| CNI Program 1999-2000 |
![[Image: Blue Dot Icon!]](https://www.cni.org/Images/dots/bluedot.gif){kind=small} Mission
The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization to advance the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.
The Coalition was founded in 1990 by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), CAUSE and Educom. ARL represents the research libraries of North America. CAUSE and Educom were organizations concerned with the use of information technology in higher education. In 1998, CAUSE and Educom merged to create the new EDUCAUSE organization, which has broad membership from the higher education community and their technology partners. In establishing CNI, these sponsor organizations recognized the need to broaden the community’s thinking beyond issues of network connectivity and bandwidth to encompass networked information content and applications. Reaping the benefits of the Internet for scholarship, research, and education demands new partnerships, new institutional roles, and new technologies and infrastructure. The Coalition seeks to further these collaborations, to explore these new roles, and to catalyze the development and deployment of the necessary technology base. The Coalition is supported by a task force of about 200 dues-paying member institutions representing higher education, publishing, network and telecommunications, information technology, and libraries and library organizations. Membership in the Coalition’s Task Force is open to all organizations – both for-profit and not-for-profit – that share CNI’s commitment to furthering the development of networked information. The Task Force will meet twice in 1999-2000:
The Coalition’s program is guided by a steering committee chaired by Richard West of the California State University system. As sponsor organizations, ARL and EDUCAUSE each appoint three representatives to the steering committee drawn from their member leadership; the steering committee is supplemented by “at-large” representatives providing additional perspectives. |
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| Paul Evan Peters was the founding Executive Director of the Coalition, and served until his untimely death in 1996. Joan Lippincott, now CNI’s Associate Director, served as Interim Executive Director until the appointment of Clifford Lynch as the new Executive Director in July, 1997.
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| CNI Program 1999-2000 |
Program Themes
The work of the Coalition is structured around three central themes which we believe are the essential foundations of the vision of advancing scholarship and intellectual productivity: Developing and Managing Networked Information Content Transforming Organizations, Professions and Individuals Building Technology, Standards and Infrastructure The specific program initiatives which further these themes evolve from year to year. The initiatives and strategies planned for 1999-2000 are described below; most build upon and continue earlier efforts already underway. Many of the initiatives seek to make strategic progress relevant to more than one theme. It is important to recognize that the networked information environment is evolving very rapidly; CNI is continually adapting its activities in response to new developments and opportunities. Indeed, the Coalition believes agility is essential in the current environment and invites a continuous dialog with the members of the Task Force on the need for additional program initiatives.
In addition to initiatives to advance these overarching themes, the Coalition actively conducts an ongoing program of education and advocacy for the development of networked information and its role in transforming organizations and scholarly activities. This is accomplished through both print-based and network publications; through participation in various conferences, committees, meetings, workshops and committees on an institutional, regional, national and international basis; through contributions to standards efforts; and through participation in organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Society. The Coalition also contributes to the development of the networked information community by hosting electronic discussion groups and acting as a distribution point for materials via its web site.
The Coalition’s twice-annual Task Force meetings not only allow CNI to highlight activities related to its program themes and to focus attention on significant new thinking and technology developments, but also provide a major opportunity for the membership to showcase and discuss a wide range of emerging issues and developments in networked information. For member organizations, who are invited to send two delegates – typically a senior information technologist and librarian – these meetings offer a unique opportunity to remain informed about new developments that may reshape institutional plans, and a forum in which to establish collaborations and dialogs with others sharing common interests. In June 2000, CNI will co-sponsor a meeting in England with the U.K. Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to broadly disseminate information about leading projects underway both in the US and the UK and to facilitate international collaborations. In addition, CNI occasionally convenes invitational or public workshops to advance specific elements of its program plan, and acts as a sponsor or co-sponsor for other meetings relevant to the CNI agenda. |
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Program 1999-2000
NINCH
NATIONAL HUMANITIES ALLIANCE
STEERING COMMITTEE FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES |
Developing and Managing Networked Information Content
Content from the arts, the humanities, and the cultural heritage community represents an important scholarly resource for the networked environment; indeed, making much of this information available in digital form should greatly increase its accessibility and usefulness. CNI pursues this goal through its ongoing support of the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH), a broad coalition of arts, humanities and social science groups. CNI, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Getty Information Institute founded NINCH in 1996. CNI also supports the National Humanities Alliance, which was created in 1981 to advance the cause of the humanities in national programs, policies and legislation. The Alliance brings together scholarly and professional associations, museums, libraries, historical societies, state humanities councils and universities and independent centers for scholarship. CNI is participating with NINCH, the National Research Council, and ACLS in a Steering Committee for Computer Science and the Humanities which seeks to promote the application of the information sciences to the understanding of the human record; currently, the work of this committee is focusing on knowledge representation and humanities informatics. |
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NETWORKED DIGITAL LIBRARY OF THESES AND DISSERTATIONS (NDLTD) |
Theses and dissertations are a key part of the content created by the higher education community; also, because the process of their creation is so integral to the process of higher education, they offer a unique opportunity to train new scholars in the creation of digital documents, and for institutions to formalize their management. Further, these materials represent a significant body of important information that has not historically been readily accessible. CNI is a member of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) program, and serves on the steering committee of this enterprise. The initiative, which is now finding broad international acceptance, seeks to improve graduate education by allowing students to produce electronic theses and dissertations, and to understand issues in publishing while increasing the availability of student research for scholars, and preserving these electronic materials.
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DUBLIN CORE DESCRIPTIVE METADATA INITIATIVE |
Metadata to describe networked information resources is now recognized as a key component in organizing content to facilitate its discovery and use. CNI has been a partner in the OCLC Dublin Core Descriptive Metadata program on a continuing basis and is a sponsor of the 7th Dublin Core meeting in Frankfurt, Germany in November 1999. A key goal for 1999-2000 is to continue to move work on metadata beyond descriptive information to support resource discovery; this includes work in metadata and supporting infrastructure to address the authenticity, provenance and integrity of digital information, and to document the digitization or capture processes for electronic information.
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PROJECT ISAAC |
There is a continuing need for alternative resource discovery tools to serve the particular needs of the research and education community in offering human- mediated, highly authoritative collections of Internet resources. CNI is a co-sponsor of work being conducted by the NSF-funded Project Isaac to link geographically distributed metadata collections into a coherent virtual collection; leveraging existing efforts to create metadata, this seeks both to provide such a discovery tool and to also create a testbed for continuing research on networked information discovery and retrieval.
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CONTENT FOR ADVANCED NETWORKS |
Internet2 and other advanced networking applications are enabling a new range of multimedia applications, including large collections of digital video material. CNI is seeking to promote a greater understanding of the issues involved in managing and providing access to such materials, and is working with ARL to identify library collections that may help to develop experience and insights in this area.
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PRESERVATION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION |
Preservation and long-term management of digital information has emerged as a central issue in the shift to network-based scholarly publishing. CNI is working with ARL and other partner organizations such as the Council on Library and Information Resources in developing economic, business and organizational models for preservation; in exploring technologies to manage the archiving of digital content, and in identifying priorities for preservation action. The Coalition will host a workshop on organizational and economic issues related to electronic journal archiving in December 1999.
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SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION |
CNI continues to work with other organizations, including ARL, ACLS, and the Association of American University Presses to understand the changing landscape and growing diversity of scholarly communication. In the Spring of 2000 CNI expects to work with these organizations as the co-sponsor of the third in a series of annual conferences focused on mapping and exploring this changing landscape. In addition, CNI is working with the e-print archive community to define interoperability agreements that facilitate the federation of such archives.
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Program 1999-2000
WORKING TOGETHER WORKSHOPS |
Transforming Organizations, Professions and Individuals
A fundamental goal of CNI is to foster dialog and collaboration among information professionals from all disciplinary backgrounds. The Coalition offers Working Together, a structured workshop experience to help groups of professionals improve their ability to collaborate and build partnerships with colleagues, particularly on projects related to networked information resources and services. In the fall, CNI will offer its third specialized Working Together workshop, developed under a grant from the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission, designed to address electronic records management issues by promoting institutional projects undertaken by teams of information technologists, records managers, and archivists. |
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ASSESSING THE NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT |
Measuring the impacts and value of networking and networked information has emerged as a major issue. Building on the work of Professor Charles McClure and the University of Washington, CNI developed a workshop to teach information professionals about approaches and best practices in assessing networking and networked information resources and services. In 1999-2000, CNI is working with partners to transform the workshop content into a distance education program so that there can be wide dissemination of the approaches developed by leading institutions.
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POLICY ISSUES |
The move to networked information and electronic communication is giving rise to a number of new organizational policy issues. In 1999-2000 CNI will seek to collect and facilitate discussion and formulation of best practices in several of these areas. Our work in authentication and access management has highlighted the importance of reader privacy policies. In addition, we will focus a discussion of the policy issues such as business continuity planning, records management and institutional accountability that are raised by the growing use of encrypted communications within organizations.
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DISTANCE EDUCATION |
Distance education and instructional technologies are emerging as important new programs for many institutions of higher education; they are a central part of the Internet2 initiative, which should enable greatly accelerated progress. New institutional strategies, new collaborations, and new kinds of networked information resources and services will be needed if libraries are to be effective partners with faculty and instructional technologists in the implementation of these programs. Building on earlier collaborations with the EDUCAUSE National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII), CNI will continue to work through both ARL and EDUCAUSE to explore institutional readiness factors and organizational roles to support distance education and digital instructional media.
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Program 1999-2000 |
Building Technology, Standards and Infrastructure
CNIcontinues to be actively engaged in key areas of standards and infrastructure development. The Coalition is particularly concerned with facilitating the difficult and delicate transition of standards and technologies into operational infrastructure within the CNI community. |
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AUTHENTICATION AND AUTHORIZATION |
Authentication and authorization have emerged as essential infrastructure requirements for network- based access to information, and have become a particularly critical need as institutions enter into site-license arrangements with publishers and other information providers or form consortia for resource sharing. The Coalition is pursuing a program to define technology approaches, standards, best practices, and policy and business issues for such an inter- organizational authentication and authorization infrastructure, and to help early adopter Task Force member organizations share implementation experiences and explore interoperability issues. Working in partnership with Internet2, EDUCAUSE’s Net@EDU, and the Digital Library Federation, we will seek to illuminate many of the planning, operational and budgetary issues involved in implementing public key infrastructure.
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IDENTIFIERS FOR DIGITAL INFORMATION |
Identifiers for digital information – such as the Internet Engineering Task Force’s Uniform Resource Names, the publishing community’s proposed Digital Object Identifier, various bibliographic identifier standards, and the emerging discussion of “human friendly identifiers” – are an essential part of the infrastructure that will enable applications to allow access, linkage and reference in the networked information environment. CNI will continue to be actively engaged in both standards work and inter- community dialog to help further the development and deployment of such identifiers and to inform the community about the capabilities and appropriate uses of the various identifier systems.
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W3C |
Many important developments are beginning to emerge from the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). During 1999-2000 CNI will be making a focused effort to raise awareness about these developments and to connect them to operational networked information issues.
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INTERNET2 |
Internet2 is a key testbed for many of the next- generation networked information applications; it will offer not only much higher bandwidth between Internet2-connected sites than can be reliably obtained through today’s Internet, but several fundamentally new network services. Quality of service management allows users to obtain guaranteed bandwidth and delivery and is particularly important in the support of multimedia applications. Multicasting, an efficient way of supporting multi-point distribution and interchange of network traffic, offers new ways to think about information distribution. It is vital to gain an understanding of how these new technologies, combined with very high bandwidth, can broaden our thinking about networked information applications. CNI will continue to seek to highlight novel Internet2 applications to the CNI membership, and to promote the development of networked information applications for Internet2 by serving as a bridge between the library and networking communities. CNI will work with ARL to identify library collections and services that are enabled by Internet2.
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DIGITAL BOOKS |
Digital books, in conjunction with new technologies like consumer e-book readers, are raising important standards and infrastructure issues, and CNI is participating in the definition and development of standards initiatives in these areas.
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CIMI |
As part of its efforts to bring cultural heritage information to the networked environment, CNI is a member of the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI), which consists of organizations working together to solve standards and interoperability issues related to the electronic interchange of museum information. CIMI is playing a key role in developing the technical approaches necessary to interchange and provide access to cultural heritage information.
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DIGITAL BOOKS |
Digital books, in conjunction with new technologies like consumer e-book readers, are raising important standards and infrastructure issues, and CNI is participating in the definition and development of standards initiatives in these areas.
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DIGITAL LIBRARIES 2 |
As part of its efforts to bring cultural heritage information to the networked environment, CNI is a member of the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI), which consists of organizations working together to solve standards and interoperability issues related to the electronic interchange of museum information. CIMI is playing a key role in developing the technical approaches necessary to interchange and provide access to cultural heritage information.
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