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Roadmap to the Spring 2014 Member Meeting, St.
Louis, Marc
A Guide to the Spring 2014
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Spring 2014 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at The
Ritz-Carlton in St. Louis, Missouri on March 31 and April 1, 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,
March 31. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be followed by
three rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday, April 1, 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, March 31, after which
participants can enjoy a free evening in St. Louis.
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
sessions for our meeting. Bryan Alexander and I will open the meeting
on Monday with a wide-ranging conversation on current topics ranging
from implications of distance education and MOOCs to device ecosystems
and the growth of walled gardens for various kinds of media. We'll
look both at broad macro trends - economic, technical, social,
political - and some specific developments that have caught our
attention recently. And, of course, we'll speculate a bit about the
future.
For those who want to continue the conversation, we've scheduled a
breakout session later in the afternoon on Monday.
Bryan Alexander is a well known futurist, consultant and technologist
who has been heavily involved in social media, instructional
technology and technology-driven changes in pedagogy; a good deal of
his work has been focused on liberal arts colleges and he is a Senior
Fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education
(NITLE). He has also spent time as a professor of English, and holds a
PhD in that field. Visit his website at
www.bryanalexander.org for more information, or to subscribe to his monthly
newsletter, Future Trends in Technology & Education.
The closing plenary session honors the memory of CNI's founding
director, Paul Evan Peters, by presenting the award that CNI,
EDUCAUSE, and the Association of Research Libraries established in his
memory. The 2014 recipient of the award is Donald A.B. Lindberg, M.D.,
the long-time director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and
also, concurrently, in 1992-1995, the founding director of the
National Coordinating Office for High Performance Computing and
Communication. The criteria for the Paul Evan Peters award speak to
sustained contributions at the highest level in the use of technology
and information to change society and to advance scholarship. The
record of achievement by the National Library of Medicine under Don's
leadership is truly amazing in this regard, and spans areas from
research frontiers in molecular biology and genomics to the way that
individuals worldwide conceptualize, discover and use medical and
health information.
After presentation of the award, Dr. Lindberg will deliver the Paul
Evan Peters Memorial Lecture, reflecting broadly on the past, present
and future of information technology, the life and health sciences,
and the work of NLM. This should be a very special occasion.
You can find more details on the plenary speakers and on the Paul Evan
Peters award on the CNI website.
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 2013-2014 Program Plan
(www.cni.org/program/2013-2014/) 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.
Many of the project briefings address a variety of themes related
to scholarly communication, e-research, and repositories. OCLC
is doing some important thinking about the evolving scholarly record,
working to expand our understanding of what types of digital objects
we will need to curate for researchers from generations to come. A
session on the Journalism Digital News Archive (JDNA) provides a good
case study of how the Internet environment is having a major impact on
traditional forms of evidence that supports scholarly work and will
examine the challenges of preserving born-digital news.
Other scholarly communications sessions include:
o SHARE Project
Update, a proposed system of cross-institutional repositories, in
which presenters will focus on an automated system for registering and
disseminating events related to research results (such as publication
of an article or deposition of a dataset). This is a very rapidly
evolving vision and implementation plan.
o
Can a Consortium Build a Viable Preservation
Repository? in which representatives from the Academic
Preservation Trust (APTrust) describe their project, including its
planned relationship to the Digital Preservation Network (DPN).
o Community-based
Stewardship at Pennsylvania State University, where they will
report on their initiatives to provide a repository both for scholars
and for institutional records.
o
Use Altmetrics to Uncover the Hidden Scholarly
Dialogue, an exploration by Plum Analytics of new modes of
understanding the impact of scholars' work.
We will have a report on a study from University of Michigan that
collects data and analyzes the actual impact of library purchasing on
the economics of university press publishers; it has been
conventional wisdom for some time that as some libraries spend more on
serials and less on monographs, it has hurt the viability of
university presses. This study takes a closer look at the data.
A core area of CNI's program has highlighted innovations in digital
library content development. Two libraries will share their
strategies for contributing local/regional content to the Digital
Public Library of America (DPLA). An important German project
describing the creation of an open access, comprehensive digital
encyclopedia of World War I, compiled as an international
collaboration, will be featured. A briefing on Manuscriptlink will
discuss tools for re-aggregating segments of medieval manuscript
materials that are held in geographically dispersed locations.
CNI continues to feature sessions that address the preservation
of a wide variety of content related to our cultural heritage. Portico
is moving beyond journal preservation to begin to address other
challenges, such as the preservation of e-books, and I want to bring
that work to the attention of our CNI constituency. We will also have
a presentation that highlights the work of participants in the
National Digital Stewardship Residency Program from individuals
working at PBS and the National Security Archive.
We are seeing a maturation of work on efforts related to researcher
identifiers and research management systems. I want to call your
attention to a program called CASRAI; this work is seeking to simplify
interoperability of research administration data across multiple
tools, organizations, and countries; our colleague from Jisc will
describe the UK work on this project. We will also learn about
an OCLC effort to examine the integration of researcher identifiers
into the systems and practices of libraries, publishers, and funders.
Representatives from ORCID and two universities will describe their
work to integrate ORCID researcher identifiers into the repository
workflow.
We will have a update on the ResourceSync project, which assists third
parties to keep information synchronized with selected web resources
and thus promises to be an important part of the broad web information
ecology, by Herbert Van de Sompel and Martin Klein of Los Alamos
National Laboratory.
Large collections of digital materials need new perspectives and
solutions for information organization, access and retrieval,
particularly as the ecology of discovery and access systems becomes
ever more complex. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas will describe
their work on an exploratory project using linked data with their
digital collections. Representatives from Ex Libris and Boston
University will discuss their work on optimizing known item discovery.
Tom Cramer of Stanford will discuss how the Hydra Project and
Blacklight are providing a means for institutions to develop a
technical framework that promises an integrated stack of services for
all types of digital content. A session on the International Image
Interoperability Framework (IIIF) will focus on an approach to
delivering a wide variety of digital images in a standard way.
An increasing number of universities and colleges are developing a set
of services to support the work of faculty and students working on
high-end digital projects in a variety of fields; these are sometimes
developed as digital scholarship centers or labs. Immediately
following the CNI meeting, we will have a specialized (invitational)
workshop examining the role, services, staffing, and programs of these
centers. At the membership meeting, we will highlight digital
scholarship or digital humanities centers from the University of Notre
Dame and the University of Miami in one session, and the University of
Oregon in another. A session from the University of Rochester will
focus on support of digital humanities faculty and its relationship to
teaching and learning. Staff from the University of Calgary will
discuss their experiences working with faculty and graduate students
in their data visualization center.
A session will provide an opportunity for attendees to see the beta
version of FLEXSpace, the Flexible Learning Environment eXchange, a
new project that aggregates information on many aspects of
institutions' physical learning spaces on an ARTstor Shared Shelf
platform.
Teaching and learning will be the topic of a number of
sessions, some focusing on services and others on digital learning
materials. The Association of College & Research Libraries will
highlight its work on the synergies between information literacy and
scholarly communication.
Other sessions highlighting teaching and learning include:
o
Perceptions of Library Support for Formal Undergraduate
Research Programs, a systematic study of these programs.
o
E-Textbook Initiatives in Libraries and IT
Organizations, where we will hear about projects in three
institutions and what they are learning.
o Course Readings
in Learning Management Systems, which describes an initiative to
integrate publications licensed by EBSCO directly into a learning
management system.
We will have some sessions that describe new services and
assessment, including a report on a study of Centers for
Excellence in Libraries, an assessment of a social media program run
by a library, and a critical look at library and IT assessment
strategies. Findings from the Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2013,
recently published, will be presented. Three liberal arts colleges
will report on their assessments of their e-book programs. North
Carolina State University and the University of Calgary will describe
their innovative and popular equipment loan programs.
In order to better serve our constituencies, we need to understand
what competencies are needed for staff; the Association of Research
Libraries has worked with two international groups to identify these
competencies in relation to support of e-research and scholarly
communication and will report on the outcomes of this work.
Finally, we will have a session that addresses some issues that have
been on my mind and that I believe deserve the attention of CNI
representatives. Helen Cullyer of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and
consultants Joe Esposito and Gary Price, will lead a session on
Privacy in the Digital Age: Publishers, Libraries and Higher
Education, examining the implications of the amount of data that
our institutions and businesses are collecting regarding the
information we access and use.
I invite you to browse the complete list of breakout sessions (full
abstracts will be posted soon) at the CNI website:
http://www.cni.org/spring-2014/s14-project-briefings-breakout-sessions/. In many cases you will find these abstracts include
pointers to web resources that you may find useful to explore prior to
the session, and after the meeting we will add materials from the
actual presentations as they are 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
#cni14s.
I look forward to seeing you in St. Louis. 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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