The Spring 2023 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held in Denver, CO, on April 3-4, 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.

First, I want to call attention to some logistical matters that I hope will help avoid confusion. The meeting venue, the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, is comprised of two buildings across the street from each other, and we recommend that you instruct drivers to drop you off at the hotel’s main drive, located at the corner of Court Plaza and 16th St. Mall, in order to gain direct access to the front desk, located in the Plaza Building. The CNI meeting will take place in the Tower Building; guest rooms may be in either building, and a second-floor sky bridge connects the two buildings.

It has been wonderful to see so many new faces (as well as familiar ones!) as we’ve returned to our in-person meeting format. On behalf of the entire CNI organization and community, I extend a warm welcome to all those joining us for the first time. On Monday, April 3, the CNI meeting proper will be preceded by an optional, first-time-attendee information session at 11:15 am, and I hope to meet many of you there. 

Light refreshments will be available for all beginning at noon; the opening plenary is at 1:00 pm and will be followed by three rounds of parallel breakout sessions. The day’s presentations will end with a stand-alone, lightning round session—comprised of a series of brief presentations on new or ongoing projects or programs—immediately preceding our signature evening reception which will run until 7:30 pm, where we encourage you to follow up with lightning round presenters and connect with old and new colleagues. After the reception participants can enjoy a wide range of nearby dining options in Denver.

Tuesday, April 4, begins with something new this meeting: a small number of optional, lightly facilitated discussion roundtables on a focused topic over breakfast; rest assured there will still be ample space in the breakfast area for those who prefer unstructured meal and social opportunities. The breakfast discussion tables are intended to give attendees an opportunity to engage with each other on issues for which there is strong community interest; we expect the discussions to be relatively unstructured, the role of moderator to be fairly casual, and that participants will come and go. Check the meeting agenda for roundtable discussion topics and names of facilitators; tables will be designated by topic in the breakfast dining area. Please share your feedback with us about this pilot (and any other aspect of the event); after the meeting we’ll be asking about your views in the evaluation that we send out.

After breakfast, the main meeting resumes with additional rounds of parallel breakout sessions, a sit-down lunch (provided), and the closing plenary, concluding around 3:30 pm. Like last year, we include generous break time for informal networking with colleagues.

The schedule includes leisurely pacing with increased transition time between sessions, a modest 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 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).

Project briefing rounds will be 30, 45, or 60 minutes in duration. Note the final round on Tuesday is anomalous: there are two 60-minute sessions and a 30-minute session taking place in parallel (those attending the 30-minute session get an open half hour, or can join one of the 60-minute sessions in progress).

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://cnispring23membermtg.sched.com) or on our website; at the meeting, we’ll also have a few program hard copies, as well as a physical message board that will include any last-minute changes. 

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

The opening session (Monday, April 3, 1:00 pm) will feature a panel of four CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows: two from the 2020 cohort (to update us since their last panel at CNI’s virtual spring 2021 meeting and to reflect on their experiences in the program), and two from the 2022 cohort, participating for the first time. CLIR 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. CNI has long maintained a close relationship with the program as part of our commitment to supporting emerging leaders in our community, and I’m really pleased to welcome back the fellows in person this year.

For the closing plenary (Tuesday, April 4, 2:15 pm), we’ve invited members of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship to share their views on the group’s work and preliminary findings, as the Commission approaches a summer 2023 report release and conclusion of the current phase of its work. The Commission was established to develop recommendations on improving support, access, and sustainability of digital resources and digital humanities projects related to social and racial justice. It has been convened by ACLS with funding from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This work has deep connections to many long-standing CNI concerns involving scholarly work in the digital age, digital preservation, and the complex technical and social infrastructure to support these activities. 

More information about the plenaries, including biographies of all panelists, is available at https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2023/plenary-sessions-s23.

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 and Vimeo channels after the meeting. We hope you will share these resources widely with your communities.

CNI’s Joan Lippincott will report on the findings from two invitational forums examining the evolution, current state, and future of digital scholarship programs in libraries of CNI member institutions (there will also be a document reporting on this work). Ken Klingenstein of Internet2 and Tracy Tolliver of U. Illinois, Urbana-Champaign will survey the many changes taking place that will impact access to online content, particularly for the research and education community, and discuss the consequences for the library community. Representatives from several San Diego-based libraries will provide an update on a community partnership to address the crisis of health misinformation.

A cluster of breakouts will focus on various aspects of what we think are important emerging technologies, including:

Panelists from the U. of Michigan, the U. of Minnesota, ACLS and ITHAKA will discuss a proposed model to publish open access academic books sustainably. Another publishing-related session will explore how the U. of California is evaluating the Palace Project platform to bring mobile access to their e-books and collections to its constituents.

Speakers from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will address the 2022 Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum on new public access requirements for federally funded research, as well as interagency coordination efforts in the recent declaration of 2023 as the Year of Open Science. We’ll also hear from several university-based open source program offices (OSPOs), to relay early lessons learned, as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation embarks upon a program to fund an additional set of university OSPOs.

A team from the U. of Oklahoma will report on its work with the National Research Platform to create custom computing environments that focus on the needs of instructors, students, and researchers. Other sessions to address various aspects of research support services and infrastructure will include:

Ithaka S+R will report the findings from the latest in their longitudinal study of library directors, fielded in October–December 2022. The Library Director Survey has been conducted on a triennial basis since 2010, with a special 2020 cycle conducted in the fall of that year to account for pandemic-related issues. In “Developing a Data-Driven Approach to Organizational Development,” we’ll learn about one organization’s strategies for coping with an issue we hear about often from library leaders: the staffing shortage and the need to build skilled, diverse teams.

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/spring-2023  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 #cni23s.

On behalf of the CNI team, I look forward to welcoming you to Denver 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.

Executive Director

Coalition for Networked Information