I wanted to share the list of speakers and presentations for CNI's upcoming December 2021 Virtual and In-Person meetings. There may be a small number of last minute changes but this should provide a very good sense of how rich and diverse the programs are. I expect that we will be making available a schedule for the two events around the end of this week or the beginning of next week.

The virtual meeting will run December 7-9; on December 7 and 8 it will run from about 1-530pm Eastern, and on December 9 we'll have a closing session from about 1-2pm Eastern.

The in-person meeting will take place in Washington DC from about noon Eastern on December 13 to 330pm on December 14. Let me remind you yet again the for the in-person meeting, you MUST register in advance so that we can verify attendees are fully vaccinated as part of the registration process; we will NOT be able to accommodate walk-up or last minute registrations.

You can find a list of contributed project briefings here

 https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2021/project-briefings-breakout-sessions-f21

The virtual meeting includes a large number of pre-recorded briefings, and a smaller number of synchronous project briefings. In addition to these contributed sessions, I'll open the virtual meeting, and then moderate an invited conversation session with Roger Schonfeld and Deanna Marcum to discuss their new book "Along Came Google", which charts the progress of large scale book digitization. As we've done in recent virtual meetings, we've invited another cadre of CLIR fellows to introduce themselves and talk about their important work. We'll have an invited session describing  the new UK Octopus scholarly communication platform and initiative. And on December 9,  we'll close the meeting with a session led by Laura Brown, Danielle Cooper and Dylan Ruediger of Ithaka S+R on the future of scholarly meetings and the tradeoffs between virtual and in-person events, after which I'll make a few closing remarks.

The in-person meeting will open with my traditional December keynote, surveying recent events and future prospects. The sessions are primarily a very carefully chosen set of project briefings, plus  an invited session to introduce a number of the fellows from the Library and Information Sciences Education and Data Science Integrated Network Group (LEADING) project and their work. The meeting will conclude with what should be an amazing plenary session: a team from Carnegie Mellon University and Emerald Cloud Lab -- Dean Rebecca Doerge, University Librarian Keith Webster, and Emerald co-founder Brian Frezza --  exploring new strategic approaches to supporting scientific research through highly automated network-based shared instrumentation facilities, including consideration of the implications for research data management and reproducibility.  For those not attending the in-person meeting, note that we intend to capture video of all sessions, and make that video broadly
available as soon as possible after the in-person meeting.

We'll be putting out a roadmap spanning both the virtual and in person meetings in very early December to help you navigate the wealth of material. I think we can look forward to a pair of outstanding events in December.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI