I'm very pleased to announce the keynote speakers for the upcoming CNI
Member Meeting taking place in Albuquerque, New Mexico on April 3-4,
2017.

Our opening plenary speaker will be Alison Head, Executive Director and
Principal Investigator of Project Information Literacy (PIL). Currently
Alison is also a Research Affiliate at the metaLAB (at) Harvard and a
Visiting Scholar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's University
Libraries.

Since 2008, PIL has been asking probing and perceptive questions about
how today’s college students are accessing and using information in
their studies, their everyday lives, and their first work experiences
after graduation. PIL employs a project team to gather data from
students in over 60 higher education institutions of all types and has
published nine open access research reports on their findings. The
analyses they produce have gained wide recognition for the insights
they provide into use of information by students and new graduates. For
example, a report published in 2016 concluded that new college
graduates believe that they have good competencies for evaluating
information, but that they were weak in their ability to formulate and
ask their own questions. This has implications for information
professionals and for higher education faculty in general. PIL has also
provided insights into students’ use of library space and library space
planning efforts. For their most recent student survey, Alison and her
team published an open access data set, code book, survey instrument,
and user guide along with the report of their study.

I think that Alison will give you a new perspective on today's
students. Also, the thing I love about Alison's work is that she asks
questions not just about how to help students succeed at being
students, but how to help students thrive in their lives after they
leave the academy; this is something that we don't think nearly enough
about.

I'm delighted that Amy Brand, the Director of the MIT Press, will be
giving the closing plenary at the meeting. Amy has had a very diverse
career in academia and scholarly communication, and thus brings a wide
perspective on roles and opportunities for university presses within a
very broad context. In addition, the MIT Libraries last year released a
bold new vision for their future role; the MIT press will play an
important part in this, so her comments are  particularly timely.

MIT Press is a thriving, dynamic and innovative leader of long standing
in the university press world, both in terms of what they publish and
how they approach the processes of publishing. Amy has told me she will
share some of her thinking about the future of the monograph, the role
of open access, the challenges of discovery and preservation in a
digital world, and much more.

You can find biographies of the speakers, and their abstracts, at

https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2017/plenary-sessions-s17

In addition, we have just posted the preliminary list of breakout
sessions, at

https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2017/project-briefings-breakout-sessions-s17

These cover a wealth of timely and important topics. In the next few
weeks, I'll put out my usual roadmap highlighting many of these
sessions.

I look forward to seeing you in Albuquerque!

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI