A Guide to the Fall 2016 Coalition for Networked Information Membership
Meeting

The Fall 2016 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Capital Hilton
Hotel in Washington, DC on December 12 and 13, 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. Light refreshments are available for all at 12:15 PM on
Monday, December 12. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be
followed by three rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday,
December 15, includes four additional rounds of parallel breakout
sessions, lunch and the closing plenary, concluding around 3:45 PM. At
this meeting, we are experimenting with some breakout sessions of
different duration, including half-hour sessions, allowing us to add
one more round and provide you with more opportunities to learn about
new initiatives. Some of the hour-long sessions are actually pairs of
these half-hour sessions that are thematically related. 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 12, 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, 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

During the opening plenary, scheduled to start at 1:15 PM on Monday, I
want to look at recent developments and the ways in which the landscape
is changing and outlining 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 2016-2017 Program
Plan. The Program Plan will be distributed at the meeting (and will be
available electronically on the Coalition's website, cni.org, in early
December). 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.

Due to the special presentation that will be part of the closing
plenary, the length of our meeting has been extended slightly, and our
closing time on Tuesday will be about 3:45 PM rather that the usual
3:30 PM.
 
Our closing plenary speaker on Tuesday afternoon will be the renowned
computer and information scientist Ben Shneiderman, a Distinguished
University Professor at the University of Maryland. Ben has published
many important books over the years; a particular favorite of mine is
the 2002 book Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing
Technologies. Most recently, Ben has been focusing on the changing
nature of the research process itself, and what will be needed to meet
the challenges of the present century. Last year he produced an
absolutely wonderful book titled The New ABCs of Research: Achieving
Breakthrough Collaborations, which I'll simply say should be required
reading for anyone engaged in any aspect of the research enterprise. He
will speak to these issues in his presentation.

Ben has also generously agreed to autograph copies of his book if you
bring them with you.

In addition to our closing plenary, we will have a special shorter
briefing from Dr. Robert Kahn, the long-time president of the
Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). For most of the
CNI community, Bob needs no introduction; he is known throughout the
world for his central role in the creation of the Internet and as
co-creator, with Vint Cerf, of the TCP/IP protocol. But he has made a
vast number of other high-impact and often prescient contributions; one
that has proved quite vital to the CNI community is his work in
creating the Digital Object Identifier System (DOI). In fact, the DOI
is only one part of a much broader Digital Object Architecture that Bob
has been developing over the past several decades. In his presentation,
which will precede Ben's plenary, he will review these developments and
bring us up to date on this important work. Bob has been a friend of
CNI since it's founding, and I look forward to welcoming him back to
our meeting.


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 2016-2017 Program Plan, as
well as many 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.

I am pleased to announce that Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet
Archive and a recipient of CNI’s Paul Evan Peters Award, will share
his vision about creating collaborative digital library collections
along with colleagues. In another timely briefing that includes
representatives from the Internet Archive along with staff from the
Library of Congress and the University of North Texas, we will learn
about how the teams are approaching identifying and selecting content
for the archive that provides a snapshot of the federal government web
at the end of President Barack Obama’s term.

We have a particularly strong set of breakouts on many aspects of
digital preservation and curation, including from national strategies
in a report from the UK, Canada, and the US and a session on
implementing a new electronic records archive at the US National
Archives and Records Administration (NARA). A panel with
representatives from the Digital Preservation Network, the Texas
Digital Library, Academic Preservation Trust, DuraSpace, HathiTrust,
Chronopolis, and MetaArchive will explore the current digital
preservation ecosystem.

Other sessions on preservation and curation include:
• Building Tools and Services to Support Research Software Preservation
and Sharing, an especially important topic for the actual reuse of
large data sets in e-science and digital scholarship.
• Weaving Together Preservation and Active Research, a project whereby
Johns Hopkins University and the University of Notre Dame are working
within the Open Science Framework (OSF) to integrate preservation into
research workflows.
• A Story of Preprints and Curation Networks, describing
scholar/librarian partnerships involving SocArXiv (a new preprint
archive) and SHARE. Curation associates are involved in providing
stewardship for the preprint repository.
• An update on the widely deployed LOCKSS project: Lots of LOCKSS
Keeping Stuff Safe.
• Documenting the Now, which will discuss supporting scholarly use and
preservation of social media content.
• A survey of preservation approaches from the Fedora community.
• Assessing Training for Digital Stewardship, which will report on
assessments of four National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR)
programs and present a tool for examining competencies for components
of digital stewardship.

A concern related to digital preservation is the fact that many
scholarly articles link to website materials, and those items are
particularly vulnerable to reference rot, the combination of link rot
and content drift. This is a breakdown of a vital component
(referencing) of the scholarly communication system. The always popular
Martin Klein and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National
Laboratory will report on a proposed approach to address this problem.

A core area of CNI's program has highlighted innovations in
repositories of various types. We will have an update on the University
of Florida’s program to expand their institutional repository services
to facilitate compliance and access to products of publicly funded
research; they are working with Elsevier and the Clearinghouse for Open
Research of the US (CHORUS) along with some additional universities,
research institutions, government labs and publishers in the next phase
of the project. We will look at future directions and strategies for
the pioneering arXiv repository, which is now 25 years old. Assessing
Institutional Repositories, a combined session, will look at approaches
by George Washington University and the University of Minnesota, along
with a report on undercounting file downloads from institutional
repositories by Montana State University. Another session will describe
national and international initiatives to build data repositories, that
also include other materials, pertaining to archaeological research.

In a session focusing on Islandora, we will learn about the progress of
the Islandora community and hear the details of a specific project,
developed at the University of Rochester, using Islandora to exhibit a
multi-media diary from their special collections.

Many CNI member institutions are developing a range of capabilities and
organizational strategies related to data services, large digital
libraries, and the support for new scholarly practices (e-research,
digital humanities, and digital scholarship).

Additional sessions on data, large digital libraries, and
e-research/scholarship include:
• Hathi Trust Research Center, which will describe the research arm of
the HathiTrust Digital Library and the kinds of text analysis and data
mining opportunities they offer.
• DRASTIC Measures, an open source digital repository platform for
performing computation on content (typically large data resources of
various kinds) by researchers from the University of Maryland. This is
a very important problem that is just now beginning to get serious
attention.
• Digital Humanities Collections and Technologies, where Johns Hopkins
will demonstrate its humanities data library and University College
Dublin will discuss using emerging technologies with a traditional
cultural heritage collection.
• Using Big Data, Asking Big Questions, exploring the results of a
National Endowment for the Humanities and Library of Congress data
challenge to researchers devised to demonstrate the research
possibilities of the Chronicling American Historic American Newspapers
collection.
• Another session on newspapers will focus on using software such as
that produced through the Open Online Newspaper Initiative (Open ONI)
and the adoption of the International Image Interoperability Framework
(IIIF) to improve user experience with these collections of local
resources.
• From Primary Resources to a Foundation for Programming, describing
how a University of Texas Arlington collection of materials on the
topic of disability has evolved from primary source material to the
basis for a rich set of programs and exhibits.
Two projects employing crowdsourcing for special collections materials,
one at the University of California, Davis and one at Yale, will look
at trends and outcomes of institutional projects, one for wine labels
and one for documents on theater history.

Four sessions will focus on new types of researcher practice and
services to support them. CNI was invited to partner with the EDUCAUSE
Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) on a working group to develop a
paper on supporting digital humanities; the co-leaders, Joan Lippincott
of CNI and Quinn Dombrowski of the University of California, Berkeley,
will provide a report on findings. Columbia University will examine
what model will support a digital initiative initially developed by a
faculty member that assumes greater importance and requires more
resources. A session with representatives from Stanford, IIIF, and the
University of Toronto will look at tools for digitized manuscripts.
North Carolina State University will describe the “scholar’s backpack
” that uses virtual environments to support research along with an
examination of research sharing tools by University of Rhode Island
faculty. The University of Illinois will provide an overview of its
Research IT program. Georgia State will describe expanded research data
services in a combined session with the University of Virginia
discussing its integration of research data services in campus-wide
research networks. Northwestern and Indiana universities will report on
their study of scholarly use of audio and video collections by
researchers in multiple disciplines in a combined session with
Dartmouth, which is applying some tools to a collection of educational
films in order to generate annotations that can be attached to each
film.

Scholars@Cornell will describe a data and visualization service whose
goal is improving the visibility of Cornell research offering insights
into the patterns and structures of scholarly collaboration.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) will report on
its recent paper recommending practices for altmetrics.

Representatives from presses at Johns Hopkins, the University of
Michigan, and New York University will describe developments in digital
long form publishing that leverage the affordances of the digital
environment. A session with representatives from the University of
Michigan, Emory University, and JSTOR explores the evolution of the
digital monograph.

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 (IMLS), the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Historical
Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), and the Council on Library
and Information Resources (CLIR) describing their latest grant programs.

The economics of scholarly publishing has been a mainstay of CNI’s
program from the earliest years, and this meeting features the findings
of the Pay It Forward Project, a seminal study of article processing
charges and associated costs in the context of library journal budgets
and publishing costs, conducted by the University of California, Davis
and the California Digital Library (CDL). This updates a
work-in-progress report that elicited a great deal of interest a year
ago at our meeting.

CNI has also had a programmatic focus on authentication and
authorization and we published a report on a survey we conducted in
2016 describing the current environment. A session will provide a very
brief overview of the CNI survey as well as describe work by the STM
Association and NISO, which is exploring how to improve user experience
and provide greater control and analytics over network activity related
to the publications of their members.

Ken Klingenstein, whose title as “Identity Evangelist” for Internet2
well describes his long career in Internet identify management, will
describe the notable progress he has seen in the last year in the
landscape of Internet identity.

An important project from Germany, the Deutsche Biographie, is an
enhanced digital version of two highly regarded biographical
dictionaries that employs encoding, authority data, and linking
mechanisms in order to add value to the traditional resources. I think
that this is a noteworthy development that serves as a potential model
for other similar work, and I welcome our colleagues from Germany to
CNI as they share it with us.

Discovery, interoperability, and linked data are topics of interest to
many in the CNI community. Sessions will include:
• Migrating Library Collections and Operations to Linked Data,
including a roadmap for conversion at the University of California,
Davis combined with a briefing on using linked data to better connect
special collections to the web at the University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign.
• Open Platform, describing an open source discovery layer and enhanced
discovery with open linked data in the Alma and Primo systems by the
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• A session by presenters from the Getty on The Provenance of Madame
Bonnier that will look at linked open data and intra-institutional
collaboration. The Getty, as some of you know, has been a pioneer in
making scholarly content available as linked open data.

LYRASIS, the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard will
discuss CollectionSpace. Funded by The Andrew Mellon Foundation, this
open-source platform is being developed and deployed to manage object
collections of many types in a cohesive way.

Libraries and university museums often have similar issues related to
collection description, discovery and management, but their solutions
have developed historically along different paths. This year the
University of Miami hosted (and CNI helped co-convene) “The Academic
Art Museum and Library Summit” that has produced a report on potential
avenues of collaboration between an institution’s library and museum;
findings will be shared in this session. In a briefing by Oxford
University, we will learn about their program to improve discovery of
and access to a wide range of digital assets including garden, museum
and library collections, open educational resources, and research
outputs and data.

Explorations of how organizations are developing new services and
engaging communities are also key components of CNI's program. We will
have a panel with presenters from the University of Rhode Island,
Virginia Tech, the University of Oklahoma, and O’Reilly Media, in
which they will describe approaches to makerspaces, virtual reality,
and the Internet of Things. Another session will focus on virtual
reality at the University of Oklahoma. A program at Northwestern is
using gaming platforms to foster student engagement with the university
’s One Book program and other activities. Offering services that
depend on emerging technologies requires a staff that is able to work
with the user community and develop programming around the tools. In
presentations by the Claremont Colleges and the University of
Pennsylvania, in a joint session, we will learn about staff development
efforts in two libraries. In addition, new types of spaces are often
needed to support these programs. In Spaces for Learning and
Scholarship, we will learn about new spaces and their associated
programs at the University of Notre Dame and the University of
Michigan.

Gardner Campbell of Virginia Commonwealth University, along with
Christina Engelbart of the Doug Engelbart Institute (the late Doug
Engelbart is credited with the development of the computer mouse,
hypertext, and many other important breakthroughs) will describe a
massive open online course (MOOC) that focused on thought vectors, a
phrase coined by Engelbart to describe collaborative inquiry and
problem-solving among knowledge workers.

Malcolm Brown of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and Megan
Oakleaf of Syracuse University will lead what promises to be a lively
discussion about how libraries might investigate the potential of
participating in institutional learning analytics programs.

I invite you to browse the complete list of breakout sessions and their
full abstracts, to be added soon, 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 #cni16f.

I look forward to seeing you in Washington, DC 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.

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information