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

The Fall 1999 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held in Phoenix, Arizona at the Hyatt Hotel on December 13-14, 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 exceptional 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 December 13.

The Plenary Sessions

The Phoenix meeting marks the conclusion of CNI's first decade, as well as the end of a decade of breathtaking developments in information technology, networking, and transition to digital content and communication. To recognize and celebrate these events, we will open the meeting with a special plenary panel made up of leaders in networked information and key participants in CNI's first decade. This session will review accomplishments and discuss priorities and challenges for the start of the next millennium.

The closing plenary keynote address will be given by Professor Alice Agogino of the University of California, Berkeley. Alice holds the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Chair of Mechanical Engineering, and serves as the Faculty Assistant to Berkeley's Executive Vice Chancellor for Educational Development and Technology. She is also the Director of the NSF-sponsored Synthesis Coalition and National Engineering Education Delivery System's Digital Library of Courseware. Alice has been a pioneer in the development of digital content and digital libraries to support teaching and will address opportunities and challenges involved in using these technologies in an instructional context. Alice is a dynamic and thoughtful speaker and has important insights to offer us about how networked information can enhance and transform teaching.

You can find more information on Alice and her work at <http://best.me.berkeley.edu/>.

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 1999-2000 Program Plan, which will be distributed at the meeting (and subsequently available at http://www.cni.org/), and also a few other sessions of special interest. The breakout sessions at this meeting are varied and exciting, I think, and once again I expect you will have to make some difficult choices about which ones to attend. We will make every effort to obtain materials from speakers that will be accessible via our web site after the meeting for those sessions that you weren't able to attend.

Continuing our focus on implications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other recent developments related to intellectual property, we have sessions addressing faculty copyright education, the study of the impacts and implications of technical protection systems mandated by the DMCA, and the status of UCITA (formerly known as UCC 2B, the proposed revisions to the Uniform Commercial Code dealing with transactions in information). In addition, members of the National Research Council (including myself) that recently issued the report "The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Emerging Information Infrastructure" will discuss the findings of this report.

In the areas of instructional technology and distance learning, the program includes an update on the Educause National Learning Infrastructure Initiative and the Instructional Management System, a session on the virtual university, and a discussion of a proposed CNI distance education program in assessing the networked information environment. Several sessions highlight changes in scholarly communication, including presentations on BioOne and Electronic Theses and Dissertations. In addition, we will have a report on the recent Santa Fe meeting that established a set of agreements to facilitate the federation of both disciplinary and institutional e-print archives. I will also report on the outcomes of a December CNI workshop to explore criteria and strategies for ensuring the archivability of electronic scholarly journals, and Robert Spindler will discuss issues in the interface between archiving and electronic records management.

In the area of advanced high-performance networking, Ken Klingenstein will offer two sessions, one updating important developments in Internet 2, and the second on his middleware initiative, which includes leading edge work in authentication and authorization. Anders Gillner will provide an update on the Nordunet2 advanced network and applications.

A number of sessions feature developments in infrastructure and standards: Len Kawell of Glassbook will speak on emerging electronic book standards (postponed from the Spring 1999 meeting); there will be updates on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (including the recent Dublin Core 7 meeting); citation linking and version location; and personalization strategies for interfaces to electronic collections. OCLC will provide an update on its CORC effort for collaborative description of network resources and also some interesting research it has been doing in surveying web sites.

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 Phoenix this December as we conclude CNI's first decade. 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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