A Guide to the Spring 1999 Coalition for Networked Information Task Force Meeting

The Spring 1999 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held in Washington, DC at the Renaissance Hotel on April 26-27, 1999, offers a wide range of presentations that advance and report on CNI's programs, showcase projects developed by Task Force member institutions, and highlight key activities in the broader field of Networked Information at a national and international level. This provides a roadmap to the sessions at the meeting, which includes an unusually strong and varied range of breakout sessions focusing on current developments in networked information.

Along with plenary and breakout sessions, the meeting includes ample time for informal networking with colleagues and a reception on the evening of April 26. The CNI meeting leads off a week of conferences in Washington dealing with advanced technology and higher education; all of these will be held at the Renaissance hotel. For Internet 2 member institutions, the I2 spring meeting will take place on April 28; information on this is at <http://www.internet2.edu/>.  The Educause Net '99 meeting, covering policy issues related to networking, has an opening reception on April 28, and sessions April 29-30. CNI attendees who are still in town are welcome to join us for the Net '99 opening reception, even if they cannot stay for the Net '99 conference. Information and registration information for Net '99 can be found at <http://www.educause.edu/>.

As in previous years, there will be exhibitions and demos of advanced high-performance network applications running during the week, and CNI attendees will have an opportunity to visit these on the afternoon of April 27, after the CNI meeting, or on April 28.

The Plenary Sessions

Professor Bruce Schatz of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will provide the opening keynote. Bruce has a long and distinguished record of developing pathblazing advanced networked information systems, ranging from Telesophy at Bellcore in the late 1980s through his work on the highly influential Worm Community System in the early 1990s and his more recent efforts as the Principal Investigator for the University of Illinois Digital Library Project. Currently, he runs the Community Architecture for Network information Systems (CANIS) lab and is Principal Investigator for a major new DARPA grant developing community information repositories and analysis environments. Recently, Bruce has been thinking deeply and ambitiously about how the web might evolve into a new information environment in the coming decade, and what some of the implications and opportunities of such an evolution may be. He will share this thinking with us.

You can find more information on Bruce's work at <http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/>. Download Professor Bruce Schatz's PowerPoint Presentation File (~6.7 MB file size),  the same presentation file in PDF Format (~3.2 MB file size).

The closing session of the meeting will be a plenary panel discussing implementation issues arising out of the newly-passed copyright legislation, which creates a number of new responsibilities for universities, network service providers, libraries and other groups. The focus of this panel will be pragmatic, addressing how institutions are responding to the requirements and provisions of the new law.

Highlighted Breakout Sessions

I cannot cover all of the many breakout sessions here. However, I want to note particularly some sessions that have strong connections to the Coalition's new 1998-1999 Program Plan, which is available at <http://www.cni.org/>, and also a few other sessions of special interest. The breakout sessions at this meeting are particularly exciting, I think, and I'm afraid you will have to make some difficult choices about which ones to attend.

Our colleagues at the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) have organized a major, two-session breakout on the central problem of translating projects into sustainable services, drawing on their own experiences and also parallel efforts in the United States and the European Union. This pair of sessions should provide important insights into the strengths of the different approaches that are being used to address sustainability.

We will also hear a report from Titia van der Werf of the National Library of the Netherlands on the European Commission funded Networked European Deposit Library project for the preservation of electronic publications.

Several new technology developments are featured: Len Kawell of Glassbook will speak on emerging electronic book standards; we will have a presentation from the University of Kentucky on their innovative deployment of wireless technology; and a representative of the World Wide Web Consortium will discuss their work on web access standards for the disabled, which has important implications for the selection and licensing of electronic information resources. Two presentations - one on a proxy system and the other on a certificate based prototype - will continue the focus on authentication and access management issues for networked information resources. We will also have a presentation on the work of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) which I think will be very interesting for those unaware of this program.

At the policy level, Mike Lesk of the National Science Foundation will review the results of the recent Digital Libraries 2 grant solicitation, and discuss future plans for funding initiatives in this area. Herb Lin, of the National Research Council, will report on the results of the NRC study on information technology literacy that he has been directing. The Institute of Museum and Library Services will discuss developing ideas for a federally-funded digital library of education.

A number of breakouts report on issues involved in copyright clearance and developments related to the economics of intellectual property, including presentations by the Duke University Digital Scriptorium project, the UK Higher Education Resources on Demand (HERON) project, and update on the pricing experiments at the University of Michigan (PEAK), and recent findings from multi-institutional digital image distribution projects. Finally, the program includes updates on a variety of CNI-sponsored or endorsed projects or collaborations, including Project Isaac, the Electronic Theses and Dissertations effort, Internet 2 applications, and the CNI working together program for records managers, archivists, and information technologists.

You can find a full list of the breakout sessions that are scheduled on the CNI web site <http://www.cni.org/>.  This list will be updated as last-minute changes invariably occur.

I look forward to seeing you in Washington this April for what promises to be an extremely worthwhile meeting. Please contact me (cliff@cni.org), or  Joan Lippincott, CNI's Associate Director (joan@cni.org) if we can provide you with any additional information on the meeting.

Clifford Lynch
Coalition for Networked Information

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