Meeting Roadmap A Guide to the Spring 2025 Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Spring 2025 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee on April 7-8, 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 and technologies.
This will also be a CNI meeting unlike any other. I won’t be there for my own meeting – what I expect will be my final meeting as CNI Executive Director!
I would never have imagined when announcing my retirement in summer 2024, that I’d find myself in my current situation. As some of you know, I started having serious respiratory problems in late 2024. They put me on supplemental oxygen in February 2025. I had a major physical collapse on Tuesday, March 18, and, much to everybody’s amazement, was still alive in the intensive care unit at a hospital near my home on March 19. The hospital discharged me about a week ago.
Basically, I need supplemental oxygen at all times, and I don’t have much stamina. I’m not very mobile. Intellectually I’m fine, reading, talking, watching video, and similar things. After considerable discussion I’ve concluded that I’m physically unable to make the trip and attend the meeting; the really overwhelming issue is making my way around the hotel with portable oxygen throughout the meeting.
The current plan is that I’ll have an opportunity to chat with people at the Monday reception via Zoom, to participate remotely in the closing panel, and to listen to the opening plenary and open discussion before Monday’s reception.
So, it falls to me to remotely welcome everyone to Milwaukee, and to rely on CNI’s amazing team to welcome you on my behalf in person.
It has been wonderful to see so many new faces (as well as familiar ones!) at our in-person meetings recently. On behalf of the entire organization, I extend a warm welcome to all those attending CNI for the first time, and I hope that long-time attendees will help to make them welcome. On Monday, April 7, the CNI meeting proper will be preceded by an optional, first-time-attendee introduction and information session at 11:15 am. 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 sessions will end with a stand-alone, open forum discussion session on current national trends, immediately preceding our signature evening reception which will run until 7:30 pm, where we encourage you to continue the conversation and connect with old and new colleagues. After the reception participants can enjoy a wide range of nearby dining options in downtown Milwaukee.
Tuesday, April 8 begins with optional topical discussion tables over breakfast which will be lightly facilitated. Breakfast discussion tables provide attendees with an opportunity to engage with each other on issues for which there is strong community interest. The discussions are relatively unstructured and the role of facilitator is intended to be fairly casual; there is no signup and participants are free to come and go. Rest assured there will still be ample space in the breakfast area for those who prefer unstructured dining and social opportunities. We are actively adding discussion topics and facilitators to the program; tables will be designated by topic in the breakfast dining area.
After breakfast, the meeting resumes with three additional rounds of parallel breakout sessions, a sit-down lunch (provided), one more parallel breakout round, and the closing session, concluding around 3:30 pm. We include generous break time for informal networking with colleagues.
The schedule includes leisurely pacing, a modest number of parallel sessions, and professional recording of most sessions for subsequent public availability; please note that Monday’s “Open Forum on Current National Trends: Discussing Key Issues in Today’s Environment” will not be recorded. Furthermore, 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 releases of video project briefings; see https://www.cni.org/resources/pbvs for the most recent edition.
Project briefing rounds will be 30, 45, or 60 minutes. Our goal is to provide you with ample opportunities to learn about work that impacts the community (and potentially connect to projects of interest) while maintaining a comfortable meeting pace and structure.
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://cnispring2025mtg.sched.com) or on the CNI website ( cni.org); at the meeting, we’ll also have program hard copies for those who want them, as well as a physical message board near registration that will include any last-minute changes.
Plenary Sessions
The opening plenary session on Monday, April 7, at 1:00 pm, will include an update on the CNI leadership transition by Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Executive Director Andrew K. Pace, followed by the presentation of the Paul Evan Peters Award to LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) co-founders Victoria Reich and David Rosenthal. In their Peters Memorial Lecture “Lessons from LOCKSS,” the recipients will look back over their two decades with the LOCKSS Program, including the evolution of its goals, the development of its technology, and how this history reveals a set of seductive, persistent but impractical ideas.
We have reserved the end of the first day for an unrecorded, open discussion, beginning at 5:30 pm. Karim Boughida of Stony Brook University and Karen Estlund of Colorado State University will lead and moderate the session, Open Forum on Current National Trends: Discussing Key Issues in Today’s Environment, which is designed to provide attendees with an opportunity to openly engage in discussions about pressing issues affecting the field. The session will be immediately followed by the Monday evening reception.
The closing session (Tuesday, April 8, 2:15 pm) will be “A Conversation on Cybersecurity, Essential Cyberinfrastructure for Research and Education, and Resilience,” including panelists Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), Elisabeth Long (Johns Hopkins University), and Cheryl Washington (University of California, Davis). The conversation will explore questions and issues surrounding the increasing intensity and frequency of attacks on information systems and services across all sectors of society, and their effects and implications.
Breakout Sessions
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 also expect to make recordings of the sessions publicly available on our YouTube and Vimeo channels. We hope you will share these resources widely with your communities.
Collections, discovery, and access recur as major themes at this meeting, particularly within the context of emerging technologies: - An invited update on the Public Interest Training Commons, by Northeastern University Library Dean Dan Cohen and Thomas Padilla of the Authors Alliance, will report on a project announced at CNI’s fall 2024 meeting. The initiative is focused on developing large-scale, high-quality artificial intelligence (AI) training data from the world’s memory organizations to serve the public interest.
- Speakers from Northwestern University discuss chat-based search and discovery in “Continuing the Conversation: Leveraging Generative AI Tools and Semantic Search for Digital Collections.”
- In “HBS Knowledge: Building a Foundation for AI-Driven Discovery,” we will hear about a platform developed by Harvard Business School that uses a dynamic knowledge graph to enhance the discovery of sources from across the organization.
- “Beyond ‘This Image May Contain:’ Using Vision Language Models to Improve Accessibility for Digital Image Collections” explores how neural network AI technologies capable of working with both images and text offer promising tools for improving access to library collections at scale.
A team from the University of Texas at Austin will discuss developing scripted processes for gathering information about research datasets and open-source software in “Completing the Picture of Institutional Research Output and Impact: Automating Discovery and Assessment of Research Data and Software.” Other breakouts will focus on various aspects of research data management and support, including “Smarter Data Management: AI-Driven Insights and Institutional Integration in the Machine-Actionable DMPs (MAP) Project,” on technical solutions to integrate AI-driven evaluation of data management plans (DMPs). “What Are We Even Doing Here? Building a Community of People Working with Data,” will provide an overview of a Data Curation Network project to develop a data curation training curriculum for information professionals and data stewards.
Collaboration and partnership models will be explored in several sessions: - In “Washington University Libraries and the Digital Intelligence and Innovation Accelerator (DI2): Partnering in Digital Transformation,” representatives from both the Library and the DI2 unit will discuss the partnership between the departments and describe several projects resulting from their collaboration.
- An innovative model that is positioning the Library to move deeper into research support across the university is explored in “Yale Library Governance and Technical Infrastructure to Fuel Innovation.”
- “Cultivating Collaborative Library Scholars: A Multi-Institutional Professional Development Initiative” reports outcomes from an initiative among research libraries and iSchools aimed at strengthening academic libraries’ role as research partners and promoting library and information science research collaborations.
John Chodacki of the California Digital Library will describe a project designed to provide a unified, scalable approach to the problems surrounding the growing amount of research metadata built on persistent identifiers in “The Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET): Uniting Stakeholders for Collaborative Metadata Enrichment.” Panelists from Cornell and Stanford will discuss open licenses or declarations for metadata in the session “Why Open Library Metadata?” (the speakers will also host a breakfast discussion on this topic). In “Artificial Intelligence for Transcription and Metadata in Special Collections,” we will hear reports on projects from three different institutions on this topic.
A number of briefings will focus on developments in digital preservation and curation: - In “Safeguarding Audiovisual Data,” a panel including the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle, Peter Kaufman of MIT, and David Rowntree of the University of Hawaii will discuss protecting important audiovisual materials.
- George Oates of the Flickr Foundation will present a tool for preserving huge quantities of images in “Preserving Billions of Photos? Try Data Lifeboat.”
- A panel will discuss how community-owned and -led digital infrastructure can, and should, incorporate contingencies for sunsetting into sustainability planning in “MetaArchive Across Its Life Cycle: Change and Resilience in the Digital Preservation Ecosystem.”
- “Reconsidering Digital Ecosystems for Curation” includes presentations from three organizations on their respective digital content strategies.
Issues related to teaching and learning will be featured in “Studio X: From Vision to Impact-Advancing Extended Reality Research and Education,” which will discuss how the University of Rochester Libraries has lowered barriers to extended reality access and expanded research support. A panel including library leaders will highlight how their institutions advance AI literacy initiatives in “Artificial Intelligence Literacy: Building Competency, Confidence, and Collaboration.”
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-2025/project-briefings-s25. In many cases, you will find pointers to reference material that you may find useful to explore before the session, and after the meeting, we will add material from the actual presentations, including video recordings, if and when they are available.
The entire CNI team looks forward to welcoming you to Milwaukee 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.
Clifford Lynch Executive Director Coalition for Networked Information
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