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


The Fall 2018 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Omni Shoreham
Hotel in Washington, DC on December 10 and 11, 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 issues 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; there will be coffee and an opportunity to meet some
long-time members starting at 11. Light refreshments are available for
all at 12:15 PM on Monday, December 10. The opening plenary is at 1:15
PM and will be followed by four rounds of parallel breakout sessions.
Tuesday, December 11, includes four additional rounds of parallel
breakout sessions, lunch and the closing plenary, concluding around
3:30 PM. We are continuing to offer breakout sessions of different
duration at this meeting, including half-hour sessions, allowing us to
provide you with more opportunities to learn about new initiatives.
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 10, after
which participants can enjoy a wide range of dining opportunities in
Washington.

The CNI meeting program is subject to last minute changes (remember, it
’s December, and weather can sometimes surprise us), 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 (https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2018/schedule-f18) 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 2018-19 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 CNI's continually evolving strategy with you, as well as
discussing recent events and current issues. There’s so much to talk
about. 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 Dr. Patricia
Flatley Brennan, director of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM).
Since her appointment in 2016, Patti has worked to position the Library
to be the hub of data science at the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), and has done tremendous work in formulating institutional
approaches to stewardship for data in the biomedical sciences. In her
talk, "The National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of
Health Partnership in Accelerating Discovery Through Data," Patti will
discuss how digital content is changing research, how NLM is thinking
about its role as part of the preservation of biomedical research data,
and provide her thoughts on the ways that scholarship is documented and
disseminated. I am delighted that Patti will be here to share her
insights into these critical areas; I’ve had opportunities to work
with her and I can attest that she’s taken a deeply knowledgable and
very thoughtful approach to shaping strategies for NLM and the broader
NIH. It’s very clear to me that NLM sees partnerships with the broader
community as an essential part of their strategy; this is an important
opportunity to move these discussions forward. You can read more about
Patti Brennan on the meeting website.

Highlighted Breakout Sessions
I will not attempt to comprehensively summarize the wealth of breakout
sessions here; we offer a great abundance and diversity of material.
However, I want to note, particularly, some sessions that have strong
connections to the Coalition's 2018-19 Program Plan, as well as a
number of 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 will have two sessions on blockchain (or perhaps more accurately,
distributed ledgers, which is a far-from-new technology), a topic that
has been the subject of a tremendous amount of poorly informed
enthusiasm recently. It seems like we are in a world where blockchain
is the answer, now what was the question, whether the context is public
records, scholarly communication, or trading of financial instruments
or commodities. I'm thrilled that our good friend David Rosenthal, one
of the most incisive thinkers on these issues, will be with us to
consider whether distributed ledger technology is a viable solution to
problems in academic communication and digital preservation. This is a
don’t miss session, and we will be capturing it on video for those who
can’t join us; David previewed this at my seminar at UC Berkeley about
a month ago and I believe it concisely captures many of the limitations
of the various blockchain models. Meanwhile, Michael Nelson, another
regular CNI contributor who has done a great deal of work on aspects of
web archiving, will tell us why blockchain cannot be used to verify
replayed archived webpages, and what the implications are there.

Issues related to intellectual property, open access, and scholarly
publishing will be well represented at this meeting. The Internet
Archive (IA) will be discussing a couple of projects in which it is
currently involved. One presentation will report on a study conducted
in conjunction with several university presses to examine digitizing
backlist and out-of-print books and then making them available via
controlled digital lending by libraries. In another session, IA will
report alongside Impactstory and SPARC on building infrastructure and
services for open access to research outputs, including projects such
as Unpaywall and the Open Access Button.

Additional sessions in this area include:
• Promoting a Public Face for Scholarly Journals describes a joint
project by the American Historical Association and the Rosenzweig
Center at George Mason University that aims to extend the audience of
scholarly work.
• Representatives from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
explore open access publishing in academic settings and the budgetary
implications of article processing charges at an R1 institution.
• An update on Lever Press, which is made up of a consortium of
libraries seeking to establish a new publishing model with an emphasis
on the humanities.
• Panelists from three libraries and the Library Publishing Coalition
will talk about the work library publishers are doing, including
discussion of a few open source publishing platforms. As I have learned
over the course of the past few months, there is a great deal of
activity taking place in this area, much of which seems to have been
occurring “under the radar,” but which promises to really reshape the
landscape in the next few years.
• An interesting and potentially important new tool developed at Johns
Hopkins, the Public Access Submission System (PASS), allows for
simultaneous submission into funder repositories, like PubMed Central,
and institutional repositories. This is an important attempt (one of
the first in the US) to rebalance the relationships between publishers,
academic institutions, funders, and individual researchers in workflows
surrounding the publishing process.
• Martin Eve of the University of London will report on what's next for
the Open Library of Humanities, especially in light of the European
Union's Plan S.
• The California Digital Library will discuss partnering with Dryad to
address researcher needs and lead an open, community-owned initiative
in research data curation and publishing. This is a potentially
important new model that seeks to restructure institutional
relationships with independent data archives to introduce greater
systemic sustainability and better support faculty.
• Ithaka S+R has been working with the State University of New York to
examine its publishing activities and we'll hear about the
opportunities they've identified.
• Public Access to Research Data will include a report on a recent
invitational workshop organized by the Association of Public and
Land-grant Universities and the Association of American Universities
that seeks to advance open access to research data.

Scholarly practices (e-research, digital humanities, and digital
scholarship) and data services are closely related to the above themes,
and we'll have ample opportunities to hear about ongoing efforts in
these areas as well. Data integrity is a critical research element. Can
I Trust this Data? Selecting Data for Reuse and Other Dilemmas of the
Research Scientist will include a description of a compelling proposed
solution to the challenge of finding and using trustworthy
interdisciplinary data. Curating Reuse: An Institutional Approach to
Statistical and Computational Reproducibility discusses a University of
Colorado Boulder project to enhance existing data curation workflows
and enable wider and more effective reuse of data produced on campus.

Additional sessions on data and e-research/scholarship:
• A report on the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments describes a
major initiative to explore the integration of data science into three
research universities (New York University, the University of
California Berkeley, and the University of Washington) over the past
few years.
• A presentation on a research object authoring tool for the NIH Data
Commons that is designed to improve reuse and reproducibility.
• RA21, or Resource Access for the 21st Century, whose mission is to
align and simplify pathways to subscribed content across participating
scientific platforms, is a publisher-driven (and somewhat
controversial) effort that proposes reshaping
authentication/authorization frameworks.
• The presentation of a project at the University of California San
Diego to promote a sustainable, equitable research information and
scholarly communication ecosystem.
• We will learn about evolving engagement in the data and computational
sciences at the University of Cincinnati Libraries.
• A team from Stanford and the University of Minnesota will discuss the
state of the art in technology for geospatial content in libraries and
future work to promote greater access to geospatial content.
• An opportunity to consider areas of greatest need and opportunity for
DataONE going forward, as well as an examination of sustainability
options; this is particularly timely as the project approaches the end
of its second NSF funding cycle.
• There will be an introduction to the NSF-funded Science Gateways
Community Institute, which promotes knowledge and resource sharing
among communities of practice.
• We will hear about the shift in focus on the SHARE project, to that
of a community partner model; again sustainability is an important
subtext here.
• The Globus platform has been very important for high performance
computing in recent years, and consideration of its relationship to
research data management is very timely.

A number of sessions will focus specifically on digital humanities (DH):
• A transcription project at the College of William and Mary created
opportunities for students and staff, and transformed the perception of
the library.
• A report on the Iberian Books project will consider how it could be
leveraged for new research; this session will also include information
about the image-matching service Ornamento.
• There will be a presentation on a proposed service model for a more
sustainable infrastructure for DH projects resulting from an analysis
by Athenaeum21 of over 30 projects at Oxford University.
• We will hear how spreadsheets, maps, and data visualization tools
altered the construction of a memoir and led to a class assignment on
racial mapping at California Polytechnic State University.

Other sessions will focus on identity management and privacy. Ken
Klingenstein of Internet2 returns to continue the conversation
regarding internet identity and the research community. Montana State
University will report on a study of HTTPS and Google Analytics in
academic library websites. Two teams will discuss privacy gaps in
online library services. We'll have an update on the Social Networks
and Archival Context (SNAC) Cooperative, a highly strategic archival
identity management program focused on cooperatively maintaining
archival identity management data and providing a web-based discovery
service.

A team from Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) will discuss the
collaborative research data management pilot Nucleus, based on Open
Science Framework, and launched in the unique technology and policy
environment of the LANL Research Library.

A presentation by Yale University will discuss how institutional
departments collectively addressed the many barriers to collaboration,
resulting, ultimately, in sustainable, shared services, staffing, and
funding models, demonstrating how libraries and museums can partner to
leverage collections and expertise.

Digital preservation and curation continue to figure prominently in CNI
’s agenda. Oya Rieger and Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R will report on
the state of digital preservation, which they have been assessing in
order to identify key research questions and action areas. The Software
Preservation Network will discuss the tools, guidelines and workflows
they are developing to promote best practices in this important area.
The PEGI Project was established to plan a national agenda for
collaboratively preserving electronic government information; we’ll
have a report on the project's results and the planned next steps. We
will also hear about a related project, "Planning a Community-Created
Data Rescue Toolkit," which is working to coordinate distributed
efforts for government data preservation.

Discovery, interoperability, and linked data are topics of interest to
many in the CNI community. In the session The Challenge of Hidden Big
Data Collections: Making Digital Congressional Papers Available for
Scholarly Research, we'll hear two reports: one on the University of
Nevada's acquisition of one senator's congressional papers,
representing its largest acquisition of data to date, and the other on
a tool to make congressional constituent correspondence available for
research.

Additional sessions on discovery, interoperability, and linked data:
• We will have a presentation on tools and services to improve the
discoverability of digital humanities scholarship.
• A presentation describing projects to make historic copyright data
available in searchable, machine-processable, and linkable forms, in
order to enable libraries and other cultural institutions to legally
use and share underutilized public domain and copyrighted literature
and scholarship.
• There will be a breakout on DRAS-TIC Fedora and exploring a Linked
Data Platform server based on Apache Cassandra NoSQL database for
next-generation repositories; presenters from the University of
Maryland and the Smithsonian Institution will discuss the exploratory
phase of the project.
• Presenters will discuss whether Linked Open Data can help users
engage with and make better use of digitized special collections.
• There will be a report on the work of the Islandora Collaboration
Group and the Five College Consortium.

Explorations of how organizations are developing and evaluating new
services and engaging communities are also key components of CNI's
program. Presenters from Columbia University will describe a new
campus-wide program to provide students with access to instruction in
the fundamentals of computational literacy. OCLC has been developing a
workflow to ensure that good ideas lead to useable services. At the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, librarians help faculty
and staff demonstrate research impact and advance teaching using the
same digital scholarship tools and methods used for research. In an
effort to build community and support for open science, liaison
librarians at Carnegie Mellon University joined with faculty in the
biological sciences to host a transdisciplinary open science symposium.

The evolving role of the library is taken up by speakers from the
University of Rochester, as they discuss the planning process for the
development of the iZone, a collaborative innovation hub located in the
library and the benefits of its placement. In What Is the Future of
Libraries in Academic Research? a team from the University of Calgary
will provide an update on their in-depth work to develop partnerships
between the library and multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary
researchers to implement services and infrastructure that enables and
supports their work. Many CNI attendees are familiar with the Hunt and
Hill libraries at North Carolina State University and the acclaim they
have received as 21st century library facilities. Presenters will focus
on how they’ve been able to transform the library's impact on teaching
and learning in these facilities. The potential for artificial
intelligence to play key roles in knowledge creation within academic
institutions will be explored by speakers from the University of
Oklahoma.

Assessment will be a theme in several briefings:
• Analyzing Faculty Activity Reporting at the University of Arizona
shares the findings of UA Vitae, a system that reports on faculty
activity launched by the university five years ago.
• An IMLS-funded partnership has studied library adoption of 3D and
virtual reality services.
• We'll have a report on "Developing a Framework for Measuring Reuse of
Digital Objects," also IMLS-funded.
• The University of Oklahoma discusses measuring exhibit engagement
through open source code and 3D printing.
• A discussion of how research libraries can leverage their knowledge
of bibliometric analysis, resource management, and scholarly
communications infrastructures to contribute to institutional rankings
initiatives – this work can heighten the visibility of librarians’
skills in an area of key importance to the university administration.
• The results of an environmental scan of how and why digital
strategies succeed or fail.
 
The Library of Congress will present an update on its digital strategy,
and we will offer a popular annual session where representatives from
the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the National
Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC), The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, and IMLS will discuss 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 #cni18f, and this year, as an
experiment, we've built a Slack workspace (bit.ly/cni18fSLACK), which
we encourage you to explore and then let us know if you found it to be
useful, or how we might improve it as tool to help attendees connect
over shared interests and agendas.

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