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Roadmap to December 4-5, 2006 CNI Fall
Meeting
A Guide to the Fall 2006
Coalition for Networked Information Task Force Meeting
The Fall 2006 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held at the Renaissance
Washington Hotel in Washington, DC on December 4 and 5, 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 always,
we have strived to present sessions that reflect late-breaking
developments and also take advantage of our venue in Washington DC to
provide opportunities to interact with policy makers and funders.
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, December 4. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be
followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday,
December 5, 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 till 7:00 PM on the evening of Monday, December 4, after
which participants can enjoy a wide range of dining opportunities in
the Washington area.
In conjunction with the meeting, the Library of Congress is offering
an information interchange session on developments with the National
Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP),
which will run from 8:30 to 11:45AM on Monday morning. This is open to
all CNI attendees, and no separate registration is necessary; the
meeting will be in Meeting Room #2.
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
Following tradition, I have reserved the opening plenary session to
address key developments in networked information, discuss progress on
the Coalition's agenda, and highlight selected initiatives from the
2006-2007 Program Plan. The Program Plan will be distributed at
the meeting (and will be available electronically on the Coalition's
Web site,
www.cni.org around December
3). I look forward to sharing the Coalition's continually
evolving strategy with you, as well as discussing current issues.
The opening plenary will include time for questions and discussion,
and I am eager to hear your comments.
The opening plenary will also include the presentation of the first
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards for Technology Collaboration. These
awards recognize non-profit organizations that have demonstrated
exceptional leadership in the collaborative development of open source
software through the contribution of substantial self-funded
organizational resources. You can find out more about the awards, and
the stellar award jury (which includes several recipients of
CNI's Paul Evan Peters award) at http://rit.mellon.org/awards/ . The awards will be presented by Sir
Tim Berners-Lee.
The closing plenary, scheduled to start at 2:15PM on Tuesday, will be
given by Professor Dan Atkins of the University of Michigan, who since
June 2006 has been serving as the Director of the Office of
Cyberinfrastructure at the United States National Science Foundation.
Dan, who I think is well-known to much of the CNI community and a
former member of the CNI Steering Committee, has played a key role in
shaping our networked information environment; he was one of the
leaders in the development of our thinking about collaboratories and
digital libraries. He was the founding dean of the School of
Information at the University of Michigan. He chaired the blue-ribbon
panel that wrote the key 2003 report "Revolutionizing Science and
Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure" for the National Science
Foundation. You can find much more about Dan's career and
contributions here:
http://www.si.umich.edu/people/faculty-detail.htm?sid=2 ; more detail on the current work of the
NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure is at:
http://www.nsf.gov/dir/index.jsp?org=OCI
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. We have a packed agenda of breakout
sessions, and as always will try to put material from these sessions
on our Web site following the meeting for those who were unable to
attend.
Developing a more sophisticated understanding of faculty research in
order to deliver library and information technology services to
support this central mission of universities is on the agenda of many
institutions. As the global and institutional
cyberinfrastructure develop and new forms of e-research allow new
types of scholarship, librarians and information technologists are
seeking to understand their roles in the support of researchers
deploying advanced technologies in their work. Richard Katz will
present the work of the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) on
an extensive study of IT engagement in research, and we will have
reports from NYU and University of Minnesota on their initiatives to
assess how libraries could better meet the needs of researchers.
Understanding faculty perceptions of publishing in the digital
environment is also part of this picture. An important study
from the Center for the Study of Higher Education at UC Berkeley will
describe the results of in-depth interviews with faculty in several
disciplines and their views of publishing in open access and
online-only publications; the results are eye-opening and important
for CNI representatives to understand.
The themes of institutional repositories and the management of
locally-produced scholarship are also important to CNI's agenda.
Herbert van de Sompel and Carl Lagoze will describe their
Mellon-funded project to work on cross-repository interoperability,
which follows on from a workshop that CNI co-sponsored earlier this
year. The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories
will discuss its project to develop an interoperability solution for
resources in DSpace and Fedora. Representatives from JISC and
SURF will provide an update on Knowledge Exchange, an initiative
involving British, Dutch, German, and Danish partners on the national
level who are working jointly on institutional repository and site
licensing issues. We will have sessions from the University of
Michigan and from Michigan State University on providing digital asset
management for a wide variety of content. A more specialized,
collaborative project for sharing dance image resources will also be
featured.
Several project briefings will describe national, international, and
local efforts to create software or tools for digital information
systems. Zotero, developed by the George Mason Center for
History and New Media, is intended to be a next-generation scholarly
research tool that operates within the Firefox browser. In
Germany, the ARIADNE and UNIMATRIX projects are working to provide
uniform access to a variety of digital resources across the country
through a standardized platform. CSA will describe a new set of
tools and descriptive approaches they call "deep indexing" in
order to enhance both the discovery and reuse of scholarly works.
University of Rochester and Oregon State University will discuss their
separate projects to develop new types of library search tools.
University of Pennsylvania and University of Washington will describe
their projects to deploy tools for better access to collections. A
Mellon-funded project from the NITLE institutions that uses a semantic
engine to explore texts will also be featured.
Digital preservation continues to be of great interest to the CNI
community. As mentioned earlier, there will be a special
briefing on the Library of Congress NDIIPP initiative that will be
held prior to the start of the meeting. Project briefing
sessions on preservation include an update from the Portico project, a
discussion of threats and countermeasures for digital preservation by
the developers of LOCKSS, an analysis from two libraries that compares
LOCKSS/CLOCKSS and Portico archived content, and a report from a
collaborative multi-institutional preservation initiative on Southern
Digital Culture. A session on incorporating rights and
preservation information into metadata will focus on technical issues.
University of Kentucky will describe their work in reformatting analog
oral history audio materials into digital form.
A number of sessions will explore what types of services today's
information users, seekers, and creators need and how libraries,
information technology providers, and museums are innovating to
meet those needs. At the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, librarians are experimenting with service delivery
via Facebook, MySpace, and other vehicles; this should be a
stimulating update of ways to reach users in new environments.
The State and University Library of Denmark recently released an
important study of users' expectations of hybrid (digital and print)
libraries, and we will hear about lessons learned from their survey.
Many libraries are keenly interested in understanding their
constituency's use of Google as compared to library information
resources, and a report from the Association of Research Libraries
(ARL) and Texas A&M will describe what LibQUAL+ ? reveals about
this issue. Georgia Tech will provide details on how
collaborations between library and IT units produce better services
and facilities for users.
In the teaching and learning area, a session will focus on a study of
faculty and student use of digital images in liberal arts colleges.
The Columbia University Center for New Media Teaching and Learning,
which has produced some outstanding work, will describe some of their
tools for the analytic use of video in the classroom.
Another session, from University of Nebraska, will discuss art image
issues in teaching and learning environments. Harvard and ARTstor will
describe their experiment in merging locally owned images with ARTstor
content. A briefing from the Virtual Museum of Canada will describe
how a very large collection of user feedback messages helped the
museum understand user behavior and measure impact. Related to
these user studies is work by Ithaka to understand librarian attitudes
towards their role, the role of digital resources, and other issues;
this session will focus on results from a 2006 survey.
Given our Washington-area venue, we will have some very useful updates
from federal agencies. These include sessions that will
highlight grant opportunities, particularly for digital resources and
services, from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and
the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which has recently
launched a Digital Humanities Initiative. Also, we will have an
update from the Government Printing Office on their future digital
system.
CNI works closely with a number of other organizations, and we will
have reports from two of those, the new Programs and Research division
of OCLC (which includes the new home for RLG's programs following the
OCLC-RLG merger) and the Digital Library Federation, which will
highlight its important recent work on developing a services framework
for digital libraries.
Finally, let me mention just two other sessions. Brad
Wheeler of Indiana University will report on an October 2006 Licensing
and Policy summit in which leaders grappled with the complex issues
surrounding implementation of open source software. Another very
interesting new development is the emergence of new university presses
or other publishing enterprises as part of the campus library. We will
have reports from Penn State, Rice, and Georgetown on their projects
in this area.
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 Washington, DC this December 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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