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Roadmap to the Spring 2007 CNI Meeting, April
16-17, Phoen
A Guide to the Spring 2007
Coalition for Networked Information Task Force Meeting
The Spring 2007 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held at the Hyatt
Regency Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona on April 16 and 17, offers a wide
range of presentations that advance and report on CNI's programs,
showcase projects underway at Task Force member institutions, and
highlight important national and international developments.
Here is the "roadmap" to the sessions at the meeting, which
includes both plenary events and an extensive series of breakout
sessions focusing on current developments in networked
information.
As usual, the CNI meeting proper is preceded by an optional
orientation session for new attendees - both representatives of new
member organizations and new representatives or alternate delegates
from existing member organizations - at 11:30 AM; guests are also
welcome. Refreshments are available for all at 12:15 PM on
Monday, April 16. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be
followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday,
April 16, includes additional rounds of parallel breakout sessions,
lunch and the closing keynote, concluding around 3:30 PM. Along
with plenary and breakout sessions, the meeting includes generous
break time for informal networking with colleagues and a reception
which will run until 7:15 PM on the evening of Monday, April 16, after
which participants can enjoy a free evening in Phoenix.
The CNI meeting agenda is subject to last minute changes, particularly
in the breakout sessions, and you can find the most current
information on our Web site, www.cni.org, and
on the announcements board near the registration desk at the
meeting.
The Plenary Sessions
Our opening plenary on Monday will be by Columbia University Art
History and Archaeology Professor Stephen Murray. Stephen's
work, which involves intensive documentation of French churches of the
Middle Ages, is intellectually engaging and visually stunning.
But it is even more stunning, and more significant, as an
extraordinary example of how the application of advanced information
technology in the humanities can move beyond simply enhancing access
to evidence to enable truly new and important scholarship.
Stephen's project also makes integral use of collaborations with teams
of student helpers and suggests fascinating new interconnections
between the processes of teaching, learning and research in the
humanities.
I was deeply impressed when I had an opportunity to see Stephen's work
recently, and immediately wanted to make it more visible to the CNI
community. I'm delighted that Stephen is able to join us and
share his insights.
Marc Smith of Microsoft Research will provide our closing plenary on
Tuesday, titled "Pictures of Traces of Places, People, and
Groups." Marc, who is a sociologist by training, has been
exploring, measuring, mapping, and visualizing social cyberspaces and
the activities that occur within them. This multi-faceted work
connects to a wide range of important questions, ranging from the
organization and documentation of virtual organizations in an
e-research setting through the new ways in which emergent social media
(including mobile technologies) are being developed and used by the
public. His work also has important implications for the
development of learning spaces.
I believe that you'll find the opportunity to engage with Marc's
thinking to be highly thought provoking, and I hope that it will
expand your own thinking about virtual environments.
Highlighted Breakout Sessions
I will not attempt to comprehensively summarize the wealth of breakout
sessions here. However, I want to note particularly some
sessions that have strong connections to the Coalition's 2006-2007
Program Plan and also a few other sessions of special interest, and to
provide some additional context for a few sessions that may be helpful
to attendees in making session choices. I do realize that
choosing among so many interesting concurrent sessions can be
frustrating, and as always we will try to put material from the
breakout sessions on our Web site following the meeting.
Institutional repositories have been an important part of CNI's agenda
for a number of years, and I thought this would be an appropriate time
to revisit some of the more mature efforts to see what they have been
learning. We will have a panel of representatives from the
institutional repository programs at MIT, University of Virginia, and
University of Toronto to address these questions, with a particular
emphasis on the developing role of the repository within the
institution; I will moderate this session.
We will also have a session on DSpace as a software system, reporting
both on the system's architectural review and the establishment of the
Dspace Federation to manage the open source development of the
software. The Australian Partnership for Sustainable
Repositories (APSR) will report on the development of the national
repository system in Australia and its role within broader national
initiatives. Case Western Reserve University and Stanford will
each have sessions on their institutional repositories, highlighting
novel aspects of repository design, implementation and
development.
Curation of large data sets is emerging as a major issue, and many CNI
institutions are looking at the policy and implementation issues they
must address to play a role in this arena. Cornell's Mann
Library will describe pilot projects managing linguistic and
ecological research data; Michigan's ICPSR and Georgetown will explore
issues related to social science data and electronic theses and
dissertations.
Other sessions will explore preservation concerns, including work at
NYU, funded through the NDIIPP Program, on preserving digital public
television; this will include a discussion of DSpace-Storage Request
Broker (SRB) integration and repository architecture. A
presentation by New York Public Library will explore the tension
between public service needs and preservation needs within digital
repositories. David Rosenthal and Vicky Reich of the LOCKSS
project look at fundamental - and in my view badly under-examined -
questions in the preservation of large databases.
Building and sharing collections of digital content will be explored
from a number of vantage points. I am very pleased that Paul
Courant - familiar to the CNI community as the former Provost and now
recently appointed University Librarian at the University of Michigan
- will provide an update on their work with the Google Book Search
Digitization Program. We'll also hear about an important new,
multi-institutional project called MONK (building on an earlier
project called Nora) to support a wide range of interaction modalities
for a large corpus of English texts; in a real sense, this project
helps us to understand the contours of humanities
cyberinfrastructure. We will also have a briefing on the edition
production and presentation technology (EPPT), which is a set of
XML-based tools designed to assist humanists in developing scholarly
editions that combine image facsimiles and marked-up transcriptions of
works.
In a report on the Ithaka-based Aluka project, we will learn about
this collaborative initiative to build a scholarly resource from and
about Africa. At Purdue University, they are exploring
strategies for fusing current GIS data with hundred-year-old maps and
texts that they are digitizing. The University of Washington
will describe their project using links to integrate their digital
collections into Wikipedia.
As always, there's strong interest in how technology and
organizational strategies can work together to facilitate
community-based collaborations, and we can see this theme in many
sessions. Representatives from ARTstor and the J. Paul Getty
Trust will explore how the educational community might take a more
collaborative approach to sharing image content for teaching and
study. We will have an update on the National Science Digital
Library (NSDL) and its efforts to build social networking and
collaboration tools. Two project briefings will focus on work
with Semantic Web technologies: one from Germany is developing a
question-answering system and a Web service for the semantic
annotation of texts, and the other, at the Canada Institute for
Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) uses Semantic Web
technologies, visualization, and other information retrieval
techniques applied to library resources. Using XML, the
University of Southern California is developing, through the Gandhara
Project, tools and services for library information systems that will
better integrate a variety of collections of content. And the
University of California, Los Angeles and Stanford will provide
perspectives on the sometimes contentious questions involved in
adopting community and open source software solutions. Finally,
Peter Brantley, the newly appointed Director of the Digital Library
Federation (DLF), will discuss new strategic directions for that
organization, which also stress multi-institutional collaborative
frameworks such as DLF's Aquifer project.
We will have an update on the Open Archives Initiative Object Re-Use
and Exchange (OAI-ORE) Project, which is now well into its technical
work with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Fundamental architectural ideas in this program seem to be maturing
quickly, and this will be a good opportunity to both learn about and
provide comment on these developments.
The Shibboleth distributed authorization system has gained
considerable momentum over the past year, with the formation of
national-level trust federations in Europe, and the implementation of
the protocol by a number of major information suppliers around the
world. We will have a session focusing specifically on the
technical and organizational status of Shibboleth and trust
federations and the remaining barriers to large-scale production
adoption of the system (particularly in the United States). Ken
Klingenstein will also lead a second session dealing more broadly with
the role of libraries in the development and deployment of
collaboration technologies in the research and higher education
communities, with some emphasis on the implications of infrastructure
services such as identity and trust management.
A number of sessions will explore what types of services today's
information users, seekers, and creators need and how libraries and
information technology providers are innovating to meet those needs.
Delivering new types of services in technology-enabled physical spaces
is an important aspect of many institutions' engagement with students
and their learning. CNI's Joan Lippincott will explore trends in
information commons, and the University of Rochester will report on
their work with a Herman Miller information-gathering technique that
will inform their planning for a major library renovation. The
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will discuss the
multi-faceted roles of gaming as learning, in research, and as part of
library collections. Georgetown University will feature a
community-based learning initiative that includes student development
of online posters and a peer-reviewed online journal. Nancy John
of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Ed Valauskas of the
journal First Monday will explore library-based publishing
services and supporting technology that allow the sustained operation
of very low cost, high quality open access scholarly
journals.
Faculty perspectives will be covered in a briefing from Ithaka, which
will report on its 2006 survey of faculty and their views of
electronic research and teaching resources; they'll also compare this
data with similar studies in 2000 and 2003 to help us understand how
these views are evolving over time. The University of
California, San Francisco and University of Washington will report on
assessment activities that were used to better understand faculty
preferences for library resources, services, and physical spaces in
biomedical and health science disciplines.
The New Media Consortium, in conjunction with the EDUCAUSE Learning
Initiative, produces the annual Horizon Report, which
identifies six technologies likely to impact teaching, learning, and
creative expression within higher education and suggests their
adoption time frames; they will describe their findings and share
reaction to their 2007 report.
"Podcasting" (the management and dissemination of audio
recordings) is now well established as a tool for teaching and
learning, and a base of best practices and experience on developing
infrastructure to support this - along with an appropriate policy and
administrative framework - is now well developed.
Representatives from Indiana University and Duke University will
describe experience in this area.
A key issue in service delivery and administrative and financial
strategy on campuses is the relationship between central IT
organizations and those in colleges, departments, or other units;
there is evidence that, for better or worse, a strong decentralization
trend has been underway in the last decade. Jack McCredie, in
his role as an EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) fellow and
drawing on his earlier experience as CIO of the University of
California, Berkeley, has been exploring these issues and will share
his perspectives. I think that this is a particularly important
set of developments that the library community can also gain insight
from, particularly as they face the new service delivery challenges of
supporting e-research across the campus.
Finally, three sessions will provide opportunities for attendees to
hear viewpoints on and discuss how we should shape our institutions
for the future. As a follow- on to an invitational summit on
technology, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)
is conducting a wide-reaching discussion about the best ways for
academic libraries to address technology issues. David Lewis of
Indiana University/Purdue University of Indianapolis has written a
paper presenting a strategy for academic libraries for the next twenty
years and will seek participant comments. The Canadian Heritage
Information Network will discuss how new and emerging technology
opportunities can help museums transform their business practices.
There is much more, and I invite you to browse the complete list of
breakout sessions and their full abstracts at the CNI Web site.
In many cases you will find these abstracts include 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 when it is available to us.
I look forward to seeing you in Phoenix this April for what promises
to be another extremely worthwhile meeting. Please contact me
(cliff@cni.org), or Joan Lippincott, CNI's Associate Director
(joan@cni.org), if we can provide you with any additional information
on the meeting.
Clifford Lynch
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