The Fall 2021 CNI Membership Meeting (https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2021) will be comprised of both an online and (at last!) an in-person component, each independent of the other, and designed to be complementary: the virtual event (https://cnifall21mtg.sched.com) will be held online Dec. 7–9, and the in-person event (https://cnifall21inperson.sched.com) will take place the following week in Washington, DC, on Dec. 13–14. Both events offer 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 events and an extensive series of live synchronous, in-person, and pre-recorded sessions, including plenaries, invited sessions, and project briefings focusing on current issues in digital information.

Only a small number of virtual sessions will take place live; the vast majority of project briefings will be pre-recorded. Curated playlists of pre-recorded project briefings corresponding to CNI's core program area themes will be available on-demand beginning Nov. 30, to be explored at your leisure. In addition, for the virtual event, we offer an expanded line-up of invited sessions and project briefings on topics we feel are particularly timely and/or strategic for the community as a whole; these will be live, to take place online Dec. 7–9. Unless the presenters have requested otherwise, all sessions will be recorded and subsequently available to the public; this includes the pre-recorded sessions.

The Executive Roundtable sessions (by prior application) will be online, and will take place in conjunction with the virtual event on December 6 and 10. 

The in-person CNI meeting is preceded by an optional orientation session at 11:15 AM for new attendees (representatives of new member organizations and new representatives or alternate delegates from existing member organizations); guests and presenters are also welcome. There will be coffee and an opportunity to meet some long-time members of the CNI community. Refreshments are available for all at 12:00 PM on Monday, Dec. 13. The opening plenary is at 1:00 PM and will be followed by three rounds of parallel breakout sessions plus a stand-alone, invited session immediately preceding the evening reception (new this year). Tuesday, Dec. 14, includes additional rounds of parallel breakout sessions, lunch, and the closing keynote, concluding around 3:30 PM. This year, after so much time virtual, we’ve built in additional and generous break time for informal networking with colleagues, in addition to our signature reception which will run until 7:00 PM on the evening of Monday, Dec. 13, after which participants can enjoy an evening in Washington, DC. We are in a new hotel this year (the J.W. Marriott) and there are a number of nearby dining options. 

You’ll see several important changes in the in-person meeting this year. Along with a more leisurely pacing, we’ve greatly reduced the number of in-person parallel sessions, and are professionally recording all sessions (unless otherwise requested by presenters) for subsequent public availability. 

The CNI meeting program is subject to last minute changes, particularly in the in-person breakout sessions – don’t rule out a late-breaking addition to the line-up! You can find the most current information, including schedule details, on the two event Scheds:

We are making both event schedules available via Sched, and while a Sched account is not required to view meeting information, you may find some of the tool’s personalization features helpful. Virtual event registrants will be able to access meeting sessions via Sched when logged into their Sched account; alternatively, they can access the meeting using the Zoom link sent by email in early December. If you have not received an invitation from Sched, or if you have questions about its use, please contact Paige Pope (paige@cni.org). For registration inquiries, please contact Jackie Eudell (jackie@cni.org).

As is now traditional, I have reserved the opening plenary of our in-person fall member meeting for an update. During this session, scheduled to start at 1:00 PM on Monday,  Dec. 13, I want to look at recent developments and the ways in which the landscape is changing, and to 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 thoughts on CNI’s future program. 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.

I’m really thrilled that, for the in-person closing plenary, a team from Carnegie Mellon University and Emerald Cloud Lab will share their experiences 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. I first learned about this work as part of CNI’s exploration of pandemic implications for the research enterprise and have been following it closely ever since; it seems quite unique and I believe it’s enormously important. You can find more information about the project on the meeting website.

We have several invited sessions lined up for the virtual event, and a special invited panel to take place during our in-person event – these are all closely tied to the ongoing programmatic interests of CNI and its members:

Roger and Deanna will discuss their wonderful new book looking at the history of book digitization at scale, tracing this work through the Google Books program and the creation of HathiTrust.

CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows work on projects that forge and strengthen connections among collections, educational and information technologies, and current research and scholarship, and they are a key source of future leaders for our community and beyond. CNI has historically enjoyed a close and fruitful relationship with this program. The pandemic-driven move to virtual meetings has jeopardized this historical engagement between the CNI community and the most recent cadres of CLIR Fellows. These panels are CNI’s effort to address this challenge. We’ve hosted CLIR Fellows Panels at our last two virtual events, and now I invite you to meet another outstanding cadre of Fellows as they describe their work and share their perspectives on the current landscape.

Octopus is a new platform, launching in spring 2022, and is being developed in partnership with Jisc, UK Research and Innovation, and the UK Reproducibility Network. It is designed to be the new primary research record for science: instead of being a platform for the publication of papers, it is designed for easy and rapid sharing and assessing of work, in smaller units. The platform’s creator will explain more about how its unique structure will work, and why it was designed the way it was.

Ithaka S+R and JSTOR Labs, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, are organizing a cohort of scholarly societies to explore and develop the future of the scholarly meeting in light of the many challenges brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic. A team from Ithaka S+R will share with us some of the preliminary thinking on this issue and plans for the project.

We’ve reserved a session (immediately preceding the Monday reception) to highlight an excellent IMLS-funded program that aims to prepare a diverse cohort of LIS doctoral students and mid-career librarians for data science endeavors: the Library and Information Sciences (LIS) Education and Data Science Integrated Network Group (LEADING). We will hear directly from several of the fellows in the current cohort, as well as from some of the project’s principal investigators.

I will not attempt to comprehensively cover breakout sessions here; we offer a great abundance and diversity of material. I do want to note, however, some sessions that have particularly strong connections to CNI’s program, as well as a number of other sessions of special interest or importance, and to provide some additional context that may be helpful. We’ve requested that presenters share their slide-decks with us, to put on our website following the meeting, and we expect to make recordings of almost all sessions publicly available on our YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/cnivideo) and Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/channels/cni) channels after the meeting; we hope you will share these resources widely with your communities.

Strategies for coping with the challenges of research data and information management feature prominently in the fall 2021 meeting program. A panel representing four university libraries will present a live, virtual session on developing institutional strategies and policies for research data. Research data publishing ethics will be the subject of an in-person breakout, as will an update from the Data Curation Network. Another in-person session will discuss the German National Research Data Infrastructure. Pre-recorded sessions on related themes include:

Our community continues to focus considerable attention on the publishing industry and on issues related to intellectual property, and we will have several sessions that deal with related issues. Live, virtual sessions will include a team from Harvard to discuss an intriguing and potentially high-impact project designed to automate rights determination for orphan works, as well as a panel from the Boston Library Consortium that will discuss consortial controlled digital lending. In-person, the University of Michigan will provide a progress report on the “Fund to Mission” open access monograph model, and we’ll have a pre-recorded session from MIT Press on their Direct to Open monograph publishing model; both of these presentations explore new futures for university press monographs. Other pre-recorded sessions on these themes include a session on understanding the APC waiver process, a report on the Open Access eBook Usage Data Trust, values-driven models for scholarly communication, and using interinstitutional infrastructure to establish an open educational resources (OER) imprint.

There are a number of presentations dealing with workforce and skills issues at scale. There will be an in-person update on a large-scale effort to assist professionals working in libraries and cultural heritage institutions evaluate and address a range of key copyright matters (the Virtual Copyright Education Center). Several pre-recorded sessions will touch on related themes: a presentation on the library technology career jumpstart program, a team from Skilltype will speak on identifying global expertise in the library economy, and we’ll hear about the Scholarly Communication Notebook to help support the teaching of library students and professionals about scholarly communication librarianship.

Relatedly, we will also have a number of sessions on spaces and services: CNI Associate Executive Director Emerita Joan Lippincott will moderate a live, virtual session on high-tech work in physical and virtual spaces, and pre-recorded sessions will cover a student-centric technology ecosystem, a collaborative research and education tool at the Naval Postgraduate School, and an analysis of usage of library services and collections during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Digital preservation continues to be an important topic at our meetings, and I'm really pleased we can offer a number of pre-recorded sessions dealing with aspects of these challenges:

Research impact will be explored during this meeting in various contexts. An in-person session will describe the Publication Activity Collection Environment (PACE) system at Notre Dame University that provides high-confidence publication data for university centers, institutes, and departments. A pre-recorded session from Weill Cornell Medical College will discuss using the National Institutes of Health’s iCite service to gauge the influence of scholarly output. Another pre-recorded session, on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), will explore emerging models for society-driven research agendas that can be integrated with academic culture to strengthen US research linkages with the SDGs and how that progress can be monitored.

A cluster of briefings will focus on information access and retrieval; in-person sessions will feature panelists from five university libraries that have adopted a community-developed, app-based, open-source library services platform, The Future of Libraries is Open (FOLIO), and a team from UIUC will discuss using machine learning for topic modelling and identification on bibliographic datasets. Jefferson Baily of the Internet Archive will present a live, synchronous update on a project to support perpetual access to open scholarship. Pre-recorded briefings on these themes will include: a session on the Digital Public Library of America’s work with Wikimedia; improving access to electronic theses and dissertations; using Wikidata for improved access to library data.

The pre-recorded sessions “Addressing the 7% Problem: The FRAME Project and the ARL-CARL Marrakesh Treaty Implementation Project” and “Accessibility Does Not Imply Usability for Students with Visual Disabilities” will center on accessibility matters.

Issues related to special collections and digital scholarship will be investigated by the pre-recorded briefings, “The University of California, San Francisco-John Hopkins University Opioid Industry Documents Archive,” “From Monolith to a Modern System, and the First-Ever Florida Digital Newspaper Library Portal,” and other sessions will also explore the use of emerging technologies, often in connection with special collections:

There will be an update on the Dryad repository program at the in-person event; other presentations related to repositories will include the following pre-recorded briefings:

Using, leveraging, and assessing open systems and services are issues of ongoing interest to the CNI community, and several sessions will address some of these challenges:

Other sessions will focus on privacy and identity management: there will be an in-person presentation on the Licensing Privacy initiative, that aims to improve how academic libraries leverage licensing terms to advocate for reader privacy, as well as a session to report on a multi-institute undergraduate focus group study on learning analytic scenarios, which involve delicate privacy issues. A pre-recorded presentation from Duke University Libraries will report on a project to develop a new statement of priorities and guiding principles related to data privacy. Additional pre-recorded sessions include a presentation by Ken Klingenstein of Internet2 focusing on the value and use of attributes, Loyola University Chicago’s experience with federated authentication, and a presentation on the researcher profiles system at the University of California, Davis.

We will offer an in-person session, organized and moderated by Cynthia Hudson Vitale of the Association of Research Libraries, where representatives from federal agencies and non-profits will discuss funding priorities and trends, and a pre-recorded session on the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) and funding support for open science infrastructure.

Finally, Kenning Arlitsch of Montana State University and Michael Della Bitta of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) will explore the issue of obtaining broader contributions of digital objects to the DPLA from our community during an in-person breakout session. 

I invite you to browse the complete list of breakout sessions and their full abstracts on the event Scheds, where you will often find pointers to reference material that you may find useful to explore prior to the session:

More about pre-recorded briefings, including links to curated playlists is available at https://sched.co/pRut.

The meeting hashtag is #cni21f.

On behalf of the CNI team, I look forward to welcoming you to what promises to be another extremely worthwhile meeting. Please contact me (cliff@cni.org) or Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI's Assistant Executive Director (diane@cni.org), if we can provide you with any additional information on the meeting.

Clifford Lynch

Executive Director

Coalition for Networked Information