CNI PROGRAM PLAN
2003-2004

BACKGROUND AND HISTORY

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is a joint project of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE. ARL represents the research libraries of North America. EDUCAUSE champions the use of information technology among its broad array of members in the higher education community and the associations, organizations, and corporations that serve that community.

In establishing CNI, these sponsor organizations recognized the need to broaden the communityís 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, networking, information technology, government agencies, museums, libraries, and library organizations. Membership in the Coalitionís Task Force is open to all organizations -- both forprofit and not-for-profit -- that share CNIís commitment to furthering the development of networked information.

The Task Force will meet twice in 2003-2004: once in Portland, Oregon, December 8-9, 2003, and again in Alexandria, Virginia, April 15-16, 2004.

The Coalitionís 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. Three ìat largeî representatives on the Steering Committee contribute additional perspectives. The executive directors of ARL, EDUCAUSE, and CNI serve as ex officio members of the committee.

CNI was founded in 1990 by ARL and EDUCAUSE's two predecessor organizations, Educom and CAUSE. Paul Evan Peters was the founding executive director of the Coalition, serving until his untimely death in 1996. Joan Lippincott, now CNIís associate executive director, served as interim executive director until the appointment of Clifford Lynch as the new executive director in July 1997.

PROGRAM THEMES

The work of the Coalition is structured around three central themes that we believe are the essential foundations of the vision of advancing scholarship and intellectual productivity:

Developing and Managing Networked Information Content

A network that will play an integral role in scholarly discourse and productivity must be rich in content and information resources. The Coalition seeks to mobilize and bring together the many diverse communities that create and manage content. It works with these communities to develop methods of creating, organizing, evaluating, managing, and preserving networked information resources. The Coalition also furthers the development of economic, policy, social, and legal frameworks to sustain the creation and management of networked information and facilitate its access.

Transforming Organizations, Professions, and Individuals

The use of networked information is transforming institutions, professions, and the practices of learning and scholarship. For academic institutions, success in the new environment requires an unprecedented degree of collaboration among libraries, information technology groups, faculty, instructional technologists, museums, university presses, and other units; it demands new alliances and partnerships with publishers, information technology and network service providers, scholarly societies, government, and other sectors. Organizations must develop and share new strategies, policies, and best practices. Of equal importance is the need to assess and measure the impact of the new environment on institutions and their activities as the transformation progresses. Professions need to develop new competencies and enter into new dialogues that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. The Coalition seeks to facilitate these collaborations and dialogues and to help professions and institutions work together in program strategy formulation and impact assessment.

Building Technology, Standards, and Infrastructure

The networked information environment relies on the development and deployment of standards and infrastructure components in order to enable the discovery, use, and management of networked information. The ability to use collections of resources in a unified, consistent fashion is essential and requires a continuing focus on interoperability of services. At the same time, promising new technologies need to be explored, assessed and tested, and sometimes adapted to the needs of the CNI community. No one institution acting alone can build the needed infrastructure or explore the full range of new technologies as they become available. Accomplishing these goals requires a coordinated communitywide effort. CNI seeks to provide leadership in this undertaking, to offer a context for collaborative experiments and test beds, and to serve as a focal point for sharing knowledge about new technologies.

The specific program initiatives that further these themes evolve from year to year. The initiatives and strategies planned for 2003-2004 are described below; most build upon and continue 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 still changing 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 dialogue with the members of the Task Force on the need for additional program initiatives. Because of this, the 2003-2004 Program Plan should be viewed as a snapshot of our thinking about priorities and opportunities as of late 2003 that will inevitably develop further during the coming year.

ADVOCACY AND CONSULTATIVE ACTIVITIES

In addition to specific initiatives to address these overarching themes, the Coalition actively conducts an ongoing program of collaboration and advocacy to advance 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 conferences, meetings, workshops, and committees on an institutional, regional, national, and international level; through contributions to standards efforts; through collaboration with key funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Department of Education, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and through participation in organizations such as the Internet Society. Of particular note in this area are our contributions to the Library of Congressís efforts to map out a National Digital Preservation Program and to various studies and programs conducted by the U.S. National Research Council. On an international level, we collaborate with other organizations concerned with networked information, including the U.K. Office for Library Networking (UKOLN) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the United Kingdom, and the German Initiative for Networked Information (DINI).

In addition to contributing to the programs of our sponsor organizations, ARL and EDUCAUSE, we also support, contribute to, and collaborate closely with other organizations that share in specific aspects of our programmatic interests and priorities as a strategic part of our own program work. These include:

The University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) manages the Internet2 initiative to promote advanced networking and applications within the higher education community. CNI works with UCAID on numerous interests, including video and multimedia applications and standards and high-bandwidth, content-intensive applications.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) addresses a broad range of issues involving the scholarly communication system, higher education, and libraries. The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a CLIR program focused on the use of digital library technologies within research libraries. CNI collaborates extensively with CLIR and DLF on issues ranging from digital preservation to metadata.

CNI and the IMS Global Learning Consortium have formed an alliance designed to explore the development of common architectural and functional models leading to joint specifications and improved technical interoperability in both digital libraries and learning object repositories.

The Coalition also contributes to the development of the networked information community by hosting electronic discussion groups, such as the CNI ñCOPYRIGHT forum, and acting as a distribution point for materials via its Web site and the CNI-ANNOUNCE e-mail list.

MEETINGS

The Coalitionís semiannual Task Force meetings, scheduled for December 8-9, 2003, in Portland, Oregon, and April 15-16, 2004, in Alexandria, Virginia, 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 an opportunity for the members to showcase and discuss a wide range of emerging issues and developments in networked information. Each member organization is invited to send two delegates, typically a senior information technologist and a senior librarian. Meeting participants are introduced to new developments that may reshape institutional plans in a forum that encourages collaborations and dialogues with others who share common interests.

CNI regularly co-sponsors a conference in partnership with JISC and UKOLN as part of our ongoing collaboration with these programs. Planning is underway for the next conference, to be held in Brighton, England, July 8-9, 2004. The previous conference was held June 25-27, 2002, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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. This year, such events include the IS&T Archiving Conference, April 20-23, 2004, in San Antonio, Texas; the EDUCAUSE Policy Conference, to be held in Washington, DC, May 19-20, 2004; and the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, scheduled for June 7-11, 2004, in Tucson, Arizona.

DEVELOPING AND MANAGING NETWORKED INFORMATION CONTENT

The Coalition has broad interest in all types of digital contentñincluding text, images, data, mixed media, and interactive objectsñthat can be used to support research and education. We provide a forum for the exchange of information on leading projects in this arena. In 2003-2004 we will be making a special effort to showcase innovative faculty projects from some of our member institutions at the CNI Task Force meetings. In addition, we will track developments and promote strategies for the creation of digital libraries and federated collections of digital content. Through our Task Force meetings, specialized conferences, collaborative initiatives with other organizations, papers, and presentations, we provide leadership on digital content policy, economic frameworks, and scholarly communication.

Institutional Content Resources and Repositories

The centerpiece of our work on networked information content is constructed around the broad theme of the stewardship of institutional content resources, a central role for higher education and cultural memory organizations in the digital age. Our work here has two major components. The first is to understand and help to advance and structure the wealth of new digital content. The Coalition's projects in this area include: participation with Internet2 in the Performance Archive & Retrieval Working Group, which will make guidelines for the digital capture of a wide range of performance events available for public review and comment during this program year; our continuing efforts to understand and highlight experiments in the creation of new types of scholarly works for the digital medium, including successors to the printed scholarly monograph; and our ongoing participation in the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, which seeks to facilitate the migration of theses and dissertations to digital form. The other major component of our work in stewardship of institutional content resources focuses on approaches to manage this wealth of new content through development of institutional repository services. Here CNI is addressing the full range of issues from policy and strategic planning through systems architecture.

Metadata andDigital Rights Management

Tracking rights and permissions is essential to our ability to share and reuse information; structuring appropriate metadata for this purpose is also essential for successful dissemination and long-term stewardship within the context of institutional repositories. We have ongoing efforts, building on the September 2002 NSF-funded workshop that CNI co-sponsored with Internet2, the Video Development Initiative (ViDe), and the Southeastern Universities Research Coalition for Networked Information Association (SURA), to advance a program for the documentation and management of rights related to digital content in educational and other noncommercial settings. Also important in the metadata area is the progression of the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) "packaging" for digital objects. CNI will be collaborating with the METS project in a United Kingdom seminar on METS in conjunction with the joint CNI-JISC meeting in July 2004.

Digital Preservation

Closely related to the work on stewardship of institutional content resources is the Coalitionís continuing work on preservation of digital content. This is a central issue in the shift to network-based scholarly communication, and has also more recently emerged as a broad and fundamental social and public policy issue. CNI works with ARL, DLF, CLIR, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR, and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) on the full range of technical, economic, and strategic issues surrounding digital preservation. We have continued to collaborate with the Library of Congress in their efforts to develop and build consensus around a national digital preservation strategy. The Coalition also continues to explore issues at the juncture of records management, archival practice, and preservation of digital materials through its support of the Arizona State University Electronic College and University Records (ECURE) conferences, the next scheduled for March 2004. As in recent years, developments in digital preservation will be highlighted at Task Force meetings.

Computing and the Humanities

CNI continues to participate with the National Academies complex, the American Council of Learned Societies, and NINCH in a Steering Committee for Computer Science and the Humanities that promotes the application of the information sciences to the understanding of the human record. The Steering Committee obtained funding from the Carnegie Corporation for the first in a series of major conferences, held in January 2003, to bring together computer scientists and humanists to advance the use of information technologies in humanities research through collaboration between these disciplines. CNI is seeking to build on this work and to help the community structure a new agenda for engaging the arts and humanities, given the restructuring of NINCH and the wind-down of the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) consortium. We will also work with our partners to advance the inquiry into the potential nature and role of cyberinfrastructure to support the humanities as well as the sciences.

TRANSFORMING ORGANIZATIONS, PROFESSIONS, AND INDIVIDUALS

The Coalition has a long-standing commitment to highlighting and advancing organizational initiatives that facilitate collaborations across institutional units and professional cultures, with particular emphasis on collaboration between librarians and information technologists. We have also done extensive work on evaluation and assessment strategies. This year, after a series of milestones in our Transformative Assessment program with the EDUCAUSE National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) and the TLT Group, we will enter into wide consultation with the community about appropriate next steps and new directions in our assessment work.

Collaborative Facilities and Collaborative Services Directory

In 2003-2004 we will continue the CNI partnership with Dartmouth College, which has produced a Web site to assist institutions in planning, implementing, and evaluating collaborative facilities. A number of institutions are offering public service points or facilities where library and information technology staff share responsibilities to serve users; other institutions are establishing teaching and learning support centers that bring together instructional technologists, faculty, information technologists, and librarians. Typically, these service points and centers are developed in conjunction with building renovations, expansions, or new building projects. There is great interest in sharing experiences and plans in this area, and the Web site hosted by Dartmouth includes planning documents, architectural layouts, programmatic descriptions, and other information provided by institutions active in such projects. We want to increase substantially the number of institutions that are contributing to the site, and will continue to schedule project briefings at the Task Force meetings and at the EDUCAUSE annual conference highlighting initiatives in this area.

In 2003-2004 we will expand the focus of the collaborative facilities program in two directions. We will look at collaborative organizational structures and programs for service delivery that may or may not be facilities-based, and we will also look at collaborative learning spaces and spaces for service delivery, building upon our ongoing collaboration with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE).

Organizational Policy Implications of Learning Management Systems

We will continue to pursue ideas launched in the 2002-2003 program year with the paper, ìThe Afterlives of Courses on the Network: Information Management Issues for Learning Management Systemsî (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research Bulletin 2002:23). This work examines institutional policy implications related to the reuse of content contained in course sites within the learning management system context.

Executive Roundtable

At the Fall 2003 Task Force meeting, CNI will inaugurate a new program called the Executive Roundtable, which builds on the theme of collaboration between librarians and information technologists that has been at the foundation of the Coalition. We will assemble pairs of chief librarians and information technology officers (and perhaps one additional representative from each participating organization, depending on the topic under discussion) from about ten organizations per meeting for a focused two-to-three-hour discussion of a specific topic. Topics might include institutional repositories, learning management systems, the role of university presses, or privacy and security issues. Initially, these sessions will take place on the morning of the first day of the Task Force meetings. The topic for Fall 2003 is institutional repositories. Based on the response to the first Roundtable, we may look for additional Roundtable venues in order to permit more institutions to participate.

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 for the research, higher education, and library communities. In addition to the major program initiatives described here, the Coalition is closely tracking a wide range of developments in areas as diverse as identifiers, digital books, metadata standards, federation, distributed search and harvesting technologies, and recommender systems and personalization technologies.

Architectural Contexts for New Academic Platforms

During the past two years, ARL has provided a focus for renewed interest from the library community in a cluster of ideas variously called ìscholarís portals,î ìacademic platforms,î or ìscholarís toolkits,î to assist information seekers in locating, using, and contributing to the ever-growing diversity of academic and scholarly information resources. As these ideas have been refined, we are recognizing the limitations of services such as commercial Web search engines, traditional library automation tools such as online catalogs, and stand-alone abstracting and indexing databases. We are also seeing the need to integrate with the emerging technologies of learning management systems.

The Coalition is concerned with architectural and standards frameworks that can facilitate the development of interoperable and complementary prototype systems in this area, and ultimately contribute to the development of a vibrant marketplace in such systems as they are created by the private sector, by university-industry collaborations, or by university-based projects. In the spring of 2002 we sponsored a workshop in collaboration with ARL to begin to map out developments in this area. One outcome of the workshop is the focus on institutional repositories as part of the broader issue of stewardship of institutional content resources discussed above; another was the initiation of work dealing specifically with learning management systems, also described earlier. A third result of our work in this area is an intense focus on the interactions between learning management systems and the rest of the information landscape; this is detailed below as a separate initiative. Our ongoing efforts in the area of architectural contexts is characterized by an emphasis on access and reuse of content from a user perspective, dealing specifically with portals, search engines, and the role of the open archives metadata harvesting technology.

Interoperability and Interfaces between Learning and Information Environments

In 2003 CNI launched a major collaboration with the IMS Global Learning Consortium to explore the interoperability issues and technical and standards interconnections between information and learning environments. The first objective is to survey the landscape to identify gaps and unaddressed needs, redundant or conflicting work, and architectural or terminological disagreements. A draft white paper formed the basis for a full-day joint workshop in July 2003. A revised version of the white paper, based on the workshop and other responses, will be released for further discussion by the CNI and IMS communities during the 2003-2004 program year. The final version of the paper is intended to serve as a roadmap for future work.

Authentication, Authorization, and Access Management

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, implement online and distance education initiatives, or form consortia for resource sharing. The Coalition has been 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, EDUCAUSEís Net@EDU, and the DLF, we will continue to seek to illuminate many of the policy, strategy, operational and budgetary issues involved in access management.

A critical outcome of this work has been the development of the Shibboleth distributed authentication system as part of the NSF-funded middleware initiative at Internet2. During 2002-2003 Version 1 of this system was deployed in a series of highly successful field trials involving universities and content providers. In 2003-2004 we will work with Internet2 to expand the field trials to additional vendors and to advance Shibboleth into broader deployment; to assist in the development and validation of new tools that will be needed to support largescale Shibboleth deployment; and to define functional requirements for future versions of the system. Also, given the very real progress on authorization, in 2003-2004 CNI will revisit the complementary question of authentication systems to explore what can be done to accelerate progress.

The Coalition takes a broad view of security, integrity, and access management issues as they relate to management of licensed resources and stewardship and preservation of digital content. New technological capabilities ñ peer-to-peer resources sharing and the ability to amass large personal digital libraries of materials from licensed collections ñ continue to raise complex questions with both technological and policy dimensions. The Coalition believes that we must continue to explore these new behaviors and practices and to reflect this broad view in the developing focus on systems and network security within the higher education community.