Welcome to the second edition of CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series intended to provide timely reports on projects, events, and other initiatives or issues of importance to the community. This guide contextualizes the video collection, which reflects CNI’s ongoing programmatic interests and ongoing challenges in digital information, including changing research methods, the evolution of scholarly communication, the urgency of digital preservation, and more.

Members of the Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) project, a rapid-response digital humanities project focused on archiving Ukrainian cultural heritage websites at risk of being lost, have shared a fascinating account of their work. In Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online & Rapid-Response Digital Humanities, project participants Quinn Dombrowski, Alex Gil, and Anna Rakityanskaya describe how SUCHO builds on earlier socially-engaged digital humanities work while facing new challenges around web archiving in unstable circumstances. The presentation brings together several perspectives: SUCHO co-founder Dombrowski offers an overview of the work and evolving situation, Rakityanskaya describes project components and her own experience as a volunteer, and Gil discusses previous rapid-response projects.

Also focusing on digital cultural heritage preservation, Revitalizing the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) at Age 18 provides an update to a fall 2020 project briefing. dLOC is a collaborative digital library by, from, and for Caribbean libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations. In 2021, after facing various challenges, dLOC released updated bylaws, launched its first mobile-responsive patron interface, split its website into three systems, and planned its first all-virtual partner meeting. The briefing takes stock and maps a future revitalization project funded by Mellon Foundation.

 

A team from the University of Michigan also provides an update to a previous CNI briefing and explores an increasingly important feature of the university in Transformative Partnership: Digital Scholarship Services at University of Michigan Joe Bauer and Anne Cong-Huyen discuss the ongoing library and academic IT collaboration to deliver digital scholarship services to a large, distributed campus. What started as a grassroots effort, resulted in a comprehensive pilot program offering consultations, workshops, public events, research support sprints, a certificate program, and a pilot anti-racist grant initiative. The pair reflects on the challenges encountered, lessons learned, and the strategies and values that guide the work. 

Two briefings explore facets of scholarly communication and publishing. The volume of open journal publications and related metadata about scholarly communication has increased dramatically in the past 15-20 years. Yet there is evidence that scholarly processes still create barriers to inclusion and measuring progress toward openness, equity, and inclusion remains difficult. In Community Tracking Indicators for Open and Inclusive Scholarship, Micah Altman describes the work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries’ Center for Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services-supported project that aims to develop open, reliable, and standardized indicators to understand who participates in open scholarship. The briefing describes the project plans and preliminary pilot research results. 

In Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community, a team from Brown University and Emory University summarizes a recently published report on the landscape of digital scholarly publishing and the findings of a spring 2021 summit on multimodal digital monographs. The summit convened members of the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Monograph Initiative and focused on author and audience needs. Attendees discussed eight case studies and the most pressing questions about digital scholarly publishing. The report offers promising ways forward and calls attention to faculty-led experimentation and reimagined forms of humanities scholarship as the dissemination of multimodal digital monographs unfolds. 

There has been increased focus on leveraging research information management systems (RIMS) as of late. In Building the Unicorn: Or How to Balance Magic and Practicality in Research Information Systems Cynthia Hudson Vitale (Association of Research Libraries) and Dan Coughlin (Pennsylvania State University) describe their approach to developing a solution for discovering and aggregating distributed information about research performed on an academic campus. Their briefing includes a presentation on the technology and data sources used to power the system, and discusses how they were able to meet and comply with various institutional and federal requirements.

      

A sincere thank you to our speakers for their contributions to this edition; we hope you will share these videos widely with your communities. We welcome your comments about this series or any other aspect of CNI's work. The call for proposals for the next round of pre-recorded project briefings will be posted to CNI-ANNOUNCE and CNI’s social media outlets in the coming weeks. 

Clifford Lynch

CNI Executive Director

Diane Goldenberg-Hart

CNI Assistant Executive Director

Paige Pope

CNI Communications Coordinator