Meeting Roadmap
A Guide to the Spring 2019
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting


The Spring 2019 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at The Ritz-Carlton
in St. Louis, MO on April 8-9, 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 at 11:30 AM for new attendees, both representatives of new
member organizations and new representatives or alternate delegates
from existing member organizations, and guests and presenters are also
welcome; beforehand, starting at 11, there will be coffee and an
opportunity to meet some long-time members. Refreshments are available
for all at 12:15 PM on Monday, April 8. The opening plenary is at 1:15
PM and will be followed by four rounds of parallel breakout sessions.
Tuesday, April 9, 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 Monday, April 8, after
which participants can enjoy an evening in St. Louis.
 
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 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-2019), and we’ll still have printed
programs available for those that want them.

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 Professor Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of
Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State
University. You may recall that, formerly, Kathleen was director of
scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association, where she
also served as associate executive director, so she really brings an
interesting perspective to the issues confronting higher education and
scholarly communication. She will be sharing with us some of the
theories and findings that she explores in her most recent book,
Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Johns
Hopkins, 2019); I think you'll find her talk, "Generous Thinking:
Sustainability, Solidarity, and the Common Good," a fascinating
exploration of the competition/collaboration paradox. The Chronicle of
Higher Education recently published an interesting interview with
Kathleen, in which she touches on some of these issues:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Does-Higher-Ed-Need-to/245769.

Professor Michael L. Nelson of Old Dominion University will close the
meeting with his talk "Web Archives at the Nexus of Good Fakes and
Flawed Originals," which will explore the current and perhaps, for
many, surprisingly fragile state of web archives and prospects for the
future. Michael is in ODU's computer science department, where he leads
the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group. He has spoken at
CNI several times through the years, and I'm delighted that he's
accepted our invitation to help us take a deeper look at the pressing
challenges of the reliability and trustworthiness of web archives.

You can find more information about the plenary speakers, as well as
abstracts of their talks, at
https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2019/plenary-sessions-s19.

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 2018-2019 Program Plan (https://www.cni.org/program) and
also a few other sessions of special interest, and to provide some
additional context for certain 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.

Major shifts in the publishing industry, and implications for
contracts, competition, and access to intellectual property are issues
that have captured considerable attention in our community for a long
time now, and I’m sure you've all been following the news out of the
University of California system and their dealings with Elsevier. A
team from UC will be here to share the details of those negotiations
and to engage in conversation on these questions. We will have a panel
to explore the return on investment of open access, and another group
of presenters, including Heather Joseph of SPARC, will discuss two
projects that aim to streamline and improve efficiencies for open
source software projects. Heather will also present a talk about the
focus on data analytics taking hold in publishing and the implications
for teaching, research, and funding, among other things. The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation recently funded a study focused on the viability of a
data trust to share usage data for open-access scholarly monographs,
and we will receive a summary of those findings.

Privacy and identity are closely related to the issue of data
collection in publishing, and we will have a session that explores this
very question, "Collecting, Correlating, Stitching, Enriching: How
Commercial Publishers are Creating Value by Profiling Users," by a team
from Temple and Minnesota. A lot of good work on privacy has been
coming out of Montana State University recently and they will discuss
the National Forum on Web Privacy and Web Analytics, an Institute of
Museum and Library Services-funded project. Other sessions related to
this topic include "Students' Growing Concern with Surveillance
Capitalism" by Jim Hahn of UIUC; Jeremy Frumkin, from the University of
Arizona, will present "When Research Data Requires Controls:
Institutional Support for CUI and HIPAA." A panel will discuss a
nation-wide consortial approach to ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor
Identifier) membership for research institutions in the US, known as
the ORCID US Community. We will also hear about a project that has made
some significant progress in its goal to develop an open, unique,
high-level identifier for every research organization in the world: the
Research Organization Registry.

Scholarly communication is an important linchpin of CNI's agenda, and
we will have several presentations that relate both directly and
indirectly to how research and scholarship make their way through the
knowledge ecosystem. In a joint breakout, we'll learn about two
scholarly output initiatives, one at the Smithsonian, and the other at
Weill Cornell Medicine, which has implemented VIVO Dashboard. Texas A&M
and Duke will also report on VIVO implementations. Herbert Van de
Sompel and Martin Klein return to discuss the issue of scholarly
orphans from an institutional perspective, and a team from MIT will
talk about the "Grand Challenges-Based Research Agenda for Scholarly
Communication and Information Science."

Issues relating to institutional repositories will be well represented
at this meeting:
• We'll get an update from the California Digital Library on
developments in its new partnership with Dryad.
• There will be a report on the latest release of Islandora, as well as
an update on the future of the platform.
• A combined breakout will include reports from Northwestern and the
University of Denver on managing digital institutional content.
• The University of Houston will describe the Bridge2Hyku toolkit, to
facilitate migrating content from proprietary systems to open source
repositories.
• Panelists from several institutions, along with David Wilcox of
DuraSpace, will talk about a strategic plan for Fedora.
• From King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST),
there will be a discussion of the role of the institutional repository
in university reporting workflows.
• The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign has been developing an
integrated repository service with the capacity to curate and provide
access to multiple types of materials; they will be discussing their
efforts.
• Moving from a commercial product to an open-source product with an
active community will be the subject of a presentation from Georgia
State University.

Many CNI member institutions are developing a range of capabilities and
organizational strategies related to research data management (RDM),
including services addressing data curation, data discovery, and the
support for new scholarly practices (e-research). Sessions on data and
research services include:
• A presentation from Ithaka S+R, based on their findings of the
research practices of scholars, on holistic approaches to RDM.
• A team from Penn State will discuss developing collaborative,
faculty-centered services for public access to research data.
• We will have a discussion of alternative RDM models for smaller
research libraries from Rensselaer Polytechnic.
• From the University of Minnesota and OCLC, there will be a report on
the results from a global survey on research information management
systems.
• At Kansas State University, an information professional partnered
with a researcher to curate project data; this collaboration will be
the subject of a breakout.
• We will have a presentation considering what type of data science
support is needed for social science research.
• A team will describe the continuation of the Always Already
Computational: Collections as Data project, now called Collections as
Data: Part to Whole, which aims to support computationally driven
research and teaching and considers the organizational implications of
this work.

A meeting of the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) has been
co-located with the CNI meeting this spring, and we’ve invited our
research-computing colleagues to present a few breakouts on their work,
as well as a session on CaRCC itself: the Engagement and Performance
Operations Center (EPOC) which is a production platform for operations,
applied training, monitoring, and research and education support; a
speaker from UC Berkeley discusses a framework for a job family
classification and advancement system for Research IT professionals—in
a real sense, an effort to professionalize and institutionalize
research IT roles—to aid in recruitment and retention efforts. In
addition, there will be a presentation on the LIS Education and Data
Science for the National Digital Platform (LEADS-4-NDP) program, which
is addressing the need for practitioners who can apply data science
techniques to improve information services and operations.

A number of sessions will focus on digital scholarship, including a
presentation from the University of Florida on an international,
cross-institutional initiative to identify and digitize published
materials pertaining to Cuba. Ryan Cordell, professor of English at
Northeastern University, will discuss a report on the state of optical
character recognition (OCR) for historical documents, and also share
some recommendations for quality improvement. We will hear about three
related but different projects at Emory University which engaged
non-traditional scholars using similar software and digital components,
but that provide very different experiences for users.

We have a strong set of sessions on various aspects of digital
preservation, a topic of great interest to our members. We’ll have a
joint session exploring digital preservation projects: the University
of Chicago will describe the challenges in stewarding digital content
without a repository, and the University of Manitoba discusses a
coordinated approach to preserving digital assets.

Other sessions on digital preservation:
• Yale University has been tackling software preservation and emulation
for some time now, and we will hear about their focus on the
development of technology and services that support distributed
management, documentation, sharing, and use of emulated software across
a broad range of disciplines.
• In another Yale initiative, we'll learn about data protection
strategies that provide multiple copies of data in multiple formats at
multiple locations.
• Panelists from the Internet Archive, UVA, and Stanford will consider
the challenges of improving digital preservation, including
architecture, the services ecosystem, new technologies, best practices,
and other elements.
• Speakers from DuraSpace, Cornell and Emory will describe the Oxford
Common File Layout (OCFL), born out of an effort to define an open and
application-independent approach to the long-term preservation of
digital objects.
• The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis will join us to talk about
efforts to preserve the historical record of the Federal Reserve System
through a centralized digital preservation program for all 12 banks in
the system.
• The Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded a National
Leadership grant to address the issues of long-term accessibility,
usability and interoperability of digital 3D objects; project leaders
will report on the community of practice which aims to produce
recommendations for this purpose.

In the area of assessment McMaster University and OCLC will present on
a survey of research libraries in Canada, looking at trends,
capacities, priorities and collaborations within that community.

Representatives from LYRASIS and DuraSpace will be discussing the
merger between the two organizations and its impact. We will hear from
the University of Oregon's virtual teams model to facilitate
inter-departmental work. Maurice York will share a compelling approach
to the ever-challenging task of technology strategic planning.

We will have some sessions that describe new services, spaces, and new
ways of working with faculty and students. "Services & Resources to
Support Students" features two projects: the Applied Research in
Immersive Environments and Simulations (ARIES) program at Virginia Tech
supports applied research that brings together industry partners,
faculty, and students; a campus-wide ePoster service introduced at
KAUST. A session from the University of Oklahoma will discuss
developing a 3D scanning service, and we'll hear about virtual reality
(VR) initiatives at the University of New Mexico. More about user
services will be covered in these sessions:

• CNI's Joan Lippincott joins a panel to report on a roundtable
co-hosted by CNI and the Learning Spaces Collaboratory on how new and
renovated spaces can better reflect needs and contribute to
institutional priorities.
• Johns Hopkins is using its large-scale visualization display to
support student wellness in an attempt to deal with the alarming trend
of undergraduate students struggling with overwhelming stress and
mental health issues.
• At Georgetown University, a thriving community of practice has
emerged from the makerspace programs, helping to attract new users and
provide a diverse, interdisciplinary, and collaborative environment.
• The Digital Skills Hub (DiSH) at the University of Oklahoma provides
all students, staff and faculty, regardless of school or departmental
affiliation, with training and access to new technologies including VR,
3D printing, digital media, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.
• The University of Wyoming will share how they are using 3D scanning
and augmented reality (AR) to promote digital collections through the
development of a content delivery system that utilizes, in part, a
smart device AR application.
• The University of Michigan will describe a project between the
library and the School of Information to provide authentic learning and
research experiences for students, which intersects with broader
service design efforts within the university.

Other sessions will focus on collections and discoverability.
Presenters from two institutions that implemented very different
high-density storage spaces will discuss their respective systems and
how they developed their infrastructures to facilitate the integration
of tools to promote discoverability. The challenges of implementing
Section 508 compliance, to ensure that information and communication
technology is accessible to individuals with disabilities, will be
explored. Presenters will discuss state digital libraries that are
closely tied to the state's flagship university, and how those
institutions contribute to developing and sustaining those platforms.
The Archives Unleashed Cloud facilitates scholars' ability to work with
data at scale. Project ReShare is a group of varied stakeholders aiming
to create a new and open approach to library resource sharing systems.

Finally, we will have a provocative session addressing issues of equity
and diversity in access: we'll hear about Louisiana State University's
efforts to devise anti-racist digitization prioritization policies.
Recognizing that, by choosing what is digitized, institutions make
choices about what narratives to promote, what history to highlight,
and what legacies to further, LSU is closely examining its position as
a collecting repository at a historically white university in the
South, and what role racism has played in its collecting and digitizing
policies and practices.

I invite you to browse the complete list of breakout sessions at the
meeting website: https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2019/. In many cases you
will find that the 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 made
available to us. We will be recording the plenary sessions and a few
breakout sessions A list of the breakouts we hope to capture will be
posted on the communications board at registration, but please keep in
mind that we occasionally have problems with the captures, and that
these session captures do not include the discussion part of the
breakout. There’s no substitute for being there in person! The videos
will be made available in the weeks following the meeting. You can
follow the meeting on Twitter by using the hashtag #cni19s.

I look forward to seeing you in St. Louis for what promises to be
another extremely worthwhile meeting. Please contact me (cliff@cni.org)
or CNI Associate Director Joan Lippincott (joan@cni.org) if we can
provide you with any additional information on the meeting.

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information