Meeting Roadmap
A Guide to the Spring 2018
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting


The Spring 2018 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Westin
Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego, CA on April 12 and 13, 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 Thursday, April 12.
The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be followed by four rounds
of parallel breakout sessions. Friday, April 13, 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 Thursday, April 12, after which participants can enjoy an evening in
San Diego.
 
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 is available in your packets and at the
registration table. In addition, we are running the mobile-friendly web
app Sched to facilitate online access to the meeting schedule; Sched is
available from the meeting website
(https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2018), and we’ll still have printed
programs available for all.

The Plenary Sessions

We have two wonderful plenary sessions lined up. Both are tied very
closely to the ongoing programmatic interests of CNI and its members.

Our opening speaker will be Dr. Joan Lippincott, CNI's Associate
Executive Director. Joan has been with CNI since the earliest days and
in the last decade or so has been doing a range of unique, innovative
work on issues such as how to support technology-intensive scholarship
at scale within our higher education institutions, the issues involved
with assessment of programs and services to support teaching and
research, and the very complex relationships among space,
organizations, and services within the campus community. While many in
the CNI community will certainly be familiar with her in-depth work,
particularly those with specific interests in one or another of these
areas, in her keynote, "Where All Roads Lead: Keeping the User at the
Center," she's going to try to offer a synthesis of developments and
future prospects and priorities that I believe will be tremendously
valuable to the broader community.

I'm delighted that Larry Smarr, the Director of the California
Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2),
will be giving the closing plenary at the meeting. I've followed
Larry's work for some 30 years; he has been one of the great drivers
behind the development of high performance computing and communications
networks and cyberinfrastructure to support research for three decades.
He has an uncanny ability to identify important developments on the
horizon and also to place them in historical context. Most recently he
has been spending a great deal of time on the Pacific Research Platform
(PRP), which offers a look into the next-generation computational
environment that will yet again transfigure science and scholarship; he
will be discussing the PRP in his keynote, "Towards a High-Performance
National Research Platform Enabling Digital Research."

Larry is also stunningly versatile, with an amazing range of interests.
The March 2018 issue of The Atlantic includes a discussion of his work
in taking control of his personal health using cutting-edge technology
(medically squeamish readers are cautioned):
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/larry-smarr-the-man-who-saw-inside-himself/550883/.

You can find biographies of the speakers, and their abstracts, at
https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2018/plenary-sessions-s18.

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 2017-2018 Program Plan (https://www.cni.org/program) 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.

Research workflows and scholarly communications are important linchpins
of CNI's agenda, and we're fortunate to have Don Waters of The Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation and Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R provide us with
an overview of the development of research workflow platforms and the
strategic implications for the academy. In another session,
Collaboration to Advance Open Scholarly Communication Infrastructure, a
panel will consider open scholarly communication, as well as the
commercial and community players in the current system.

Issues relating to institutional repositories will be well represented
at this meeting. A panel will discuss a report on recommendations for
next generation repositories, which positions repositories as the
foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for
scholarly communication. Other sessions include:
• Tom Cramer of Stanford University will describe a research
information ecosystem, RIALTO, to systematically capture and relate
research outputs to people, groups and projects.
• The University of Florida will give an update on their pilot project
to enhance the IR and maximize visibility, impact, and dissemination of
articles.
• A presentation from the University of New Hampshire will introduce a
project to link the library’s digital collections repository with an
open source geospatial search interface.
• We'll have an update on the latest iteration of Fedora.
• The University of Connecticut will describe their process for
examining collections and technology systems while considering whether
to have one platform for all digital collections.
• The University of Montana will report on a dataset compiled with the
Repository Analytics & Metrics Portal, which suggests that IRs offer
significant value when optimized for search engines and when user
activity is accurately reported.

Many CNI member institutions are developing a range of capabilities and
organizational strategies related to research data management (RDM),
including strategies for dealing with big data and services addressing
data curation, data discovery, and the support for new scholarly
practices (e-research). Sessions on data and research services include:
• A presentation describing a data-sharing model for decentralized RDM.
• The findings of The Realities of Research Data Management, an OCLC
Research project, which explores the context and choices research
universities face in building or acquiring RDM capacity.
• An overview of how the Duke University Libraries and the University
of Minnesota Libraries have scaled up RDM and curation services to
better serve their communities.
• A session from the University of California, San Diego on setting up
a staging server to capture research data and assist researchers and
curators to collaborate on a shared platform.
• A German project to create an interactive online platform for the
discussion and quality assessment of research data, Discuss Data, which
will serve as a layer between distributed repositories and scholars.
• The University of New Mexico will discuss how they are building
communities of practice through a series of monthly workshops focused
on integrating lifecycle data management concepts into common use cases.
• A presentation providing overviews of development, implementation and
infrastructure considerations for institutions or consortia considering
an online research data repository, based on lessons learned from the
launch of the Texas State Research Data Repository.
• A discussion of open data in archives and special collections and
concerns related to privacy and empathy.

A number of sessions will focus on the digital humanities (DH),
including a San Diego State University DH initiative that has grown
from a grass-roots initiative into a strategic “Area of Excellence”
with a unique focus on global diversity. A panel of speakers will
describe an NEH-funded project aimed at understanding how various DH
stakeholders discover, create, and reuse digital scholarship, as well
as the workflows and tools they use throughout the research process.
Duke University will discuss DH publishing, focusing on expansive and
dynamic projects. Representatives from Johns Hopkins and University
College London will give an update on their project developing a linked
data approach for humanities data. Other sessions will focus on
developments in infrastructure and curation for a variety of digital
objects in the humanities, including two sessions on the evolution of
digital libraries for medieval manuscripts, and a talk that examines
how "machine vision" techniques can be used to analyze and organize
large visual collections with tens of thousands of images. We'll also
have a talk on text data mining copyrighted and use-limited data sets.

We'll have a session by McMaster University on how the implementation
of a campus-wide research information management system provided a
means of compiling the institution’s research information into a
standardized format. The University of Cincinnati will discuss
enhancements to their ecosystem focused on research, scholarship, and
knowledge management.

Ken Kingenstein from Internet2 will look at the transition of privacy
and Internet identity issues, and current related developments and
concerns. We'll also have two sessions dealing with the soon to be
effective European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): one on
securing institutional repositories, and another that will discuss
questions about privacy and information transfer that arose as
DuraCloud pursued an international partnership program. GDPR and its
implications for institutions outside of Europe is a confusing issue
that has garnered a lot of attention recently.

Other sessions will focus on collections and discoverability. The
Claremont Colleges Library will describe their process in trying to
provide access to collections in ways that are informed by how the
community uses those resources. A digital repository from the
University of Albany for both archival description and digital content
will make its collections usable to a broad audience. A panel will
consider the issues and implications for platforms and libraries of
choosing to link to open access articles, version of record copies,
licensed materials, etc.

We have a very strong set of sessions on various aspects of digital
preservation, a topic of great interest to our members. Email
preservation and related issues is an important theme this year: prior
to the opening of the membership meeting, we will hold two rounds of a
limited attendance Executive Roundtable on the topic Strategies for
Preserving Institutional and Researcher Email. We’ll also have a
report on an initiative supported by The Andrew Mellon Foundation and
the Digital Preservation Coalition to look at strategies for preserving
email: Email Archives: Issues, Tools, and Gaps. Another breakout
session will discuss ePADD, open source software funded by the
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), that enables
institutions to collect email of potential historical or cultural
value, screen it for sensitive, confidential, or legally-restricted
information, and make it discoverable and accessible by scholars.

Other sessions on digital preservation include:
• Building Digital Coherence Through Collective Action: Creating
DURAble Trust and DPNing Scholarship by Moving Together, where
presenters from the University of Michigan (UM), DuraSpace, the Digital
Preservation Network (DPN), and APTrust will describe their process for
a shift of all of UM Library's major digital collections, preservation,
bibliographic, and information discovery platforms.
• Cobweb: Collaborative Digital Collection Development for Web
Archives, which will describe a joint project of the California Digital
Library, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard that
supports key functions of collaborative collection development.
• Preservation: An Opinionated Approach, which will present principles
and recommendations that form a strategy for decision making for
selecting digital asset management and preservation solutions.
• Preserving Digital Content at Scale: Meeting the Challenges of AV and
Big Data, which will provide information about a preservation node for
audio and moving image content (and for other very large data
collections) that addresses the most significant challenges of
preserving this type of content.
• Supporting 3D/VR Technologies in Academic Libraries: Curation and
Preservation Challenges will discuss work being conducted at the
University of Oklahoma to develop strategies and best practices for
supporting 3D and virtual reality technologies in research and
instruction.
• PRESQT: Assessing Researcher and Library Needs for Research Data &
Software Preservation Quality Tools will describe a year-long outreach
effort to address gaps in consistently preserving research data and
software in the academic, publishing, and software development
communities.
• On a related note, Sunsetting: Strategies for Portfolio Management
and Decommissioning Projects, will present strategies for
decommissioning projects and greatly reducing the maintenance burden.

A selection of project briefings addresses a variety of themes
regarding platforms, tools, and services. We’ll hear about the
Audiovisual Metadata Platform to support mass description, and receive
an update on the Avalon Media System. We will also learn about the
prototyping of a linked data platform for production cataloging
workflows. Jeffrey Spies will explore some of the decentralized and
distributed technologies and protocols (e.g., BitTorrent, blockchains)
that are being discussed as mechanisms by which to reconfigure
scholarship. Presenters from LYRASIS and the Digital Public Library of
America will discuss assessing the viability and sustainability of open
source software programs. A new integrated library system (the first
major application of a new open source library services platform),
developed by the FOLIO community, will also be discussed.

A session will detail a new Association of Research Libraries
assessment program to help research libraries translate their values
into measures. Another presentation will report on the University
Futures, Library Futures project, examining how changes in the higher
education are informing library services, and how it is being used by
Georgia State University.

We will have some sessions that describe new services, spaces, and new
ways of working with faculty and students. Makerspaces in the Academic
Library features two projects: examining the return on investment and
sustainability of San Diego State University Library's program, and
makerspace programs to support arts and design curricula at Berkeley.
DePaul University will talk about building a maker community. A team
from the University of Houston Libraries will discuss the establishment
of the Digital Research Commons. We'll also hear about UC Merced's
LibraryCAVE. North Carolina State University will discuss their digital
and data science skills workshops. A session from the University of
Oklahoma will discuss a method for quickly launching engaging
library/museum exhibits. From the University of Victoria Libraries, a
suite of services for grant funded projects, a "menu" of services for
researchers as they develop their grant applications. The University of
Arizona will describe an initiative to develop services and position
the libraries as the natural hub for digital scholarship and data
science.

Finally, we will have sessions addressing issues of equity and
diversity in access. We'll hear about the challenges of accessing
information resources for independent and unaffiliated researchers.
Another session will explore the issue of linguistic diversity on the
Internet. Char Booth will examine academic library practice through the
lenses of information equity and economic justice.

I invite you to browse the complete list of breakout sessions at the
CNI website:
https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2018/project-briefings-breakout-sessions-s18.
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 be recording the plenary sessions
and a few breakout sessions and capture some additional ones using
voice over visuals. All these videos will be made available in the
weeks following 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 #cni18s.

On behalf of the CNI team, I look forward to welcoming you to San
Diego. 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