A Guide to the Spring 2014
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting
The Spring 2014 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at The Ritz-Carlton in St. Louis, Missouri on March 31 and April 1, 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, March 31. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be followed by three rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday, April 1, 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, March 31, after which participants can enjoy a free evening in St. Louis.
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 website, www.cni.org, and on the announcements board near the registration desk at the meeting. Information about wireless access in the meeting room areas will be available in your packets or at the registration table.
The Plenary Sessions
We have a wonderful pair of plenary sessions for our meeting. Bryan Alexander and I will open the meeting on Monday with a wide-ranging conversation on current topics ranging from implications of distance education and MOOCs to device ecosystems and the growth of walled gardens for various kinds of media. We’ll look both at broad macro trends – economic, technical, social, political – and some specific developments that have caught our attention recently. And, of course, we’ll speculate a bit about the future.
For those who want to continue the conversation, we’ve scheduled a breakout session later in the afternoon on Monday.
Bryan Alexander is a well known futurist, consultant and technologist who has been heavily involved in social media, instructional technology and technology-driven changes in pedagogy; a good deal of his work has been focused on liberal arts colleges and he is a Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE). He has also spent time as a professor of English, and holds a PhD in that field. Visit his website at www.bryanalexander.org for more information, or to subscribe to his monthly newsletter, Future Trends in Technology & Education.
The closing plenary session honors the memory of CNI’s founding director, Paul Evan Peters, by presenting the award that CNI, EDUCAUSE, and the Association of Research Libraries established in his memory. The 2014 recipient of the award is Donald A.B. Lindberg, M.D., the long-time director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and also, concurrently, in 1992-1995, the founding director of the National Coordinating Office for High Performance Computing and Communication. The criteria for the Paul Evan Peters award speak to sustained contributions at the highest level in the use of technology and information to change society and to advance scholarship. The record of achievement by the National Library of Medicine under Don’s leadership is truly amazing in this regard, and spans areas from research frontiers in molecular biology and genomics to the way that individuals worldwide conceptualize, discover and use medical and health information.
After presentation of the award, Dr. Lindberg will deliver the Paul Evan Peters Memorial Lecture, reflecting broadly on the past, present and future of information technology, the life and health sciences, and the work of NLM. This should be a very special occasion.
You can find more details on the plenary speakers and on the Paul Evan Peters award on the CNI website.
Highlighted Breakout Sessions
I 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 2013-2014 Program Plan (www.cni.org/program/2013-2014/) and also 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 website following the meeting.
Many of the project briefings address a variety of themes related to scholarly communication, e-research, and repositories. OCLC is doing some important thinking about the evolving scholarly record, working to expand our understanding of what types of digital objects we will need to curate for researchers from generations to come. A session on the Journalism Digital News Archive (JDNA) provides a good case study of how the Internet environment is having a major impact on traditional forms of evidence that supports scholarly work and will examine the challenges of preserving born-digital news.
Other scholarly communications sessions include:
o SHARE Project Update, a proposed system of cross-institutional repositories, in which presenters will focus on an automated system for registering and disseminating events related to research results (such as publication of an article or deposition of a dataset). This is a very rapidly evolving vision and implementation plan.
oCan a Consortium Build a Viable Preservation Repository? in which representatives from the Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) describe their project, including its planned relationship to the Digital Preservation Network (DPN).
o Community-based Stewardship at Pennsylvania State University, where they will report on their initiatives to provide a repository both for scholars and for institutional records.
oUse Altmetrics to Uncover the Hidden Scholarly Dialogue, an exploration by Plum Analytics of new modes of understanding the impact of scholars’ work.
We will have a report on a study from University of Michigan that collects data and analyzes the actual impact of library purchasing on the economics of university press publishers; it has been conventional wisdom for some time that as some libraries spend more on serials and less on monographs, it has hurt the viability of university presses. This study takes a closer look at the data.
A core area of CNI’s program has highlighted innovations in digital library content development. Two libraries will share their strategies for contributing local/regional content to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). An important German project describing the creation of an open access, comprehensive digital encyclopedia of World War I, compiled as an international collaboration, will be featured. A briefing on Manuscriptlink will discuss tools for re-aggregating segments of medieval manuscript materials that are held in geographically dispersed locations.
CNI continues to feature sessions that address the preservation of a wide variety of content related to our cultural heritage. Portico is moving beyond journal preservation to begin to address other challenges, such as the preservation of e-books, and I want to bring that work to the attention of our CNI constituency. We will also have a presentation that highlights the work of participants in the National Digital Stewardship Residency Program from individuals working at PBS and the National Security Archive.
We are seeing a maturation of work on efforts related to researcher identifiers and research management systems. I want to call your attention to a program called CASRAI; this work is seeking to simplify interoperability of research administration data across multiple tools, organizations, and countries; our colleague from Jisc will describe the UK work on this project. We will also learn about an OCLC effort to examine the integration of researcher identifiers into the systems and practices of libraries, publishers, and funders. Representatives from ORCID and two universities will describe their work to integrate ORCID researcher identifiers into the repository workflow.
We will have a update on the ResourceSync project, which assists third parties to keep information synchronized with selected web resources and thus promises to be an important part of the broad web information ecology, by Herbert Van de Sompel and Martin Klein of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Large collections of digital materials need new perspectives and solutions for information organization, access and retrieval, particularly as the ecology of discovery and access systems becomes ever more complex. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas will describe their work on an exploratory project using linked data with their digital collections. Representatives from Ex Libris and Boston University will discuss their work on optimizing known item discovery. Tom Cramer of Stanford will discuss how the Hydra Project and Blacklight are providing a means for institutions to develop a technical framework that promises an integrated stack of services for all types of digital content. A session on the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) will focus on an approach to delivering a wide variety of digital images in a standard way.
An increasing number of universities and colleges are developing a set of services to support the work of faculty and students working on high-end digital projects in a variety of fields; these are sometimes developed as digital scholarship centers or labs. Immediately following the CNI meeting, we will have a specialized (invitational) workshop examining the role, services, staffing, and programs of these centers. At the membership meeting, we will highlight digital scholarship or digital humanities centers from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Miami in one session, and the University of Oregon in another. A session from the University of Rochester will focus on support of digital humanities faculty and its relationship to teaching and learning. Staff from the University of Calgary will discuss their experiences working with faculty and graduate students in their data visualization center.
A session will provide an opportunity for attendees to see the beta version of FLEXSpace, the Flexible Learning Environment eXchange, a new project that aggregates information on many aspects of institutions’ physical learning spaces on an ARTstor Shared Shelf platform.
Teaching and learning will be the topic of a number of sessions, some focusing on services and others on digital learning materials. The Association of College & Research Libraries will highlight its work on the synergies between information literacy and scholarly communication.
Other sessions highlighting teaching and learning include:
o Perceptions of Library Support for Formal Undergraduate Research Programs, a systematic study of these programs.
oE-Textbook Initiatives in Libraries and IT Organizations, where we will hear about projects in three institutions and what they are learning.
o Course Readings in Learning Management Systems, which describes an initiative to integrate publications licensed by EBSCO directly into a learning management system.
We will have some sessions that describe new services and assessment, including a report on a study of Centers for Excellence in Libraries, an assessment of a social media program run by a library, and a critical look at library and IT assessment strategies. Findings from the Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2013, recently published, will be presented. Three liberal arts colleges will report on their assessments of their e-book programs. North Carolina State University and the University of Calgary will describe their innovative and popular equipment loan programs.
In order to better serve our constituencies, we need to understand what competencies are needed for staff; the Association of Research Libraries has worked with two international groups to identify these competencies in relation to support of e-research and scholarly communication and will report on the outcomes of this work.
Finally, we will have a session that addresses some issues that have been on my mind and that I believe deserve the attention of CNI representatives. Helen Cullyer of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and consultants Joe Esposito and Gary Price, will lead a session on Privacy in the Digital Age: Publishers, Libraries and Higher Education, examining the implications of the amount of data that our institutions and businesses are collecting regarding the information we access and use.
I invite you to browse the complete list of breakout sessions (full abstracts will be posted soon) at the CNI website: https://www.cni.org/spring-2014/s14-project-briefings-breakout-sessions/. In many cases you will find these abstracts include pointers to web resources that you may find useful to explore prior to the session, and after the meeting we will add materials from the actual presentations as they are available to us. We will also be recording the plenary sessions and capturing a few selected breakout sessions using voice over visuals and making those available after the meeting. There will be a list of the breakouts we plan to capture at the registration table, but please keep in mind that these session captures do not include the discussion part of the breakout, and that we occasionally have problems with the captures. There’s no substitute for being there in person!
You can follow the meeting on Twitter by using the hashtag #cni14s.
I look forward to seeing you in St. Louis. Please contact me (cliff), or Joan Lippincott, CNI’s Associate Director (joan), if we can provide you with any additional information on the meeting.
Clifford Lynch