Meeting Roadmap
A Guide to the Fall 2017
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting


The Fall 2017 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Omni Shoreham
Hotel in Washington, DC on December 11 and 12, 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 11. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be
followed by four rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday,
December 12, includes four additional rounds of parallel breakout
sessions, lunch and the closing plenary, concluding around 3:30 PM. At
this meeting, we are continuing to offer 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 7:30 PM on Monday evening, December 11, 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. Information about wireless access in
the meeting room areas will be available in your packets and at the
registration table; those staying in the CNI hotel room block at the
Omni Shoreham should also have free wireless access in their rooms. In
addition, we are running the mobile-friendly web app Sched from the
meeting website to facilitate online access to the meeting schedule.
And we’ll still have printed programs available for all, of course.

The Plenary Sessions

As is now traditional, I have reserved the opening plenary of our
winter member meeting for an update.

During this session, 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 identify 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 2017-2018 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.

Our closing plenary speaker on Tuesday afternoon will be Herbert Van de
Sompel, who is the latest recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award. At
the plenary, he will deliver the Peters Memorial Lecture, which will
address his latest thinking on future directions for scholarly
communication, with particular consideration of developments in the
Decentralized Web movement. You can see an abstract for this session on
our website; it promises to be provocative and thought provoking. The
talk is titled “Scholarly Communications: Deconstruct and Decentralize?
”
Herbert is well known to the CNI community. A leading researcher and
information scientist, he has had a distinguished and very fruitful
career and has spent his last fifteen years at Los Alamos (you can find
a full biography on our website). I am thrilled that Herbert is
receiving this award, and very proud to have known him and followed his
amazing career for two decades; I had the privilege of serving as an
outside member on his PhD thesis defense at Ghent University in 2000.
He is a consistently insightful and innovative thinker, and this should
be a memorable talk.

Highlighted Breakout Sessions
I will not attempt to comprehensively summarize the wealth of breakout
sessions here; with the new assortment of time slots the number of
sessions we can offer has become very large. However, I want to note
particularly some sessions that have strong connections to the
Coalition's 2017-2018 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; these will be noted on the
conference message board.

We have a particularly strong set of sessions on many aspects of
repositories. At the CNI Executive Roundtables in April 2017, some of
the participants spoke about what they believed was the next stage in
thinking about an ecosystem to support scholarship of their
institutional communities. Carnegie Mellon University will present
their strategy for building a more robust set of systems to support
their researchers, including an interconnected Current Research
Information System (CRIS) along with a new repository powered by the
figshare platform. In From Stock to Flows, Cal Tech will describe its
design for a system to redirect resources toward their institution’s
research outputs and workflows along with an architecture for sharing
data and other content.

Additional sessions on repositories:
• In Seven Years of Libra at UVA, the University of Virginia will
describe its move to a modular repository system.
• The Bridge2Hyku session will describe the development of a toolkit by
the University of Houston to assist libraries with migrating to the
Hyku platform.
• Shared Repository Infrastructure will report on a study that examines
115 research university repositories.
• The University of Pennsylvania will present plans to rethink its
institutional repository, especially in light of the Elsevier
acquisition of bepress.
• A session led by the Jean-Gabriel Bankier, managing director of
bepress, will discuss the reactions of the community to the acquisition
of the company by Elsevier and will describe plans for the future.
• A report on a study at Cal Poly will examine whether including
student-created materials in its repository has a positive impact on
the visibility of faculty scholarship.
• A report on the International Image Interoperability Framework
(IIIF), which has become an increasingly-import and widely implemented
standard for digital image repository interoperability, will provide an
update on that work. Note how often IIIF now appears in various project
briefings.
• From First Seeds to Now will feature a description of a harvesting
tool developed by bepress that shows publications in relation to
affiliated institutions.

A session will focus on two projects aimed at streamlining libraries’
contributions to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA): one on
the Hydra-in-a-Box project and one on DPLA Exchange and SimplyE, an
important new e-book reading platform.

Many CNI member institutions are developing a range of capabilities and
organizational strategies related to data services and the support for
new scholarly practices (e-research, digital humanities, and digital
scholarship). The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL)
established a project to support shared stewardship of research data
through a network of expertise; they will present their vision for
seamless access to research data management platforms and services for
Canadian institutions and researchers.

Additional sessions on data and e-research/scholarship include:
• a report on the Data Science in Libraries workshop, including a
roadmap to integrating data science in libraries
• a description of what the California Digital Library (CDL) has
discovered about research data management by talking directly to
researchers and an update on the tools that they are developing as a
result
• A Strategic Framework for Institutional Research Data Curation,
highlighting a report from an EDUCAUSE working group
• the session Data Capsule Appliance, on the important topic of
providing access to restricted or sensitive data for research analysis
• Always Already Computational, an effort to examine collections as data
• a description of the development of a digital scholarship center at
Rowan University

Other sessions will focus on new types of researcher practice and
services to support them. Nick Shockey from SPARC will talk about
engaging the next generation of researchers and librarians to advance
open practices. American University will describe its experience in
bringing faculty together in a conference to discuss new developments
in research and the changing roles of the scholar as policy influencer
and public intellectual in Tying the University Library to High Impact
Research. In Research Outputs: You Want Me to Do What?!? a panel will
examine the challenges and possible solution to develop a new approach
to increase visibility, impact, and compliance of research outputs and
data. Two institutions will describe their Research Sprints programs,
which target outreach to highlight librarians’ skillsets to work in
partnership with faculty, and the California Digital Library will
discuss its Library Carpentry Program to increase the skills of
librarians working with data.

A number of sessions will address scholarly communications and new
types of collections. We anticipate a lively discussion in a session on
the 2.5% Commitment Initiative, which proposes that academic libraries
contribute 2.5% of their budget to support open infrastructure and
content. Carnegie Mellon University will describe its project to create
a center for digital research and publishing, in partnership with the
university’s college of humanities and social sciences. The Public
Knowledge Project (PKP) Open Journal System (OJS) publishing platform,
used by many academic institutions, is undergoing a review and we will
learn about their plans for the future. CNI attendees will be invited
to provide feedback on ways this initiative can continue to have the
most impact possible. Colleagues from Germany will present the open
source platform they have developed for hosting encyclopedia content.
Martin Klein, a colleague of Herbert Van de Sompel at Los Alamos
National Labs will describe comparing a study of focused crawls and
Memento in conjunction with multiple web archives as techniques to
build topical collections. The session New Social Welfare History Image
Portal, created by partners from the library and museum communities,
will describe how the tool promotes access to historical materials
related to social reform movements. Rensselaer Polytechnic will
demonstrate a digital platform for people to create and share
multimodal interactive stories using digital library archives.

Libraries and museums partner to leverage collections and expertise. A
presentation by Kansas State University will highlight how the library
assisted the local museum to develop a replacement for its art display
web application.

Two sessions will highlight how content is being made more available to
researchers, including independent researchers: Serving Individual
Researchers, describing the JSTOR Access Model and the Open Access
Button for interlibrary loan systems.

Digital preservation and curation play a prominent role in CNI’s
agenda. Tom Hickerson and Annie Murray of the University of Calgary
will describe the project to migrate and preserve audio and video
recordings in a major collection recently received by the university,
the complete archive of EMI Music Canada and its partner labels. An
increasing number of institutions are participating in dark
preservation services, but there has not been enough attention paid to
the problem of tracking data from a local repository to a distributed
preservation service; a session on this topic, Beyond the Repository,
will present findings from a recent study. We will hear a report from
the APTrust on how it is fitting the digital preservation strategies of
its members after three years as a production service. Representatives
from the Fedora community will discuss a common file system that
specifies how repository resources are structured and stored on disk or
compressed archives. The Web Archiving Systems API Initiative is
concluding an effort to understand how we could develop standardized
interfaces and data exchange approaches; we’ll have a report on their
findings.

Discovery, interoperability, and linked data are topics of interest to
many in the CNI community. In the session Discovery in 2017, a panel of
representatives from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,
Ithaka S+R, and EBSCO will examine the current state of library
discovery systems in the context of identified user needs and search
behaviors. Improving Access and Delivery for Special Collections and
Archives will highlight projects from the University of Florida and
Stanford.

Additional sessions on discovery, interoperability, and linked data
will report on:
• a project at Notre Dame to enhance cross-disciplinary discovery
through development of a research tool called Convocate
• a new version of the Solr discovery interface used at the University
of Pennsylvania is combining records from HathiTrust with other record
sets and grouping them in new ways
• the JSTOR Labs recently-released Text Analyzer, a new way to search
which allows users to upload their own document to initiate a search to
find similar articles on the topic; the tool and collaboration with
Columbia University will be described in Creating a New Way to Search
• Johns Hopkins University's mechanism for faceted browsing and
searching of separate medieval manuscript collections
• different approaches to shared discovery of collections in A Tale of
Two Collaborations, by panelists from the Triangle Research Libraries
Network and Ivy Plustheir
• a pair of projects to make it easier for libraries and their users to
create, use, and benefit from linked data – the Linked Data for
Libraries (LD4L) Labs and Linked Data for (Metadata) Production (LD4P)
• the National Library of Medicine project to add Uniform Resource
Identifiers (URIs) to MeSH MARC authority records in preparation for
the likely for move to a linked data environment

Sessions focusing on technical standards will include one on
biodiversity information standards and one on annotation and publishing
standards work at W3C.

Explorations of how organizations are developing new services and
engaging communities are also key components of CNI's program. A panel
with presenters from the University of Rhode Island, North Carolina
State University, and Yewno will describe how artificial intelligence
(AI) is being and will be used in libraries.

A topic receiving increasing attention is the need to design
information systems that account for diverse cultural materials and
perspectives. A presentation on the Northeastern University  “Design
for Diversity” project will provide some of the foundational ideas of
the project, results of their environmental scan, and outcomes of their
first working meeting. We will learn about the outcome of a study
investigating how Georgetown University Library can become a world
leader in the study of slavery, memory and reconciliation, an outcome
of the university’s extensive review of its early connections to
American slavery.

New types of spaces are often developed to support innovative programs
and technologies. The new Wilmeth Active Learning Center at Purdue
University combines active learning classrooms with library study
spaces; James Mullins will describe elements of the space and the
facility’s embrace by the community. Presenters from the University of
Michigan will describe their plan to design a service framework and
space strategy to guide their organization’s work into the future.

Johns Hopkins University Press, Project MUSE and the Sheridan Libraries
are developing an interesting set of open educational resources (OERs)
through the Black Press in America Project. The presenters will
demonstrate the prototype of this innovative project.

Various aspects of analytics will be described in several briefings.
The University of Texas will discuss the complexity of collecting data
about use of makerspaces in the context of broader assessment
practices. The University of Michigan is exploring library analytics
for transforming their instruction program. We’ll have a report from
Jisc on several initiatives to gather, manage, and analyze e-resource
usage data.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) will present an
update on its National Digital Platform program and will also
participate in a separate session, along with representatives from the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Historical
Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC), The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)
on funding priorities and trends.

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 #cni17f.

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