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Roadmap to the December 8-9, 2014 Membership
Meeting
A Guide to the Fall 2014
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Fall 2014 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Capital Hilton
Hotel in Washington, DC on December 8 and 9, 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 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 and presenters
are also welcome. Refreshments are available for all at 12:15 PM on
Monday, December 8. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be
followed by three rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday,
December 9, includes three additional rounds of parallel breakout
sessions, lunch and the closing plenary, 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 8,
after which participants can enjoy a wide range of dining
opportunities in Washington.
This is going to be one of our largest meetings to date both in terms
of registration and the number of breakout sessions, so you'll have
many opportunities to meet colleagues old and new. As part of our
commitment to supporting leadership development within our community,
we have once again invited the current Council on Library and
Information Resources (CLIR) and Association of Research Libraries
(ARL) fellows to join us.
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, 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
We will depart with tradition at this meeting, and instead of giving
my usual talk at the start of the meeting, I will be doing this at the
concluding session. We will begin the meeting with a conversation, in
which I will talk with three colleagues about the changing landscape
of information systems in higher education, focusing on community
source, shared platforms and systems as services. The colleagues who
will join me are James Hilton, Dean of Libraries and Vice Provost for
Digital Educational Initiatives at the University of Michigan; he has
been in leadership positions in a number of inter-organizational
collaborations such as the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) and
HathiTrust. Michele Kimpton, Chief Executive Officer of DuraSpace,
Inc., has served as the leader of a key community source activity that
includes DSpace, Fedora, VIVO, and network-based storage services. Tom
Cramer, Chief Technology Strategist at Stanford University, has been a
leader, an active participant and developer in a wide array of
community platform initiatives. My intent is that this conversation
will assist the CNI community in understanding issues like diversity,
stability, resilience of the emerging landscape as some community
source projects morph into shared, network-based services, the
shifting loci of innovation and expertise, the changing role of
standards, and the implications of changes in the rate of innovation
and deployment. I believe this will be an important and timely
conversation that will help our member institutions with their
strategic planning and collaboration strategies, and it will include
time for questions from the audience.
During the closing plenary, scheduled to start at 2:15 PM on Tuesday,
I want to look at recent developments and the ways in which the
landscape is changing, building in part on what we've learned from the
opening conversation, and to outline some key 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
2014-2015 Program Plan. The Program Plan will be distributed at the
meeting (and will be available electronically on the Coalition's
website, cni.org, by December 8). I look forward to sharing the
Coalition's continually evolving strategy with you, as well as
discussing recent events and current issues. The closing plenary will
include time for questions and discussion, and I am eager to hear your
comments.
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 2014-2015 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 distribution, some using
traditional video capture and some using a voice over visuals capture
system.
Many CNI member institutions are developing a range of capabilities
and organizational strategies related to research data
management (including strategies for dealing with big data
and services addressing data curation and preservation
and the support for new scholarly practices (e-research). Our
meeting sessions range from international initiatives to campus
programs addressing the needs of researchers with relatively small
collections of data. I am very pleased that we will have Phil Bourne,
the recently-appointed first Associate Director of Data Science at the
National Institutes of Health, providing an update on the Commons, a
conceptual framework for the development of a system where research
objects (datasets, software, research papers, experiment descriptions,
and so on) are readily accessible and shareable by various
stakeholders. Another key development is 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 ARL, the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the
Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and we will
have an update on developments in this project.
Additional sessions on data and e-research include:
o Managing Research
Data, in which representatives from three universities and
DuraSpace will provide a high level overview of a number of
issues.
o
Development of the Small Data Collections Archiving
Service, a new program at Johns Hopkins University that addresses
scholarly data at a much neglected part of the scale distribution.
o
Under the Mattress, which will address the concerns of
confidential data storage in regards to information collected by
faculty and graduate students in many disciplines, especially data
that involves security and privacy concerns. This is a critical topic
and one that many institutions have largely avoided because of its
complexity.
o
Publishing and Preserving Data as Primary Research
Objects, where representatives from Portico, IEEE, and Johns
Hopkins University will describe developing a framework to connect
publications and their linked data and to preserve that connection.
This exploratory work is a very interesting counterpoint and
complement to some of the more traditionally based efforts to extend
article citation practices to datasets.
An area of increasing interest in many research universities is
research metrics, understanding the impact of a scholar's output
in his or her community. In a presentation from the University of
Minnesota, we will learn about an interface they are developing that
produces profiles of scholarly output and research metrics for medical
school faculty while exploring new ways to contextualize, through
visualization and statistical analyses, these metrics to inform their
responsible interpretation.
Addressing many aspects of
scholarly workflow will enable others to make use of the data
that scientists collect and produce. The Center for Open Science will
describe its Open Science Framework, which is actually applicable
across a very wide range of scholarly disciplines, not just the
sciences, and how it intends to connect to other tools to develop a
research ecosystem. We will have a report from the Smithsonian
Institution on making currently hidden scientific field note
collections accessible. This work is part of a larger trend to
capture, preserve and share raw materials that are byproducts of the
processes of scholarship and not themselves intended for publication
but contain information that goes beyond what is part of the usual
scholarly record; they are a trove of valuable but traditionally
elusive and fragile information.
We will have a session updating work and deployment on the open
annotation standard, which will have important implications for
scholarly work in all disciplines, particularly in terms of
integrating resources.
An issue gaining new emphasis in CNI's program is privacy:
focusing on how institutions and broader community collaborations are
addressing privacy issues related to research, education, and
communications at both technical and policy levels. Two sessions will
explore this topic; one panel will explore libraries and user privacy
and another will examine educational analytics. Both of these are
areas where I think we have a lot of work to do in terms of both
transparency and protecting privacy. The presenters in both sessions
will welcome discussion from attendees.
Digital humanities from various perspectives will be featured
in a number of sessions. Prior to the start of this membership
meeting, we will have convened two Executive Roundtables on
"Supporting Digital Humanities," bringing together a number of
institutions that are involved in providing infrastructure, tools, and
services for faculty and students working on innovative projects. We
will be discussing how institutions are developing strategies to offer
services at scale, rather than as support for unique projects driven
by one or a small group of faculty, often supported by generous grant
funding. I've scheduled a project briefing to provide an update to any
CNI attendees who are interested in this topic; we had extraordinarily
high demand to participate in the roundtable, which is limited in
attendance to permit a genuine conversation, and despite being able to
schedule a second session of the roundtable we had to turn away many
interested institutions. I'll try to summarize the major themes that
emerged from the discussions during that session. Note that, as with
other Executive Roundtables, a written report synthesizing issues from
the roundtable will be available in the months following the fall
membership meeting.
Additional sessions addressing digital humanities are:
o
The Shelley-Godwin Archive, a project that will explore
the next generation literary archive, including the involvement of
"citizen humanists"
o Archives and Digital
Humanities, with programs from two institutions that are
developing initiatives to involve students directly in archival work
in their courses
o
Hybrid and Fluid by Design, discussing collective
capacity building for digital humanities at Pennsylvania State
University
Joan Lippincott, CNI's Associate Director, will describe the findings
from a workshop we held on Digital Scholarship Centers in
conjunction with our spring membership meeting in St. Louis. She will
also discuss next steps in that program. An increasing number of
institutions are creating these centers, often in libraries, to
provide a means for all sectors of the university to be able to use
high-end technology and tools with support from expert staff. Note
that a web-based in-depth report from the spring 2014 workshop will be
available on CNI's site shortly.
A core area of CNI's program has highlighted innovations in
institutional repositories. We will have a multi-institutional
update on the Fedora 4 early adopters, and a session will provide
perspectives from three universities (Wake Forest, Ohio State, and
Northwestern) that are examining next steps in their information
infrastructure. Yale University will highlight its plan to unify
digital collections with a single software framework and will discuss
the challenges of scale and security in planning efforts for the
future. The University of Chicago and the National Library of Wales
will describe their developments in digital repositories that each
integrate content from multiple partners.
A variety of sessions will discuss topics related to large or
comprehensive digital libraries. One of these will provide a
summary of the spring 2014 report "Developing a 21st Century
Global Library for Mathematics Research," which resulted from a
National Academies study that I co-chaired with Professor Ingrid
Daubechies of Duke University. Tim Cole of the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, a member of the study committee, and Patrick Ion of
the American Mathematical Society, who is deeply involved in follow-on
implementation planning discussions, will join me in this
presentation. Representatives from a German Research Foundation
(DFG)-funded project called DeLiVerMATH, will describe their efforts
to ensure efficient and user-friendly mathematical knowledge for the
community via improved methods and tools for content indexing; this
will be a very nice complement to the broader look at the literature
of mathematics and how it may evolve in a digital world.
I think participants will be fascinated by a presentation from the
Smithsonian on a project to do production level capture of very large
artifactual collections using 3D imaging technologies. This begins to
open up the next stage of mass digitization, as we move beyond
two-dimensional objects, such as printed pages, to an enormous range
of other materials. Understanding the evolving cost, feasibility and
quality tradeoffs here will be critical in developing community
strategies and the timelines to implement them.
Presenters from the Digital Public Library of America, the Texas
Digital Library, Duke University, and the University of Michigan will
describe their efforts to meet the intellectual property and access
challenges for large scale digital collections, whether aggregations
or repositories.
Just prior to the Las Vegas American Library Association (ALA) meeting
this summer, I had the opportunity to attend a day-long invitational
meeting as part of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
grant looking at the implications of consumer products (specifically
music in this case, rather than e-books, which have been better
studied) migrating to licensed, disembodied, purely digital files.
Going in I knew that a major problem was emerging in our ability to
preserve and provide access to these segments of the cultural record
as they transition to digital form, but I had not realized quite how
serious the problem had already become. I have invited John Vallier to
share his findings, which are deeply disturbing and I believe call for
a rapid, multi-pronged strategic response from our community.
Large digital libraries or collections allow new types of research to
be performed, notably through text mining technologies. For
example, Montana State University developed a project to do sentiment
analysis of Twitter data on the topic of public data sharing. At Notre
Dame, they worked with a historic digitized collection of trial
transcripts to analyze the relationship between religious tolerance
and political economy in the period 1649-1700. The University of
California, Los Angeles, has developed Snatch, an archiving and
analysis service for global news, which will include a number of
sophisticated tools. We'll have reports on all of these efforts.
A number of sessions will address digital preservation, a
central part of CNI's program. As always, I am delighted to have David
Rosenthal of Stanford University share his thoughts on the latest
developments in digital preservation, and in this case about the odds
of preserving various types of content and what we might want to do
about that. This is very closely connected to some of the thinking CNI
has been doing about how to scope the broad cultural record as it is
transformed in the digital environment, and to examine both the risks
of loss and the extent of preservation arrangements as an approach to
measuring digital preservation successes, failures, resource
allocation strategies, and coverage. You will also see this strategy
reflected in many of the other digital preservation sessions at this
meeting.
Stewarding New York Public
Library's Audio and Moving Image Research Collections into the
Future will be a very important presentation in which the New York
Public Library (NYPL) will share publically, for the first time, the
results of an Andrew W. Mellon-funded study to understand how much of
its audio and moving image collections are at risk due to obsolete
technology and deteriorating media. We know that in institutions
throughout the world there are large audio and moving image (film and
video) collections that are at immediate risk; there is a window of
perhaps 10 or 20 more years for action, in large measure digitizing
the content from these collections. After that window closes most of
the material will be lost forever. We know that the problem is large,
and expensive, but we don't know how large or how
expensive. The NYPL data complements the excellent contributions that
Indiana University made a couple of years ago in analyzing their own
holdings, and which resulted in substantial funding at Indiana for an
institutional rescue digitization program. We are going to need more
studies of the scale of at-risk institutional collections and the cost
of dealing with this stewardship emergency in order to mobilize the
necessary resources, and given the extraordinarily rich collections at
NYPL, the information they will share provides a vital data point.
Additional sessions on digital preservation are:
o
Ensuring Access to Digital Back Copy, featuring Peter
Burnhill of the EDINA project in the UK, who will discuss the Keeper's
Registry, which monitors what memory institutions are curating; he
will also discuss problems of reference rot. Keeper's is an essential
(and largely unrecognized) piece of the overall preservation
infrastructure, particularly for scholarly journals. I'm delighted
that Peter is able to join us for an update on developments in this
area and other related work.
o The 2014 National
Agenda for Digital Stewardship, reporting on an important annual
roadmap for national priorities from the Library of Congress-led
National Digital Stewardship Alliance that serves as a very helpful,
succinct overview of shifting priorities.
o
E-Journal Archiving, which will review studies and
report on a variety of initiatives that are working to ensure ongoing
access to born digital journal content.
o
Falling through the Cracks, which will describe how our
institutional structures actually impede 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.
New developments in publishing and innovations in scholarly
communication will be topics of a number of sessions. A session
from new CNI member Public Library of Science (PLOS) will
showcase a highly flexible and customizable
editorial and production workflow system for journals, conference
proceedings, and other content; I was fortunate to have a preview of
this system a few weeks ago, and I think CNI members will find this
extremely interesting. We will have an update on the progress of the
Library Publishing Coalition and its interest in coordinating a wide
array of stakeholders in order to move from collective action to
collective impact.
Discovery and linked data are topics of interest
to many in the CNI community. Two sessions on linked data will include
speakers from the National Library of Medicine, Cornell University and
Stanford University. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will
describe its project, working with OCLC, to transform bibliographic
records into linked data and speakers from a University of Montana
project, also working with OCLC, will describe their efforts to
establish semantic identity for accurate representation on the web in
order to make library resources more accessible. Representatives from
Northeastern University, JSTOR, and Ex Libris will discuss the
benefits of collaboration in optimizing content coverage in library
discovery systems. Speakers from the University of Central Florida,
Old Dominion University, and EBSCO will present information on
supporting topical research in discovery services and the drive to
produce more relevant results. Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R will
challenge librarians to carefully think through how they see the
library's role in discovery systems; this session will focus on ideas
presented in an issue brief he wrote earlier this year and we
anticipate a lively discussion on this topic.
We will also have a multi-institutional session on BIBFRAME, the
Bibliographic Framework Initiative.
As we will discuss in the opening plenary conversation, many
institutions are participating in cloud solutions or network
based services of various types, some involving open source
communities and others employing commercial services. One briefing
will discuss how the University of Tennessee, University of Oklahoma,
Boston College and Ex Libris are thinking about and employing the
cloud to realize efficiencies. We will also have an update on the
inaugural Digital Preservation Network (DPN) pilot project findings
and the next steps in that program. In addition, we will have a report
on the Global Open Knowledgebase, which is a collaborative project
involving Kuali OLE and Jisc, to provide an open data repository
designed to support how electronic collections are acquired and
managed by libraries; they are developing new applications for the
collaborative platform.
Explorations of how organizations are developing new services
are also key components of CNI's program. We will have a session with
presenters from the National Institutes of Health Library and the
University of Nevada, Reno, in which they will describe their 3-D
printing initiatives.
Northwestern University is developing an analytics dashboard for
Coursera MOOC discussion forums; this will assist faculty with
analysis of an important aspect of those courses.
OCLC and the Wikimedia Foundation will discuss increasing library
visibility through a variety of strategies involving
Wikipedia.
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. There
will also be a discussion of the evolution of VIVO software,
standards, and open-source community. 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 being developed in
collaboration with groups like CASRAI 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 IMLS, the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the National Historic Records and Publications Commission, and CLIR
describing their latest grant programs.
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
#cni14f.
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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