November 17, 2002
Dear Task Force Representatives and Friends of the Coalition:
I am pleased to share with you the 2002-2003 Program Plan for the Coalition. It offers an ambitious and timely agenda of efforts for this program year, presents a snapshot of our current initiatives, and situates these within the broader framework of our programmatic approach to theopportunities of networked information and advanced information technology for scholarship. I hope that you will find the Program Plan both personally helpful and valuable as a tool for communicating the scope and focus of the Coalition’s work to others within your organizationand beyond.
It seems to me that there is growing realization that we are entering a new and transformative era of technology deployment. Technology is changing the way we conduct scholarship and approach teaching and learning. Two very important reports have appeared this year thatrepresent milestones in documenting these changes and seek to understand how information technology and large-scale digital content are changing our institutions and what this means for the future. The first is a report on cyberinfrastructure to support the conduct of science, produced by an NSF committee chaired by Dan Atkins. Although the specific focus of the report is on science, I believe that many of its points are applicable to all areas of scholarly work. The second report is titled “Preparing for the Revolution: Information Technology and the Future of the Research University” and was issued by a National Research Council committee chaired by Jim Duderstadt, the president emeritus of the University of Michigan. This study takes a very broad view of issues related to higher education, but recognizes technology developments as a key agent of change.
These opportunities and developments—the transformation of scholarship and of teaching and learning—-are central to the mission and program of CNI.
On our campuses, it’s clear that the computing environment has been fundamentally restructured by the deployment of new classes of systems such as portals, learning management systems, and institutional repositories. There’s still a great deal to sort out about standards, interfaces, best practices, architectural models, organizational roles and responsibilities, and information management as we try to understand and exploit these new developments. I expect that CNI will play a critical role in this environment, and you’ll see emphasis on these developmentsthroughout the 2002-2003 Program Plan.
We are also seeing substantial changes in our core technologies. Wireless access has now deployed on a broad scale, with the ironic effect of making the old vision of the “wired classroom” a reality; we have the increasingly ubiquitous network connections, but without the wires.Another important step has been taken with the efforts to develop what are sometimes being called “light rail” systems—dedicated networks of optical fibers, as opposed to simply bandwidth on a carrier’s network—-as the next generation of high performance network infrastructure for the higher education and research communities.
The network infrastructure and tools that assist in the management of networked content are maturing to the point that truly large-scale institutional initiatives are feasible. I think that the series of developments emanating from MIT have been particularly important. These include the Open CourseWare Initiative (OCW), which has now begun making teaching materials from many of MIT’s courses available on the net, worldwide, without charge. OCW serves as an invitation and a challenge to all university communities to consider their mission and role in anetworked information world. The DSpace institutional repository, which MIT has been developing jointly with Hewlett-Packard Corporation, has now been open-sourced and is being ported to a number of other universities with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and other sources. I believe that institutional repositories are a key strategy for providing content infrastructure for many of the exciting developments that scholars have been pioneering in the digital environment. Understanding and shaping technical and policy developments for institutional repositories will be a critical part of the Coalition’s program going forward. And the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), which involves MIT and a growing list of other higher education institutions, is developing an architectural roadmap for a new generation of interoperable teaching and learning tools and systems. In OKI’s partnership with the Instructional Management System (IMS) initiative, we are seeing the context for the creation and managementof learning objects on a broad scale.
I’ve already mentioned some of CNI’s programmatic initiatives for 2002-2003 in the context of broader developments, and you can find all of the specifics in the attached Program Plan, but I do want to briefly highlight a few other accomplishments and prospects here.
The work on the development of the Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Protocol, which we have supported jointly with the Digital Library Federation (DLF), is now complete. I’m very proud of this effort, which is the product of a great deal of hard work by a talented technical teamled by Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel. The project is important not only in its own right, in giving us a critical infrastructure component that is now seeing wide deployment in digital collections, institutional repositories, and other settings, but also as a model for how we mightpursue rapid, low-cost, high-payoff technical infrastructure development going forward.
Since the late 1990s, the Coalition, working with an array of partner organizations, has been addressing issues involved in access management for information resources. This is an area where policy, economic, and technical issues come together in very complex ways, where successfulapproaches need to be developed as large-scale, multi-purpose infrastructure, and where progress has necessarily been gradual. One of the major efforts in this area has been the development of the Shibboleth distributed authorization system as part of the Internet2 middleware project and the NSF-sponsored National Middleware Initiative (NMI). I am very pleased to report that Shibboleth, which is designed from the ground up to consider privacy issues as an integral part of the distributed authentication framework, is now in experimental field trials involving anumber of universities and content providers. CNI is working closely with Internet2 to help move this deployment forward and will also provide a key forum for sharing the results of these experiments.
Institutional repositories are a new and strategic component of the evolving networked information landscape. From the CNI program perspective institutional repositories are part of a broader movement to exercise stewardship over digital content created by the higher educationand research communities, and CNI has a number of other activities that are intended to advance this objective. We are working with Internet2 on a guide to the digital capture of performance events—for example music, dance, or theater performances or symposia hosted by an institution. I expect that such recordings will be important contributions to institutional repositories. Recently, the Coalition has also been doing some work on rights management for digital content in the research and higher education context. Our fundamental concern in this area—and I believe it is the core concern for higher education and research broadly—is in documenting rights and permissions to facilitate dissemination and reuse of content.
In 2002 all of the organizations involved in the Coalition—including universities, libraries and our commercial sector members in the information and technology industries—have continued to struggle with a very difficult economic environment. The responses to these problems haveemphasized greater reliance on collaboration both within and across organizations, strategic investments, and strategic use of information resources and technologies. The Coalition will continue to be an important force in advancing these responses. Another consequence of theconstrained resource environment is that it both forces us and makes it possible for us to make choices; we can no longer do everything, simultaneously pursuing and funding both old and new approaches. In some areas the need to now make conclusive choices may actually accelerateprogress. I suspect that when we look back at the decisions and choices that we are making now from the perspective of a few years in the future, we’ll recognize that this was the period in which we made large scale and irrevocable commitments to new approaches that we validated and refined in pilot projects and experiments in the preceding decade. I am proud that CNI has played a significant role in preparing the groundwork and developing the community understanding and expertise for these transformative changes that now seem immanent.
In closing, I want to thank you for your support. In what I know are difficult financial times, I was both grateful and honored to see that virtually all of the Task Force member institutions renewed their support for the Coalition’s work. I take this as reaffirmation of my view that CNIremains a key community strategy for advancing our collective efforts to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Over the past year, I have been fortunate to be able to visit with a number of CNI member organizations and to engage their communities. These opportunities arevaluable and exciting for me, and I always come away with a new recognition of the energy, innovation, and creativity at work throughout the member institutions that make up the Task Force. I hope to have many more such opportunities in the coming year.
I greatly appreciate all those who have contributed to the work of the Coalition through participation in projects and Task Force meetings, and through service on the CNI Steering Committee. The boards and chief executives of our two sponsor organizations, ARL and EDUCAUSE, have also provided vital guidance and support for which I continue to be grateful.
As always, I welcome your ideas and input on the Program Plan and on ways in which CNI can help your organizations to engage the future.
Sincerely,
Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information
