We have got two fantastic plenary sessions lined up for the fast-approaching CNI Spring Member Meeting in San Antonion Texas next month, and I wanted to share some of the details with you. Both are tied very closely to the ongoing programmatic interests of CNI and its members.

You can find additional links, biography and full speaker-provided abstracts at the link below; here I offer a little bit of contextual framing for these presentations.

https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2016/plenary-sessions-s16

Professor Victoria Stodden of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will give the opening talk on April 4, exploring how to define the scholarly record in an age of computationally-enabled research. This presentation will explore some of the key emerging issues of what it means to fully document scholarly work that relies extensively on data and/or computation, with a particular focus on enabling the replication or reproduction of research findings. These are increasingly critical as we develop new norms for good scholarly practice and for our system of scholarly communication, and as our stewardship institutions work to manage this evolving scholarly record.

Victoria, who has both a PhD in Statistics and a law degree, is one of the genuinely foundational thinkers about reproducibility in scholarship and how this changes in computationally-intensive research. I am delighted that she is able to join us.

The closing plenary will be presented by Todd Grappone, Elizabeth McAulay and Sharon Farb of the University of California, Los Angeles, and will examine a central mission challenge for research libraries as they continue to collect contested and controversial parts of the broader cultural record that represent essential evidence to support scholarly work today and into the future. It seems that the scope of such materials is becoming more extensive, and in a digital world collecitons of such materials are often much more visible with potentially global reach. Further, the challenges and attacks on such collections have increased in intensity and and taken on technical as well as legal and policy dimensions.  The UCLA team will look at issues here from both the operational and policy perspectives, drawing upon extensive experience in collecting and stewarding such collections.

I am very grateful to Todd, Elizabeth and Sharon for helping us to understand these fundamental challenges in stewardship of the cultural record and advancing the conversation about how we address them.

I look forward to seeing you in San Antonio. Also, note that we'll be putting out the usual meeting "roadmap" covering the breakout sessions as well as the plenaries in the coming days.

Clifford Lynch

Director, CNI