Meeting Roadmap

We welcome CNI Task Force representatives and other participants to Phoenix, Arizona for the Coalition’s Fall 2005 Task Force Meeting. The meeting will be held at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix on Monday and Tuesday, December 5-6, 2005; those who are long-time CNI attendees will remember this hotel from the Fall 1999 Task Force meeting. In Phoenix this year we will again offer a rich and diverse set of presentations that advance and report on CNI’s programs, showcase projects and issues from Task Force member institutions, and highlight key activities in the broader field of networked information. Here is the “roadmap” to the meeting. As always, we have a great deal to report on and to talk about.

As usual, the CNI meeting begins with an optional orientation session, to be conducted this meeting by our Associate Director, Joan Lippincott, for new attendees – both representatives of new member organizations and new representatives or alternate delegates of existing member organizations – at 11:30 AM on Monday, December 5. Refreshments for all attendees will be available at 12:15 PM on Monday, December 5, followed by the opening plenary at 1:15 PM and several rounds of breakout sessions. The meeting wraps up with a closing plenary session concluding at 3:30 PM on Tuesday, December 6.

Along with plenary and breakout sessions, the meeting includes generous time for informal networking with colleagues and a reception on Monday evening. The reception will conclude by 7:30 PM, allowing time for attendees to enjoy the evening in Phoenix.

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 2005-2006 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.

I’m thrilled that Professor Tony Hey will be our closing keynote speaker, addressing issues surrounding e-science, libraries, and the support of research. Tony has recently become Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing at Microsoft; prior to that he served as the head of the United Kingdom’s e-science initiative. Tony, a physicist by training, is an eminent computer scientist who played key roles in the development of parallel computing and grid technologies, and has received many awards and honors, including Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He has a very deep understanding (and an unusually international perspective) of the ways in which scholarship and scholarly communication are being reconfigured by cyberinfrastructure; for a taste of this in advance of the meeting you might enjoy reading the seminal 2003 paper that he wrote with Anne Trefethen, “The Data Deluge” (online at www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~ajgh/DataDeluge(final).pdf).

Highlighted Breakout Sessions

I cannot do justice to every breakout session here, though I believe almost all are mentioned. As always, though, I want to be sure to note some sessions that have strong connections to the Coalition’s 2005-2006 Program Plan and also a few other sessions of special interest. In particular, I want to underscore that many of these breakouts are not only designed to inform attendees, but also to provide opportunities for participants to offer guidance in shaping ongoing initiatives; I’ve tried to specifically highlight some of these opportunities for participation here.

The full schedule and abstracts for all the breakout sessions are available now at the CNI Web site, and we will update these on an ongoing basis if any changes occur. Some abstracts include pointers to reports or other resources that will be discussed during the sessions so you may want to take some time to review these in advance of the meeting. We have a packed agenda of breakout sessions, and, recognizing that meeting participants will not always be able to attend all breakouts of interest, we will try to put additional material from as many of the sessions as possible on the CNI Web site following the meeting.

Building on CNI’s focus on the implications of e-science and cyberinfrastructure, particularly in the data and information management areas, we have several breakout sessions that will complement Tony Hey’s keynote and some of the comments in my own plenary session. Notably, a group of distinguished Chief Information Officers will conduct a panel, led by Bill Decker (currently a Vice President for Research, and a former CIO himself) about changing information technology needs in research support. We’ll have a presentation from Purdue about the innovative collaborations they have underway to address the challenges of large-scale research datasets. There will be a session discussing the report on Computational Science from the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). Finally, we’ll have a report on the Canadian National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data, which produced a very valuable paper earlier this year; those who are tracking the work in the United States emerging from the (US) National Science Board’s report on long-lived scientific data collections will find this Canadian perspective on the issues highly informative.

From e-science, let me move to the related (and inter-related) areas of digital asset management, institutional repositories and digital preservation – all major CNI themes, and all extensively covered at this meeting.

We’ll have a session on the new Open Content Alliance and their large-scale digitization efforts, which received a good deal of press coverage recently. A team from the California Digital Library will present their developing thinking on the issue of institutional stewardship roles and responsibilities for digital scholarly assets. In collaboration with colleagues at SURF and JISC, I’ll report on our joint work to understand the international shape of institutional repository deployment, and on new repository developments in the UK and the Netherlands. Herbert van de Sompel and Jeroen Bekaert from Los Alamos will report on the results of their cross-repository interoperability program. Avra Michelson and Mike Olson from Mitre will present some provocative new thinking about information management strategies with implications that range from enterprise repositories to personal information management issues. And we’ll have a presentation on the British Library’s Digital Object management program. Also related to repositories, we’ll have an update on the DPubS publication management system by Sarah Thomas of Cornell and Nancy Eaton of Penn State.

Addressing preservation issues, Bernie Reilly of the Center for Research Libraries will lead a discussion of auditing and certification of digital archives; we will have a panel on new developments in the Library of Congress NDIIP program; a discussion of the curation of electronic government records from the perspective of the Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records; a presentation by a group of research libraries in the southeast on their work to use LOCKSS to preserve electronic theses and dissertations; and a discussion of the JSTOR Portico program for preserving electronic scholarly resources. In addition, Eric Celeste of the University of Minnesota will describe some of their work in focused web crawling.

The American Council of Learned Society’s Commission on Cyberinfrastrucure in the Humanities and Social Sciences has just very recently issued its draft report for public discussion and comment. Because of the importance of this report, we have scheduled a pair of breakout sessions; in the first, members of the commission will discuss the report and present their findings, while the second session is reserved for community discussion and responses to the report.

We will have several additional sessions dealing with the use of advanced technology in the humanities, including presentations from Peter Kauffman on the role of new educational television approaches; a session on collaborative partnerships and projects for digital research in the humanities at the University of Nebraska; a session on teaching with digital libraries of spoken word materials; a presentation by the Getty and ARTstor on standards-based models for sharing cultural heritage collections; sessions reporting on some fascinating new museum-library collaborations for the creation of digital materials; and a look at the development of the online history of Chicago.

We will have two sessions dealing specifically with learning spaces, including a presentation from the University of Louisville and a session by CNI’s Joan Lippincott which will focus on assessment issues.

An unusual number of sessions address various aspects of understanding user behavior and the development of new end-user information servers. We have a joint Los Alamos-Ex Libris session looking at the mining of usage logs from linking servers; a talk from the University of Pennsylvania on the application of social bookmaking in an academic environment; a talk on TechLens, the fascinating work that Joseph Konstan and his colleagues are doing applying recommender systems technology to digital libraries at the University of Minnesota; and a report of the measurement of networked electronic services impact in libraries by Brinley Franklin and Terry Plum. Nancy John will describe a wide range of personalization technologies and lead a discussion of potential new library services. We’ll have a discussion of the integration of Wiki functions into OCLC services. Finally, Stephen Abram of SirsiDynix has agreed to describe their work on large-scale data collection and analysis for libraries, which I believe you will find fascinating.

Vectors is a new electronic journal that has been developed at the University of Southern California; if you have not looked at this yet, you should (see www.vectorsjournal.org) as it represents some enormously innovative and creative uses of the digital medium to present scholarship. Tara McPherson will join us for a presentation on this important project.

I look forward to seeing you in Phoenix this December for what promises to be another stimulating and informative 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