Edition Guide
Coalition for Networked Information
Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series
August 2023

In the August 2023 edition of CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series, six contributed videos address current digital information issues. This edition guide provides a brief overview of each presentation; click through to the project briefing pages to watch the videos and see more session-specific details and resources.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication (SP) 800-171, Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Systems and Organizations, outlines security standards for the protection of sensitive information; these are seeing increasing use in higher education settings both for research data and in other contexts. An EDUCAUSE working group published a toolkit to help higher education institutions cope with challenges posed by the standards. Duke University’s Jay Gallman (a toolkit author), in conversation with CNI Director Clifford Lynch, discusses the implications of these higher education standards and the toolkit’s use in The EDUCAUSE SP800-171 Toolkit Initiative. 

In Research Findings from the Building a National Finding Aid Network (NAFAN) Project, Chela Weber synthesizes OCLC’s research on end user and contributor needs in finding aid aggregations and evaluation of existing finding aid data.Led by the California Digital Library, and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the project is designed to build the foundation for a national archival finding aid network. 

Held In Trust: Digital Technology in the Context of Cultural Heritage Preservation is the result of a collaboration between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation to consider how cultural heritage conservation and preservation should confront a wide range of pressing issues. This briefing provides an overview of the group’s background and final report, with a focus on the report section devoted to digital technology.

Two videos provide updates on previous CNI briefings of note:

• Teaching Data Science and Building Data Literacy—Nationally and Globally updates a fall 2020 CNI briefing on the Northeast Student Data Corps (NSDC), which was launched by the National Science Foundation Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub in 2020 to teach data science fundamentals, with a special focus on underserved institutions and students. 
• COVID Information Commons—An Open Portal and Community for Research Collaboration provides an update to a fall 2020 CNI briefing on the COVID Information Commons (CIC), which was created in 2020 through a National Science Foundation (NSF) RAPID award to provide an open resource to explore NSF-funded research addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lastly, Learning about the Invisible: Using Linked Data to Enhance Collection Analysis shares an ongoing University of New Hampshire project that focuses on how to use linked data harvesting to learn what languages and nationalities are commonly excluded from translation. 

We thank the presenters for sharing their work, and we invite you to contact them directly with comments and questions. We will post the next call for proposals for the series to CNI-ANNOUNCE shortly.

Clifford Lynch
CNI Executive Director

Diane Goldenberg-Hart
CNI Assistant Executive Director

Paige Pope
CNI Communications Coordinator