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Roadmap for Spring 2015 CNI Membership
Meeting
A Guide to the Spring 2015
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Spring 2015 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at The Westin
in Seattle, Washington on April 13 and 14, 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,
April 13. The opening plenary is at 1:00 PM and will be followed by
three rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday, April 14,
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, April 13, after which
participants can enjoy a free evening in Seattle.
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.
I'm delighted to welcome Brewster Kahle back to CNI; he's shared his
thinking with us in the past, notably in 2004 when I proudly presented
him with the Paul Evan Peters Award, but it's long past time for us to
hear about what he's been thinking and doing in recent years, and
where he's planning to take the Internet Archive in the future. And I
know from conversations that he and I have had over the past few years
that he's eager to discuss pathways to broader and deeper
collaborations to advance the work of cultural memory
organizations.
You can read Brewster's formal biography and a list of some of his
accomplishments on the web page describing the plenary sessions. But
what you really need to know is this: Brewster combines great insight
and empathy with great passion and courage. He is a genuine hero.
Brewster is basically personally responsible for the world having any
archival record of the first five years of the web, and indeed for the
great majority of the web archiving that has taken place since then.
Beyond archiving the web, he has seriously engaged a whole series of
additional challenges managing cultural memory in the digital world,
and continues to do so; he'll bring us up to date on some of these
projects.
Professor Carole Palmer of the University of Washington will give the
closing plenary on Tuesday. Carole, who moved last year to the
University of Washington's School of Information after long service on
the faculty of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science
at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, is one of the most
experienced and most prominent educators developing programs in
informatics, data sciences and research data management. This gives
her a unique perspective for understanding professional and workforce
issues, organizational strategies for addressing research data
management in terms of people and expertise, and the evolving body of
knowledge necessary for informatics and data sciences. Carole will
share these intrinsically large-scale and community wide perspectives
with us, which I believe will make for a fascinating complement and
counterpoint to a number of other CNI presentations in recent years,
which have emphasized either institution-level strategies, funder
perspectives, or changing disciplinary research practices and the need
to support them.
I also particularly look forward to her thoughts about not just the
current situation, but about how these professions, disciplines, and
bodies of expertise and practice are likely to evolve in the future,
particularly as the norms and basic knowledge in various scholarly
disciplines become better established. This is, I think, an
under-examined but fundamental strategic planning issue for all
organizations supporting scholarly work.
You can find more details on the plenary speakers 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 2014-2015 Program Plan 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.
A core area of CNI's program has highlighted innovations in digital
scholarship and digital library content development.
I am very pleased that we will have Joshua Sosin of Duke University
with us speaking about his wonderful digital epigraphies project. The
infrastructure his team is developing will bring together a variety of
data streams related to Greek epigraphies, aligning related data from
multiple sources in a fully abstracted and independent layer. We will
also have a team from Johns Hopkins University, and they will discuss
their project on annotated early modern books and how the marginalia
in such works can be captured and analyzed in an electronic
environment. The Smithsonian Institution will describe the
Biodiversity Heritage Library and the ways in which it has transformed
in the networked environment.
Looking to more modern content, we will have a briefing on Ada: A
Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, published through a
collaboration with the University of Oregon Libraries. The
presentation will highlight lessons learned since the beginning of
publication three years ago, including reflections about participatory
media, open and collaborative review, and production issues.
The University of Cincinnati is bringing together the library, the
information technology unit, and the campus research office to develop
a rich collaboration in support of researchers and scholars. The
university is developing a research support ecosystem that includes a
research hub (a profile-based customized suite of programs for the
research lifecycle) and a repository. We'll hear about a program at
UCLA in which archivists, librarians, technologists, and faculty are
working with graduate students to effectively use special collections
in their teaching and research.
An increasing number of universities and colleges are partnering with
faculty and students working on high-end digital projects in a variety
of fields. In a study funded by the Mellon Foundation, a
multi-institutional group of librarians examined the competencies and
mindsets that are important to the practice of digital
scholarship through a multi-national field study; we will hear
their report.
We will have two important sessions on open access themes.
Representatives from the California Digital Library, Harvard, and the
Max Planck Society will report on their efforts to explore the
economic feasibility of transitioning to a more open and sustainable
publication model. Each institution will report on its study of a
range of factors and will also encourage discussion among participants
of the various issues that they will raise. In another session, we
will learn about the Smithsonian Institution's plan to provide
increased public access to federally funded publications and digital
research materials.
Many of the project briefings address a variety of themes regarding
repositories and related platforms, tools, and services. They
include:
o
Stewarding the Scholarly Record at the University of
Arizona, where librarians are coordinating their efforts with a
university faculty activity reporting system.
o
Innovative Uses of Islandora in which representatives
from three institutions will describe different attributes of that
platform in the context of use cases.
o Moving Ahead with
Fedora 4, which is using a range of tools for research data
management in Canada.
o How
Am I Doing? A Framework for IR Benchmarking, an exploration by
bepress of approaches to assessing institutional repository
programs.
There's a lot of progress to report on the preservation agenda.
A major Canadian project, represented by five collaborating
institutions, will update us on a program to develop and test
research data preservation workflows.
I'm particularly pleased to have a report from the electronic lab
notebooks project at University of Wisconsin-Madison. These systems,
which are widely used in some sectors of industry, don't seem to have
gained much traction yet in higher education, but promise to be a very
important future component in the management of research data.
Other preservation and curation sessions include:
o
Indiana University's Media Digitization and Preservation
Initiative, launching a project to digitize nearly 300,000 audio
and video objects. This is a large-scale response by IU to a study and
inventory of at-risk audio and moving image materials that they
published a few years ago, and it represents an important model of
institutional level systematic response to an increasingly pressing
stewardship crisis.
o
Enduring Access to Rich Media Content, a project at
Cornell to create a framework for preserving complex born-digital
media objects, using the very challenging world of new media art as
the test bed.
o
Software Curation as a Digital Preservation Service,
featuring programs at Yale and Carnegie Mellon that are examining the
preservation of software and executable content. The underlying
virtualization and emulation technologies in use here are increasingly
mature, and it's vital we understand where they are most applicable
and how best to use them.
o
On Building an Ontario Library Research Cloud for Shared
and Distributed Digital Curation, an initiative by 11 of Ontario's
university libraries to develop a secure, low-cost storage system
based on open source technologies and commodity hardware.
Digital preservation networked strategies and infrastructure
will be represented by sessions on:
o
SHARE Project Update, where presenters will provide an
update on project strategies and demonstrate the beta release of the
notification service for this higher education and research community
initiative that will make research assets easier to discover and
manage.
o
Digital Preservation Network Progress Report, which
will describe progress made in preparation for a "soft launch" of
this major infrastructure component later in 2015.
o
The Academic Preservation Trust: Update on First Months of
Production, which will report on the first production site at
University of Cincinnati and discuss decisions made during the
implementation process.
We are seeing a good deal of progress on name and identity
infrastructure (in the broad sense) but we still face significant
challenges in implementation. I want to call your attention to a
session from Karen Smith-Yoshimura of OCLC Research that will analyze
the current state of play in institutional identifiers; this is
rapidly emerging as a major problem area from a surprising number of
perspectives and I think is going to demand more attention. We will
also have a report on Social Networks and Archival Context, a
tremendously important effort to develop an international archival
description cooperative that is working to provide names and
biographical descriptions linked to and providing context through
historical records.
Two sessions will analyze different aspects of the use of open
source software. At Columbia University, they have tried to
systematically leverage open source approaches to digital library
infrastructure in deploying digital collections. In a presentation on
navigating change in software sustainability and business models,
representatives from four institutions will provide their viewpoints
on the transition from the Kuali open source business model to one
that includes a for-profit software services company and discuss what
this may mean for other open source projects.
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. Alex Wade from Microsoft Research will report on
his company's efforts to bring new approaches to academic information
discovery.
A report on the BIBFLOW project will describe how linked data
will transform library internal workflows, and it will also evaluate
the plans of library-related organizations to determine their
readiness to support linked data. The German project InFoLiS addresses
the connection between research data and publications, using linked
data infrastructure for seamless integration into information
retrieval systems.
Some libraries are rethinking their technology infrastructure
to include partnerships and/or moves of some services to the cloud.
Reports on projects from the University of Notre Dame and the
University of British Columbia will detail their experiences.
Teaching and learning will be the topic of a number of
sessions, some focusing on services and others on digital learning
materials. One session will provide an opportunity for attendees to
learn about recent initiatives addressing the need to have access to
more data about learning spaces. A representative from the IMS Global
Learning Consortium will describe their Caliper Framework that
simplifies learning analytics. Another session will focus on
integrating libraries into online learning environments using reading
list technology. The Association of Research Libraries and two
institutional representatives will focus on providing accessible
digital content to users of information resources.
We will have some sessions that describe new services including
3D printing initiatives at two institutions. A group will report on a
Mellon-funded study to investigate a model for leveraging
institutional strength among libraries; the study resulted in a
recommendation for a cross-institutional network model for sharing
expertise across institutions. We will have a report on the services
that the University of Guelph is providing to researchers in the
field, with an emphasis on a toolkit that campus researchers can
easily tailor to specific needs.
A group of briefings will provide examples of campuses working with
technologies to represent and manipulate data on big screens;
the challenges here include organizational and technical management of
expensive and complex shared resources, and means of diffusing
expertise widely across faculty and students in many disciplines. We
will have three sessions focused on various aspects of the
technologies and associated services, including a Georgia
State/University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill briefing on their
hands-on immersive environments for student/faculty collaboration.
Presenters from three countries will report on their use and
management of video walls in academic libraries. The University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill will discuss how they are approaching
support of data visualization research at scale. As more institutions
develop these kinds of services, they can find useful models and
lessons learned from these examples.
Finally, I will report on the recommendations from a small workshop we
held in early March to develop a near term
agenda for work needed to improve security and privacy in
systems related to scholarly communication and access to scholarly
information resources. The focus was largely (but certainly not
entirely) technical and emphasized setting an agenda for various
groups to address rather than trying to engineer solutions to specific
problems.
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/mm/s15-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
#cni15s.
I look forward to seeing you in Seattle. 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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