Meeting Roadmap

The Spring 2010 CNI Membership Meeting offers a wide range of presentations that advance and report on CNI’s programs, showcase projects underway at CNI member institutions, and highlight important national and international developments. Here is the customary “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 12. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday, April 13, 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 12, after which participants can enjoy a free evening in Baltimore.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 announcements board will also have information about wireless access in the meeting room areas.

The Plenary Sessions

We will open the meeting with a plenary address that examines the implementation issues that arise from open access mandates or policies, and the ways in which different institutions are approaching these challenges. These open access mandates or policies may arise from institutional decisions such as faculty senate resolutions at school or university-wide levels, or from conditions imposed by public funding agencies such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health or by private foundations; they call for faculty publications to be made openly available through various mechanisms and subject to various embargo periods or other limitations. The roles of individual faculty, of libraries, and of publishers in meeting these obligations are still very much in flux, as are the specifics of the obligations imposed from various sources. We’ll hear from representatives from Harvard University (a pioneer adopter of faculty-driven policy on a school-by-school basis), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a pioneer adopter at an institutional level), and the University of Kansas (the first public university in the US to adopt an instructional mandate), as well as from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the first major laboratory in the US to adopt such a policy.

There’s been a great deal of discussion about the pros and cons of various approaches to open access from a policy perspective; the questions of practical implementation, which will be our focus here, are vital both from an operational perspective at CNI member institutions and because we need to understand them in order to inform more effective future policy development. I’ll be moderating this plenary panel, and I think we will all learn a great deal from it.

Our closing plenary on Tuesday afternoon will be by Dr. Liz Lyon, the Director of UKLON at the University of Bath. Also the Associate Director of the JISC-funded Digital Curation Centre hosted at the University of Edinburgh, Liz has been deeply involved in cyberinfrastructure and e-research, data curation, and digital libraries both in the UK and internationally, and she has authored several highly influential major studies of developments in these areas, most recently the 2009 report Open Science at Web Scale (available online at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/opensciencerpt.aspx), which she will use as a point of departure for her plenary presentation. Liz, who has a doctorate in biochemistry, offers us a particularly strong understanding of the ways in which the practices and norms of science are evolving (both in traditional venues and through novel developments like the re-emergence of “citizen science”) and the implications of this evolution for research universities. Her presentation should be very helpful in identifying leading-edge experiments, developments and trends that CNI member institutions will want to continue to track carefully.

Highlighted Breakout Sessions

II will not attempt a comprehensive summary of breakout sessions here; we offer a great wealth and diversity of material. However, I want to note particularly some sessions that have strong connections to the Coalition’s 2009-2010 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.

The management of large-scale data sets in e-research has been a key theme for CNI’s program in recent years, and sessions at this meeting explore the progress that is being made in many areas. One session will highlight work at Johns Hopkins University on the capture and curation of data along the publication path; they are paired with a project that is part of a large initiative in the Netherlands to explore the relationship of datasets to article publication. The Dutch project features a publishing and archival infrastructure for the enhanced publication (articles plus data, photos, drawings, etc.) of an archaeology journal. Another session will describe standards-related work: a National Information Standards Organization (NISO) representative and representatives from the DataCite project will discuss developing standards and best practices for article supplemental materials, such as datasets. This is emerging is a central issue for scholarly publishers, particularly in the sciences, and work is taking place at both the national and international levels. Another presentation will feature a humanities e-research project that entails the amalgamation and interoperability of rich data related to a Hellenic and pre-Hellenic sanctuary; while it’s a separate project, it connects strongly to ideas and themes from Bernard Frischer’s plenary presentation at the last CNI meeting (video of this can be found on CNI’s Web site [via CNI’s YouTube channel]).

The meeting will present a wide variety of perspectives and projects related to changes in scholarly communication and the role of libraries and information technology in providing infrastructure and services to support innovation. Three presentations will feature research on faculty attitudes and practices. The first reports on the University of California, Berkeley Center for the Study of Higher Education’s massive Mellon-funded study of faculty’s views of the research and publication process. A second presents Ithaka’s most recent survey of faculty’s attitudes to digital technologies and resources in their roles as authors, teachers, and researchers, and explores how these attitudes have shifted across almost a decade of such surveys. In addition, a study by OCLC and the UK Research Information Network focuses on the research life cycle and identifies patterns, gaps, and issues from the researchers’ point of view. In support of research, the VIVO project, begun at Cornell and now being scaled up through a multi-institutional NIH-funded initiative, serves as a social networking platform for researchers designed to encourage multi-disciplinary collaborations.

In order to make more parts of its local collection available to faculty in digital form, Columbia University has begun a program to more directly involve curators in the process of migrating these collections to digital form; they will describe their strategy, tools, and services. Several presenters will discuss the Big Digital Machine, which intends to aggregate and integrate a set of capabilities to provide universities with the ability to manage scholarly output.

We’ll have a number of sessions focused on innovative technologies and tools in digital library environments. In a joint session, the Smithsonian and the National Library of Australia will present new tools for the discovery process. An innovative project by Library of Congress and Stanford will feature work to develop mathematical models and algorithms that support information discovery in large, multi-format, interdisciplinary archives of digital content. Web-based GIS tools have been developed by a German university as a component of the Open Source Initiative to work with a collection of bio-geographical and ecological information on Mongolian flora; this is one example of a growing number of projects that leverage biological data with innovative tools. The Annotator’s Workbench, developed at Indiana University, provides researchers with a much-needed tool to annotate video and has been used with collections covering a range of subject areas. The Open Annotation Collaboration will describe and demonstrate multimedia tagging features added to the reference management software Zotero; this group is working in collaboration with the modeling and standards effort that Herbert Van de Sompel and colleagues described at the fall 2009 meeting (their talk is available from the CNI Web site [via the CNI YouTube channel]). The University of Alabama will describe their Acumen software for digital object search, retrieval, and rendering.

The rapidly growing InCommon trust federation has emerged as a key part of the strategy for integrating campus-based and national cyberinfrastructure and for facilitating resource sharing across institutions. Over the past year, the organization has carried out a major round of strategic planning and re-aligned its relationships with Internet2 and EDUCAUSE. InCommon will provide an update on their work and strategic directions for the CNI community at this meeting.

CNI continues to track the development of institutional repository services–and indeed repository services more broadly–and will feature several sessions on this topic at the meeting. Researchers from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill will provide an update on a project examining the formalization and enforcement of preservation policies and policy interoperability among repositories.

We will have an update on DuraCloud, the service developed jointly by the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons to overlay storage systems such as commercial storage “clouds” with additional functionality suitable for repository and preservation applications. A report from New Zealand will highlight repository and publication management systems. The California Institute of Technology will discuss their transition from ETD-db to EPrints for the management of their electronic theses and dissertations collection. We will also have a presentation from University of Massachusetts, Amherst on best practices for the development and management of subject repositories.

Howard Besser of New York University and colleagues will provide an update of their work on preservation of public television video as part of the National Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).

A number of sessions will explore what types of environments and services today’s information users, seekers, and creators need and how libraries and information technology providers are innovating to meet those needs. We will have a report on a variety of services at Cornell University Libraries, including services for mobile devices that bring the library to the user. Wayne State University will highlight a new initiative to encourage the use by faculty of new media and digital collections. An important study from the UK features some excellent examples of how large data sets are being used in teaching and learning in the social sciences. Making campus information available in a way that will be more engaging to students will be described by Bucknell University.

An absolutely fascinating model project at University of Oregon brings together a team from the faculty, library, and archives to encourage undergraduate students, in the context of understanding historical methodologies and primary source materials, to develop new content about their experiences at the university and to develop a personal relationship with the university archives. This is a fabulous idea that I think deserves consideration for much wider adoption.

Two sessions will explore learning spaces. CNI’s Joan Lippincott along with colleagues from University of Colorado and University of Pennsylvania will discuss and describe various ways of analyzing what’s working in new or renovated information or learning commons. A number of libraries are developing spaces designated for faculty and graduate students; University of Virginia has a Scholars’ Lab, and importantly has a well-developed set of services for its clientele.

Three sessions on cultural memory institutions–libraries, archives, and museums–will focus on, respectively, working across the academic institution on the collections of those organizations, software products to support the needs of all of these types of institutions, and common meeting preservation needs of these institutions.

I will be presenting a session on a topic that I have been following for a number of years and which I believe requires greater attention by many cultural memory organizations–the need to develop actionable strategies for curating digital materials that document an individual’s life or history. It is clear that these materials are becoming an ever greater part of the “personal papers” that have historically been so important as primary research materials, and there is now a growing body of very good research on the nature of these materials and the changing behavior of individuals. I will report on a recent conference on this topic and lead a conversation on the implications of these developments.

Finally, we will have three sessions that provide a forum for discussion of some issues that are on the radar of many in the library community during this era of economic challenges. Leaders from the Association of College and Research Libraries will discuss their current study of return on investment (ROI) of academic libraries and highlight preliminary findings. David Carlson of Southern Illinois University Carbondale will lead a discussion of the concept of an safe harbor initiative that would promote the transition of journals to open access models while protecting publisher revenue streams during such a transition. OCLC Research will describe the “Cloud Library” project that examines how books from academic libraries could be more effectively sourced through shared print and digital archives.

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. We will also be videotaping a few selected sessions, including the closing plenary, and making those available after the meeting.

I welcome you to Baltimore 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
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information