus, and a project represented by the University of
Kansas and the University of Missouri will discuss plans for a
federated approach for data management. We will also hear a report
from Duke University on a campus-wide initiative to support
increasingly important data visualization tools and technologies,
including direct support for researchers and development of an
instruction program and educational materials.
Some of the projects in which librarians and information technologists
work with specific disciplines and sets of resources include work
underway at the Smithsonian Institution, which is developing an
information architecture and software environment to capture and
organize the digital "evidence" of scientists, capturing and
supporting the research process as it unfolds. Echoing these themes on
a discipline specific basis, we will also have a session on a
specialized information system for the documentation and publication
of archaeological research projects, funded by the German Research
Foundation (DFG); this is particularly timely in light of the
worldwide efforts to digitally document archeological sites, and the
growing convergence between research and underlying data in this
discipline.
The New York University led Databrary Project is focusing on
controlled and open sharing of research video data in human
developmental science; it is tackling issues related to the video
format and manipulation tools as well as policy issues such as privacy
and restricted access. This is a very significant project and I am not
familiar with anything quite like it; the promise here is to make a
substantial change in the way science is conducted.
A core area of CNI's program has highlighted innovations in
institutional repositories. We will have a multi-institutional
update on Fedora and a session highlighting a partnership by three
Canadian universities to develop a software platform that meets the
needs of each of their repositories.
A number of sessions will address digital preservation. The
Digital Preservation Network (DPN) will launch its Task Force on
Audio, Video and Film at our meeting and engage in a community
conversation.
Additional sessions on digital preservation are:
o
Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation (ANADP)
II, reporting on outcomes from a conference held in Barcelona a few
weeks ago and attended by representatives from national digital
preservation programs.
o
A National Agenda for Digital Stewardship, convened by
the National Digital Stewardship Alliance led by the Library of
Congress, reporting on their work to identify high priority and high
impact preservation needs.
o Using Informatics &
Visualizations to Understand Digital Preservation Activities,
demonstrating some interactive visualizations resulting from a
multi-sector environmental scan of projects related to digital
preservation.
o Expanding
E-journal Preservation, a Columbia/Cornell project that is
continuing important work on understanding and improving the coverage
of various types of periodicals and journals by major preservation
initiatives.
In a session that bridges digital preservation and scholarly
communication interests, Herbert Van de Sompel and Martin Klein of Los
Alamos National Laboratory will describe the Hiberlink project, which
is examining the extent of "reference rot" in references to Web
materials in scholarly articles and then suggesting some solutions
aimed at identifying and prototyping mechanisms for dealing with the
problem.
New developments in publishing and innovations in scholarly
communication will be topics of a number of sessions. Prior to the
start of this membership meeting, we will have held a pair of
Executive Roundtables on "E-book Strategies," bringing together a
number of institutions who are involved in an array of issues related
to e-books, including buying and licensing, e-textbook pilots, and
consortial arrangements. I've scheduled this project briefing in order
to provide an update to any CNI attendees who are interested in this
topic; we had very high demand to participate in the Roundtable, which
is limited in attendance, and we had to turn away many interested
parties. I'll summarize the major themes that emerged from the
Roundtable during that session.
Other sessions focusing on publishing and scholarly communications
include:
o
Reclaiming STEM Journals for the Academy, in which
representatives from four university presses will propose a project to
begin publishing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
(STEM) journals under an open Web scheme; the presenters are seeking
input and potential participation from CNI attendees.
o
Toward a Sustainable Approach to Open Access Publishing and
Archiving, presenting a strategy for a new economic model for
scholarly society publication; input from attendees will be welcome in
this session.
o Leveraging Shared
Publishing Platforms, presented by bepress and reporting on data
from their extensive offerings of library-published journals.
o
A session focusing on the innovations possible with electronic
publication, shared by Northwestern University, describing a revamped
publishing platform for their historic literary journal
TriQuarterly and Montana State University, focusing on using
HTML5, linked data, and APIs to build digital books.
o Developments in
Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), reporting on a survey
of ETD practice, a new Lifecycle Management of ETDs project, a
discussion of growing a campus ETD program, and a new tool that will
be released by ProQuest that will shed light on productivity and usage
of dissertations.
Cultural memory organization such as libraries, archives, and museums
have new challenges in collecting, organizing, and preserving
materials for future scholarship, both born-digital and digitized
material. We have a number of projects at this meeting that marry
specialized content with new tools for access and analysis. At George
Washington University, a team is systematically collecting subsets of
Twitter in order to provide content for researchers on specific
topics, and they are also collecting tweets related to the University
for the university archives. In addition, they are developing tools to
assist with the analysis and curation of the records. This is an
exciting project and is likely to be replicated in other
contexts.
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is working with
activists in the Iranian Green Movement to capture a variety of media
and technologies documenting the technological history of this
movement. HathiTrust will discuss its latest tools that will allow
scholars to create worksets for analysis of various aspects of this
massive digital library. Dan Cohen, Executive Director of the Digital
Public Library of American (DPLA) will provide an update, focusing on
future plans and DPLA's technical infrastructure. Two projects from
Columbia University will address enhanced features possible through
digital publication and tool development; one project has content
related to jazz musicians and the other provides access to information
about women film pioneers.
The session Visualizing the Temporal Narrative explores
narrative structure of various media and involves visualization
techniques and a faculty-librarian collaboration in teaching.
Additional sessions will provide insights into developments related
to teaching and learning and new models for educational
materials. We will hear a report of a study of perceptions of
library support for formal undergraduate research programs, learn
about a case study using accreditation standards to promote library
and computing services, and hear a briefing from the IMS Global
Learning Consortium, The App as a Metaphor for Learning Objects and
Tools.
Explorations of how organizations are developing new
services and how professional roles are changing are also
key components of CNI's program. We have been examining digital
scholarship centers, spaces with high-end technologies and specialized
staff that provide services to faculty and graduate students and
undergraduates working on significant projects, and CNI's Joan
Lippincott will provide an overview of trends in this area; Harriette
Hemmasi of Brown University and Vivian Lewis of McMaster University
will provide information on their campus initiatives and a new study
of digital scholars.
A session from the University of Guelph will look at issues related to
supporting researchers in the field who are accessing information and
collecting data on mobile devices. NYU and the University of
California, Berkeley will report on some interesting synergies in
their efforts to plan and benchmark services for researchers,
teaching, and learning. At the University of Texas, San Antonio,
librarians have implemented a context-sensitive chat widget into
online databases and have dramatically increased the number of
questions they receive from users. The University of Waterloo and
ExLibris will describe a new initiative to institutionally brand
electronic information resources. Elsevier will report on work it has
done in partnership with an academic institution to develop a new
recommendation engine.
An area that has been of long-standing interest to CNI is the
identity and name management challenge in the attribution of
scholarship and the management of the scholarly record. Ken
Klingenstein from Internet2 will provide an update on Internet
identity and its interactions with the research and education
community; there's a lot that has been happening in this area. Dean
Krafft of Cornell will discuss the VIVO-led initiative to provide
information about researchers in the context of their research
activities; he will describe an ontology that is intended to work in a
rich semantic data environment. As I have learned more about VIVO, it
has become clear to me that it is really both a system and a set of
interoperability standards or agreements that will find application in
a wide range of different systems. I believe that this work coming out
of VIVO merits close attention and may form an important part of the
long term infrastructure for scholarly biography, bibliography, and
social networking.
We know our members are always interested in understanding funding
opportunities for digital projects, and we will have a session
with panelists from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the
National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Historic
Records and Publications Commission describing their latest grant
programs. The session also will address new approaches to evaluation
and assessment of impact.
A team from Montana State University, OCLC, and ARL will report on
their multi-institutional analysis of the accuracy of Web analytics
reporting on the use of digital collections and websites. There are
some significant problems here that call for understanding and
attention.
Ithaka S+R will lead a session focusing on the more effective use of
data from a wide range of sources (national and institutional surveys,
statistics and analytics, and qualitative data) in library strategy
development and decision making, both at the levels of individual
institutions and collectively.
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) will provide an
update on its Alternative Metrics (Altmetrics) Project along with an
update on its Open Access Metadata and Indicators Working Group.
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
#cni13f.
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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