The Fall 2022 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the JW Marriott Hotel in Washington, DC on Dec. 12–13, offers 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 plenary events and an extensive series of breakout sessions focusing on current issues in digital information. As always, we have strived to present sessions that reflect late-breaking developments and also take advantage of our venue in the Washington, DC, area to provide opportunities to interact with policy makers and funders, including the popular regular fall session Update from Funders: Priorities and Trends, which features panelists from several federal agencies and foundations.

As usual, the CNI meeting proper is preceded by an optional orientation session at 11:15am 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, Dec. 12. The opening plenary is at 1:00pm and will be followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions plus a stand-alone, plenary lightning round session (new this year), immediately preceding the evening reception. Tuesday, Dec. 13, includes additional rounds of parallel breakout sessions, lunch, and the closing plenary, concluding around 3:30pm. Like last year, we’ve included generous break time for informal networking with colleagues, in addition to our signature reception which will run until 7:30pm on the evening of Monday, Dec. 12, after which participants can enjoy a wide range of dining options in Washington, DC.

Given the popularity of several changes made to the meeting format last year, we will continue to offer more leisurely pacing, a greatly reduced number of parallel sessions, and professional recording of all sessions (unless otherwise requested by presenters) for subsequent public availability. Please continue to keep in mind that many of the parallel project briefings that would have been part of the meeting pre-pandemic are now offered as part of our quarterly edition of video project briefings instead (see https://www.cni.org/resources/pbvs for more about CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series).

All project briefing rounds will be one hour or 45 minutes in duration, and some one-hour sessions will be comprised of two separate presentations, which may not be related, directly, thematically; we’ve emphasized to our presenters in the half-hour slots that it’s essential that they keep to time, and we invite attendees to feel free to shift from one session to another at the half-hour breakpoint. 

The new lightning round will be comprised of a series of brief presentations (no more than seven minutes each) on new or ongoing projects or programs. Our goal here is to provide you with more opportunities to learn about work that impacts the CNI community while maintaining the new meeting pace and structure. Note that this lightning round session is strategically placed just prior to our reception; you should feel free to find lightning round presenters at the reception and follow up with them! Please also do share your feedback with us about this experiment after the meeting; we’ll be asking about your views in the meeting evaluation that we send out.

The CNI meeting program is subject to last minute changes—don’t rule out a late-breaking addition to the line-up! You can find the most current information, including schedule details, on the event Sched (https://cnifall22membermtg.sched.com) or on our website; at the meeting, we’ll also have a physical message board that will include any last-minute changes. 

As is now traditional, I have reserved the opening plenary of our fall meeting for an update. During this session, scheduled to start at 1:00pm on Monday, Dec. 12, I want to look at recent key developments and trends in the networked information and research landscapes. With this as context, I will discuss the evolution of CNI’s programs and strategies as we have transited the pandemic and plan for the future. I look forward to sharing CNI’s continually evolving strategy with you, as well as a working draft of a new set of organizing themes for our work. 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.

For the closing plenary, we’ll hear from Paul Courant, this year’s Paul Evan Peters Award recipient (https://www.cni.org/go/pep-award), upon being presented with the award. His talk, “Utopia for Networked Knowledge in the Library and the Academy,” will serve as the Paul Evan Peters Memorial Lecture and promises to be thought-provoking. You can find his abstract and bio on the meeting website (https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2022/plenary-sessions-f22).

We offer a great abundance and diversity of material, and I want 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 most, if not 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.

These sessions will address various aspects of research support services:

A cluster of breakouts will discuss emerging technologies, including a session on the provocative LibNFT project, which aims to explore the use of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to mitigate the costs of digitizing and preserving distinctive collections. Panelists from the Internet Archive, York University, and the Library of Congress will consider the challenges in supporting the use of methods such as data mining, natural language processing, and machine learning (ML) for computational research using large digital collections. We’ll also hear about efforts at the University of California to develop a framework for deploying technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and ML to help libraries acquire, process, and distribute/publish their assets in ways that allow users to discover, share, use/reuse, and curate information resources.

The management, procurement, and ongoing stewardship of digital content figures prominently in this year’s program and will be considered in these presentations:

Several briefings will focus on issues related to information access and retrieval:

Karen Estlund (Colorado State U.) and Rosalyn Metz (Emory U.) will discuss evaluating business models for digital infrastructure services by providing an overview of different models in nonprofit and commercial sectors and discussing criteria for evaluating these services. We’ll hear about diverse issues related to publishing, including a presentation from Brown U. about a training institute for scholars who lack the necessary resources and capacity to develop digital publications at their home institutions, and a session on how the Public Access Submission System (PASS) might address issues raised by the August 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo on access to federally funded research. Panelists from various institutions will share their experiences with repository migrations and explore commonalities and recurring themes in the lessons learned.

Finally, we expect the lightning round will include these talks:

I invite you to browse the complete list of breakout sessions and their full abstracts on the CNI website: https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2022. In many cases you will find pointers to reference material that you may find useful to explore prior to the session, and after the meeting we will add material from the actual presentations, including video recordings, if and when they are available. You can also follow the meeting via Twitter using the hashtag #cni22f.

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