1997-1998
Program
Activities
NINCH
NATIONAL
HUMANITIES
ALLIANCE
LICENSING
MUSEUM
INFORMATION
CONSORTIUM FOR THE
COMPUTER
INTERCHANGE OF
MUSEUM
INFORMATION
(CIMI)
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I. Developing 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 is pursuing this goal through its 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 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 also serving as an important forum for discussion of the developing models for licensing museum information.
On a more technical level, CNI is a member of the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI), which consists of some sixteen members who are 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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OCLC
DUBLIN
CORE
DESCRIPTIVE
METADATA
PROGRAM
NIDR
DIGITAL
PRESERVATION
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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 5th Dublin Core Meeting scheduled for October 1997. The Coalition also expects to release its White Paper on Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (NIDR) in the 1997-1998 program year.
Preservation of digital information is a difficult and important problem. The 1995 report of the Task Force on Digital Preservation established by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group was a major advance in community thinking about the preservation of networked information. CNI is working with Peter Graham of Rutgers University, the Association of Research Libraries and the Commission on Library and Information Resources to chart the next phase of the digital preservation agenda, which will focus on identifying high-priority targets for preservation and developing strategies to address their needs.
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SCHOLARLY
COMMUNICATION AND THE
DIGITAL
AGENDA
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CNI continues to be a vital part of the dialogs surrounding the changing economics of scholarly publishing, intellectual property in the networked environment, and other parts of the emerging digital agenda. The Coalition is participating in meetings such as the Scholarly Monographs conference sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Association of American University Presses; National Research Council workshops on scientific publishing and digital libraries; and the Pew Roundtable on Managing Intellectual Property.
II. Transforming Organizations,
Professions and Individuals
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WORKING
TOGETHER/
NEW
LEARNING
COMMUNITIES
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A fundamental goal of CNI is to foster dialog and collaboration among information professionals from all disciplinary backgrounds. In 1997-1998 the Coalition will continue to offer its Working Together program, which provides 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. These workshops can be offered as preconference programs, or specialized for on-campus retreats or consortium programs. During 1996 and 1997 CNI expanded this theme through its New Learning Communities conferences, which brought together teams of faculty, librarians, information technologists, and instructional technology specialists; in 1997-1998 we will complete the web site of exemplary case studies and best practices emerging from this program.
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ASSESSMENT
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Measuring the impacts and value of networking and networked information has emerged as a major issue. In 1997-1998 the Coalition will continue the coordinated field test of the assessment measures outlined in McClure and Lopata's Assessing the Academic Networked Environment: Strategies and Options, working with a group of nine Task Force institutions. The field test is intended to facilitate institutional collaboration on assessment issues, to develop a compendium of assessment measures, and to widely inform the community on approaches and best practices in assessing networked resources and services.
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IWIS
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CNI is working with a number of member organizations to advance and document best strategies and practices in the use and management of information on an institution-wide basis under the Institution-Wide Information Strategies (IWIS) project. IWIS is intended to provide an opportunity for the participant institutions to strengthen and advance their individual work through interactions with colleagues from other leading institutions, and ultimately, by documenting and communicating these practices, to benefit the broader community in improving the effective use of networked information.
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LIBRARIES AND THE
NLII
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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. In 1997-1998, CNI will open a dialog with the Educom National Learning Infrastructure Initiative to begin to explore these issues.
III. Building Technology, Standards
and Infrastructure
CNI continues 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
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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.
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IDENTIFIERS FOR
DIGITAL
INFORMATION
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Identifiers for digital information -- such as the Internet Engineering Task Force's Uniform Resource Names, the publishing community's proposed Digital Object Identifier, and various bibliographic identifier standards -- are an essential part of the infrastructure that will allow access, linkage and reference in the networked information environment. CNI is 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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INTERNET
2
APPLICATIONS
CNI
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Internet2 is emerging as a testbed for the 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. CNI is has been part of the Applications working group for Internet2, and will seek both to ensure that applications needs in support of networked information are represented in Internet2 and to highlight novel applications to the Task Force membership.
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