Welcome to the inaugural edition of CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Video Series. Approximately every three or four months, CNI will release a new collection of videos aimed at providing timely reports on projects, events, and other initiatives or issues of interest to the community. We are pleased to introduce the first edition, which includes 10 pre-recorded videos on a wide array of topics.

This document contextualizes the briefings and serves as a guide to the collection. The videos highlight current issues in digital information and reflect CNI’s ongoing programmatic interests. They showcase projects and initiatives across the community and spotlight important developments around scholarly communication, teaching and learning, digital collections, and more. The value of collaboration is a theme that particularly stands out in this first collection.  

It is in that spirit that Gardner Campbell, associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, welcomes viewers in "The Public Debut of a Dream": Doug Engelbart's "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" 60 Years On. In this fascinating briefing, Campbell surveys the landscape of Engelbart’s imaginative, audacious 1962 framework for how networked computers could help advance human creativity and productivity. The Doug Engelbart Institute is honoring the 60th anniversary of the framework this year with new opportunities to explore Engelbart’s vision of human-computer co-evolution. Campbell reflects on the framework’s importance alongside Engelbart’s contemporaries and enthusiasts, and I think CNI members will find this briefing’s connection to CNI and opportunities for engagement particularly intriguing.

 

Two briefings provide updates on projects previously introduced at CNI membership meetings. They each explore facets of scholarly communication, which has been of continual interest to the CNI community. 

 

University of Kentucky Digital Humanities Librarian Jennifer Hootman shares an update on the library’s efforts to address a significant gap in equitable campus access to web-hosting options. CreateUK: A Review and Recommendations for Growing and Enhancing Campus Collaborations is a follow-up to the CNI Fall 2020 Membership Meeting briefing, CreateUK: Opportunities for Digital Pedagogy, Projects, and Collaborative Infrastructure. The briefing provides an overview of the pilot (ending in June 2022) and explains how CreateUK became more than a web-hosting service, functioning as a catalyst to build cross-campus relationships. Hootman outlines how the library supported the new connections and how CreateUK’s built-in open-source applications positioned the library as a collaborator in pedagogy and university projects.

 

A team from The Ohio State University Libraries provides an update to their CNI Fall 2020 Membership Meeting briefing, Transforming Scholarly Publishing at The Ohio State University. In Transforming the Scholarly Publishing Economy: Reflections on the First Three Years, the team takes stock of the initiative, reviewing the portfolio of transformational and transitional agreements, support for open scholarly infrastructure and publishing, and consortia partnerships. The team shares thinking on future initiatives, including deeper exploration of open access publishing models and collective action. An apt companion piece to this session is the “Fund to Mission” Open Access Monograph Model at the University of Michigan: Progress Report briefing from CNI’s Fall 2021 Membership Meeting, which The Ohio State University Libraries supports and references.

 

There has been renewed attention on the role of research information management systems (RIMS) and how they figure into the broader scholarly communication ecosphere, which was a focus at the Spring 2022 Membership Meeting. In The Library-Led Research Information Management System at Oklahoma State University: Collaborations, Successes, and Challenges, Megan Macken, assistant department head of digital resources and discovery services and Clarke Iakovakis, director of scholarly services and research engagement, explain how they led the university-wide implementation of a RIM system. This briefing explains the collaboration between the library, campus IT, and data owners in configuring the data feeds, and the associated challenges in migrating data from local databases to a new system.

 

Issues and innovations related to digital collections and curation, another area of CNI focus, are featured here. Danielle Emerling, West Virginia University, introduces an ambitious project in The American Congress Digital Archives Portal Project, which will provide access to congressional archives dispersed across multiple institutions via a single online portal. The pilot, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2021-2022), was recently completed, and the briefing examines the results and next steps to scale the project.

  

Kathryn Ruddock provides a summary of the University of Calgary’s implementation of the Cortex digital asset management system in Leveraging a Digital Asset Management System for the Full Data Lifecycle for Digital Collections. Ruddock outlines the advantages of using a single platform for managing digital collections throughout the data lifecycle.

 

Fedora is a heavily used open-source repository system within the CNI community; in Fedora 6: Migration & Integration Tooling for Community Use Cases, a LYRASIS team explains the latest, long-awaited update. The update strengthens Fedora’s digital preservation sensibilities, data transparency, and commitment to community standards by incorporating the Oxford Common File Layout. This briefing highlights the new features and overviews the Camel Toolbox, which is a new, community-driven suite of microservices that integrate with Fedora. Lastly, the briefing provides an update on an IMLS grant focused on developing a migration toolkit for community-wide use. 

 

From Pennsylvania State University, Ruth Tillman shares her work around the emerging field of maintenance studies in Beyond Implementation: Positioning Maintenance as a Core Commitment in Libraries. The briefing explores an under-studied and poorly understood aspect of the academic library’s systems infrastructure, and it highlights the potential consequences of underestimating and inadequately planning for proper systems maintenance. This session proposes steps for establishing a process where core maintenance tasks are not only recognized but also supported.

 

Ashley Champagne of Brown University provides a first-hand look at digital scholarship center management in Flexible Project Planning for Digital Scholarship Centers: A Framework for Managing Multiple Projects of Varying Technical Complexity. The briefing explores the challenges of digital scholarship centers with an emphasis on variability, flexibility, and preservation. Champagne outlines how to adapt project planning documents and shares frameworks and closeout document templates from Brown University’s Center for Digital Scholarship.

 

Building Resilience to Health Misinformation in Local Communities: A Public and Academic Libraries Partnership in San Diego County recounts the efforts of a public and academic libraries consortium to support San Diego County’s campaign to counteract health misinformation. In addition to reporting on the project’s outcomes, the briefing reflects on the partnership’s alignment with the collective impact model – a social innovation concept whereby a network of community members, organizations, and institutions coordinate to advance equity and facilitate social change.

 

A warm thank you to our first cohort of speakers for participating in the inaugural edition of CNI’s Project Briefing Video Series. I hope you will share these videos widely, and I welcome your comments and suggestions about this project or about any other aspect of CNI’s work. We will be announcing the call for proposals for the next edition in the coming weeks. 

 

Clifford Lynch

CNI Executive Director

Diane Goldenberg-Hart

CNI Assistant Executive Director

Paige Pope

CNI Communications Coordinator