The Spring 2022 CNI Membership Meeting (https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2022) will be comprised of both an online and an in-person component, each independent of the other, and designed to be complementary­—sessions do not repeat across the two events: the virtual event will be held online March 21-22, and the in-person event will take place the following week in San Diego, CA, on March 28-29. The events include 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 two events comprising the spring meeting, which include an extensive series of virtual and in-person sessions, including plenaries, invited sessions, and project briefings focusing on current issues in digital information. Unless the presenters have requested otherwise, all sessions, virtual and in-person, will be recorded and subsequently available to the public on our YouTube and Vimeo channels after the meeting; we hope you will share these resources widely with your communities.  

Note that in lieu of including pre-recorded project briefings that have been part of previous virtual membership meetings, we recently launched a new, separate Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series, the first of which will be released in April 2022.

The Executive Roundtable sessions (by prior application) will be online and will take place in conjunction with the virtual event on March 16, 17 and 23.

The in-person CNI event 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.

Refreshments are available for all at noon on Monday, March 28. The opening plenary is at 1:00 PM and will be followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions followed by a stand-alone invited session and then the evening reception. Tuesday, March 29, includes breakfast, additional rounds of parallel breakout sessions, lunch, and the closing keynote, concluding around 3:30 PM. Our signature reception will run until 7:00 PM on the evening of Monday, March 28, after which participants can enjoy an evening in San Diego.

As with the December 2021 in-person event, we’ve built in generous break time for informal networking with colleagues. Along with more leisurely pacing, the number of parallel sessions has been greatly reduced, and all sessions will be professionally recorded for subsequent public availability unless otherwise requested by presenters.

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:

Both event schedules are 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 we will send by email shortly (each day of the virtual meeting takes place as a continuous Zoom web meeting). We’ll also have printed programs for the in-person meeting for those who want them. 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).

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

I will moderate the opening in-person plenary, “The Privacy Landscape: Policy & Practice in the Library and University Contexts,” which will feature a panel on university and library privacy issues. The session will bring together distinct perspectives from three insightful panelists: Cheryl Washington, Chief Information Security Officer, University of California Davis; Kent Wada, Chief Privacy Officer, Director, Policy and Privacy, University of California Los Angeles; and Lisa Hinchliffe, Professor/Coordinator for Information Literacy Services, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who many of you will know from her writings about library and scholarly publishing privacy-related issues. You may recall my conversation with Kent and Cheryl from the Spring 2021 meeting; I’m looking forward to welcoming them back and continuing our exploration of these issues.

The in-person event will conclude with a keynote by Lorcan Dempsey, currently Vice President for Research and Membership and Chief Strategist, OCLC; you may be aware that Lorcan recently announced his plan to retire from this position at the end of April. Many of you know Lorcan for his consistent ability to recognize, articulate and crystalize important trends in the information landscape, and we are glad to have him close our gathering in San Diego with his reflections and insights as he completes his long and distinguished tenure with OCLC.

We have several wonderful invited sessions lined up for both events:

I’m really pleased that Heidi Fraser-Krauss, the new Chief Executive of Jisc, will join us to share her insights and vision for the organization’s strategies and programs.

The American Council of Learned Societies’ new commission, Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship, explores and supports the future of digital work in the humanities, and it includes many members of the CNI community among the commissioners. I'm delighted that our community will have this opportunity to hear about the Commission's objectives and plans from Chair Marisa Parham, and I hope we’ll learn more about how we can support this work.

Building off the Fall 2021 Closing Plenary “Carnegie Mellon University’s Cloud Lab Project,” I will sit down with CMU Dean of University Libraries Keith Webster to discuss the implications of cloud labs for research data management and the library.

An invited panel concluding the first day of the event will introduce a number of the Fellows from the Library and Information Sciences Education and Data Science Integrated Network Group (LEADING) project and their work. A similar panel (with different Fellows) was a favorite at the Fall 2021 meeting, and we look forward to hearing from more Fellows about the important work of this project.

We’re very fortunate that San Diego Supercomputer Center Director Frank Wuerthwein can join us to talk about the Pacific Research Platform, the National Research Platform, and other developments from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Wuerthwein’s session is in part an update to and continuation of Larry Smarr’s memorable CNI Spring 2018 closing plenary “Towards a High-Performance National Research Platform Enabling Digital Research.”

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 several 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.

Strategies for coping with the challenges of research data and information management continue to be important program themes; this meeting includes several sessions with a particular focus on the role of research information management systems (RIMS), which are seeing renewed attention. These sessions include:

Scholarly communication is of perennial interest to the CNI community, and we’ll have several virtual sessions dealing with many of its facets. “Open Educational Resource Program Development: A View from Two Institutions” will explore models for course materials that align affordability with student success and retention. “Preserving New Forms of Scholarship” explores the increasingly diverse technologies scholars are using to express their research, the ways publishers are integrating dynamic features into their platforms, and the ensuing challenge of preserving enhanced digital scholarship.

Some in-person sessions will explore issues related to collections generally, including “Collections as Data: Part to Whole - Lessons Learned and Next Steps” and “Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project.” In a virtual briefing, presenters from UCLA will discuss strategies used to support teaching and learning through deepening student engagement with the library’s digital collections.

Breakouts related to special collections in particular also figure prominently in the program: a team from the University of Arizona will discuss Digital Borderlands, a project that explores the intersections of digital scholarship and primary sources among many other things (virtual), and the Modern Endangered Archive Project returns to offer an update following the two tumultuous years since its last CNI briefing (in-person). We’ll hear about Vanderbilt University’s experience making its primary source collections available through JSTOR (in-person). A presentation about the Audiovisual Metadata Platform (AMP) will describe new developments and experimentation with that system.

Other sessions will focus on privacy and identity management: Ken Klingenstein of Internet2 returns to give the talk, “Gnarly Privacy Questions and Who Will Answer Them” (virtual), and Robin Ruggaber of the University of Virginia will present “Coalescing Usage Data: Research, Data-Driven Decisions and User Privacy” (in-person).

We will offer in-person panels exploring user services and research support. “Save the Time of the User: Current Industry Initiatives and Future Possibilities for Libraries” will discuss industry efforts at mitigating user barriers to content and services. A diverse set of panelists will gather to discuss their experiences with delivering and supporting data science curricula, research support, and training in the session “Radical Partnerships: Expanding Academic Collaboration in Data and Computational Sciences.” A team from Ithaka S+R will describe their work in aligning data support services with researcher needs.

As part of the theme of computational analysis of collections, the virtual session, “Machine Learning, Text Summarization, and Optimizing Scholarship for Citizen Audiences and Discovery,” will describe using emerging technologies to improve access to scholarship, and in “Harnessing the Knowledge of the COVID-19 Literature: From Scientific Text to Answers,” (virtual) we’ll hear about technologies based on machine learning and natural language processing for retrieving, filtering, and querying core COVID-19 literature. Note that several sessions described above dealing with collections are also relevant to this theme.

Several presentations address infrastructure developments. A team from the California Digital Library joins us in-person to report on the Research Organization Registry (ROR) of identifiers. Notre Dame will offer an in-person briefing on their evolving storage management strategies. Members of the Social Network and Archival Context (SNAC) Cooperative will discuss recent community activities and technologies developed to support the project (virtual).

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 before the session:

The meeting hashtag is #CNI22s.

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.

Executive Director

Coalition for Networked Information