CNI News

I’m very pleased to share this call for nominations for the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) 2021 Excellence Awards (formerly NDSA Innovation Awards) – more information about the program is available at
https://ndsa.org/groups/excellence-awards/.

CNI is an NDSA strategic partner.

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

Colleagues:

Nominations are now being accepted for the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) 2021 Excellence Awards!

The annual NDSA award program was first established in 2012 as the Innovation Awards to recognize and encourage exemplary achievement in the field of digital preservation stewardship. Beginning in 2021, the awards were renamed as the Excellence Awards to highlight and commend all forms of creative and meaningful contributions by individuals, projects, sustainability activities, organizations, future stewards, and educators to the field of digital preservation. These awards focus on recognizing excellence in the following areas:

• Educator Award: Recognizing academics, trainers, and curricular endeavors promoting effective and inventive approaches to digital preservation education through academic programs, partnerships, professional development opportunities, and curriculum development.
• Future Steward Award: Recognizing students and early-career professionals making an impact on advancing knowledge and practice of digital preservation stewardship.
• Individual Award: Recognizing those individuals making a significant contribution to the digital preservation community through advances in theory or practice.
• Organization Award: Recognizing those organizations providing support, guidance, advocacy, or leadership for the digital preservation community.
• Project Award: Recognizing those activities whose goals or outcomes make a significant contribution or strategic or conceptual understanding necessary for successful digital preservation stewardship.
• Sustainability Award: Recognizing those activities whose goals or outcomes make a significant contribution to operational trustworthiness, monitoring, maintenance, or intervention necessary for sustainable digital preservation stewardship.

As a diverse international membership organization with a shared commitment to digital preservation, the NDSA understands the importance of developing and supporting a broad range of successful digital preservation activities. Acknowledging that exemplary digital stewardship can take many forms, eligibility for these awards has been left purposely broad. Anyone or any project or institution acting in the context of the above categories can be nominated for an award. Nominees do not have to be NDSA member institutions or individuals or project staff affiliated with member institutions, but must evidence engagement with the theory and practice of long-term digital preservation stewardship. Nominators similarly do not need to be affiliated with NDSA member institutions. Self-nomination is accepted and encouraged, as are submissions reflecting the needs and accomplishments of historically marginalized and underrepresented communities.

Nominations will be accepted until Friday, July 30, 2021.

In past years, prizes have been presented during the NDSA’s annual Digital Preservation conference Given ongoing travel restrictions, this year’s event will again take place in virtual form, on Nov. 4, 2021. Attendance at the conference is encouraged but not required for awardees or nominators. 

In these troubled times, it is especially important to take the time to recognize and laud exemplary activity. We encourage all members of the international digital preservation community to help us highlight and reward distinctive approaches to the challenges of digital preservation by submitting nominations for worthy candidates at: https://forms.gle/ZXqLaGuqeUyHhTwp9. 

For more information on the details on awards from previous years, please visit https://ndsa.org/groups/excellence-awards/. Please feel free to pass along this announcement to colleagues.

NDSA Innovation Awards Working Group:

Samantha Abrams, Center for Research Libraries
Stephen Abrams, Harvard University (co-chair)
Lauren Goodley, Texas State University
Grete Graf, Yale University
Kari May, University of Pittsburgh
Krista Oldham, Clemson University (co-chair)
–sla

Stephen Abrams (he/him/his)
Head of Digital Preservation
Preservation Services

stephen_abrams@harvard.edu
+1 617-998-5468
90 Mt. Auburn Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
HARVARD LIBRARY
Champions of Curiosity
library.harvard.edu

As students and others return to campus, we have a new awareness of our institution’s physical facilities and what they contribute to learning and development of a sense of community. EDUCAUSE is offering a QuickTalk on Friday, June 25, 2-3PM Eastern, on Promoting Inclusive Spaces.

The session description: “The Learning Space Rating System (LSRS) measures the potential of formal learning spaces to support multiple modalities of learning. Along with a number of other enhancements, v3 now adds a section that addresses physiological, cognitive, and cultural inclusion. This Member QuickTalk will focus on these overlapping and interconnected perspectives of inclusion. Four LSRS advisory board members will lead a discussion around the intent, principles, and examples of each of these types of inclusion.”

The group of highly experienced professionals leading the session are: Rich Holeton and Bob Smith of Stanford, Shirley Dugdale of Dugdale Strategy LLP, Crystal Ramsay of Penn State, and Kathe Pelletier of EDUCAUSE.

Note: This session is open only to EDUCAUSE members.

More information is available at: https://events.educause.edu/member-quicktalks/2021/lsrs-v3-promoting-inclusive-spaces

— Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director Emerita, CNI

The Chronicle of Higher Education has just released a short report (they call it an “trends snapshot”) called “Lessons from Remote Research” that covers some of the same ground as the work CNI has been doing about what has happened to the research enterprise during the pandemic, though at a much less detailed level. The report touches on issues ranging from remote access to archives and special collections (it describes Sourcery, which we’ve covered at our last two meetings, though it does not explicitly name it) through to networked and remotely accessible lab instrumentation. I thought it was worth sharing here both because it has value as a very succinct report, and also because material from the Chronicle sometimes gets very wide distribution within our institutions. See

https://connect.chronicle.com/CHE-CI-WC-2021-LessonsFromRemoteResearch-TrendsSnapshot4-AWS_LP—CHE.html

The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the US National Academies recently held an interesting session on “Assessing and Improving AI Trustworthiness” which I watched in real time. They’ve just made a brief report available at:

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/26208/assessing-and-improving-ai-trustworthiness-current-contexts-and-concerns-proceedings

you can also see the videos from the workshop at

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8327408

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Here’s what I hope will be the last catch-up installment of material that I wanted to share with the CNI-announce list. Some of it has been out for a while, and I’m sorry to be slow disseminating it, but hopefully it will novel and interesting to many CNI-announce readers.

First, our colleagues at protocols.io are offering a webinar in collaboration with PLOS on their joint work to use peer-reviewed protocols in scholarly communication. It’s at 9AM PDT on June 15. For more information and to register, see

https://www.protocols.io/webinars/PLOSOne_protocolsio

The American Library Association has recently released a December 2020 white paper prepared by its Digital Content Working Group (DCWG), on which I serve, dealing with issues around e-book licensing and libraries. This is timely, given the range of developments in this area recently, including the recently passed Maryland state law about library e-content licensing and the Digital Public Library of American’s (DPLA) announcement about its agreement to distributed Amazon-published e-books via its Simply-E platform, to name only two. See

http://www.ala.org/tools/librariestransform/working-group-libraries-and-digital-content

which includes a link to the report proper at the bottom of the page.

On June 4, the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities has issued a visioning paper addressing the future of research-intensive higher education that’s an interesting read. There’s also an accompanying video. My thanks to the indispensable Gary Price for a pointer to this work. See

https://www.the-guild.eu/news/2021/european-universities-recommendations-for-research.html

Following up on some open questions about the trajectory of Chinese scholarly publishing that were discussed at our December 2020 Executive Roundtable on Science Nationalism (report available on the CNI web site, www.cni.org), a recent presentation at the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting based in part on a recent report by Impact Science (Cactus Communications) added some new data points. For a brief summary of the session, plus links to the session video and to the Impact Science report, see

https://www.researchinformation.info/news/china-pursuing-national-open-science-strategy

Finally, a pointer from an April online meeting. Over the past 14 months or so, I’ve been looking into what’s going on with putting research instrumentation (think lab gear, or core shared research instruments) on the net to improve both resource sharing and research resilience. I’ve shared  a few reports with CNI-announce over that period. There is work going on, but it’s hard to find out about and often somewhat below the radar. Here’s a collection from a very interesting online meeting I attended that addressed a number of these issues, with a focus that is primarily on life science research (and where there’s thus a big commercial market) which provides a good sense of some developments. It’s also interesting to see the extent to which ideas about FAIR data have pervaded thinking in commercial as well as academic circles some of this work. See

https://www.lab-of-the-future.com

Finally, let me add that I’m grateful to receive other pointers to developments in this last area.

I hope that you find these pointers helpful.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Our colleagues at protocols.io are doing a webinar on June 15 with PLOS to discuss new developments in the ways experimental protocols can be integrated into the scholarly record which will be of interest to some CNI-announce readers. See

https://www.protocols.io/webinars/PLOSOne_protocolsio

for more information and registration information.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

I don’t seem to be doing well about sharing a lot of material with the CNI-announce list in a timely way, but here I’ll try to catch up with a number of very diverse items that may be of interest to readers. This is not only eclectic, but long, which is a measure of how far behind I’ve gotten. Also look forward to more in the coming days as I (hopefully) dig out.

First off, the Association of Research Libraries has produced a very useful high-level discussion of controlled unclassified information and related policy issues in the US. This has very close connections to the Executive Roundtable report on “Science Nationalism” that CNI produced after our December 202 virtual member meeting, which can be found on our website. (Disclosure: I helped out a bit on this paper.) For the ARL report, see:

https://www.arl.org/news/arl-publishes-issue-brief-on-new-us-federal-compliance-rules-for-sensitive-information/

At the end of April (!) Europeana hosted an interesting webinar, “Not in Public Ownership, but Available for Public Use” which considered what might be done with digital copies of (presumably out of copyright) artwork that is being deaccessioned by museums. This caught my attention because I’ve been arguing for at least 20 years that museums in the United States should be legally required to place high-quality digital copies of out-of-copyright works in the public domain before they deaccession them. At least in the US, it would seem that we have a legal and regulatory framework to make this possible (presumably through states Attorneys General), and it’s shocking to me that organizations like AAMD haven’t mandated this as part of their deaccessioning guidelines as well, particularly in light of the ghastly spate of deaccessioning that is currently taking place. The Europeana presentation, by Bernadine Brocker Wieder, looks at some additional dimensions of this issue,
including the possible role of Nonfungible Tokens (NFT), a discussion I found quite confusing. But interesting viewing. See

https://pro.europeana.eu/event/not-in-public-ownership-but-available-for-public

Our colleagues at Jisc have recently put out a white paper on open access monographs. This seems to be an emerging objective for various funders, particularly in Europe. They’ve shared a blog post that gives some very helpful background as well as pointers to the white paper and some earlier publications.

https://research.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2021/05/18/investing-in-the-open-access-book-infrastructure-a-call-for-action/

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) has made a recording of a recent discussion “The Future of Archives: Collecting in Time of Crisis” available for viewing. This is an issue that I think is emerging to be of central importance. We’ve explored aspects of this at CNI meetings, looking at projects like Documenting the Now and the work to capture the Occupy Wall Street movement.  This is a very complex multidimensional challenge without straightforward answers. I hope that we’ll explore these issues in more detail in future CNI events. See

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/future-of-archives/register

The US National Academies is holding a three-part series “The Revolution in Intelligence Affairs” in conjunction with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The first session, on Technological Drivers, took place on April 28, and the recording is available. There’s a lot of interesting material in here that I suspect many, perhaps most, CNI-announce readers are unaware of — for example, the “GEOINT singularity” as space-based earth imaging expands, or the interactions between machine learning and counterintelligence. Links are here, as well as information about the upcoming second and third parts of the series.

https://www.nationalacademies.org/event/04-28-2021/the-revolution-in-intelligence-affairs-technological-drivers

I’ll also just mention the National Academies report on the impact of the pandemic on women in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine), which was released some time ago. It’s really bad news. See

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/26061/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-the-careers-of-women-in-academic-sciences-engineering-and-medicine

which also includes a pointer to video of a webinar of the announcement event (which I watched; it’s grim viewing).

There’s a very interesting emerging initiative from NSF called the “Internet of Samples”  which deals with cyberinfrastructure to deal with the management and sharing of materials samples. I hope to get a report on this for a future CNI event. A good short summary with pointers to the key materials is at

https://bids.berkeley.edu/news/internet-samples-isamples-toward-interdisciplinary-cyberinfrastructure-material-samples

Finally, a very interesting recent proposal for a National Discovery Cloud from the Community Computing Consortium; the work has been led by Ian Foster, who has done a great deal of important and visionary work that will be familiar to many CNI-announce readers. This is a potentially important set of ideas about research and public cyberinfrastructure that I again hope we can explore at CNI in future. The paper is not long, and is well worth reading. See

https://cra.org/crn/2021/05/national-discovery-cloud/

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

There’s an interesting report that has come out very recently offering a series of scenarios for the future of cybersecurity in the 2030 time frame. See

https://resources.trendmicro.com/Project-2030-Resources.html

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

I’m very late in sharing this with the CNI-announce list, and I hope those already aware of this work will forgive me the duplication, but this is an important report. My apologies also to Ed for taking so long to get this out.

Ed McCain of the University of Missouri has been one of the great advocates and researchers seeking to advance the critical issues around the preservation of the news as news distribution shifts to digital channels. (I’ve had the privilege of working with Ed on several conferences he’s put together over the last decade focusing on these challenges.) He and his colleagues have produced a major milestone study titled “Endangered but not too Late: the State of Digital News Preservation” which provides important (and scary) data about the current state of the digital news preservation landscape. This is well worth your attention and your consideration.

See https://www.rjionline.org/preservenews for more information about this report. I have also reproduced the press release below.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Catching up with yet another belated paper, this is a very thought provoking read that connects to a number of important issues about archives, digital preservation, control of disinformation and related topics that’s come out from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. It’s authored by John Bowers, Elaine Sedenberg and Jonathan Zittrain. See

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/platform-accountability-through-digital-poison-cabinets

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Full disclosure: Elaine is a UC Berkeley School of Information PhD graduate who’s given several wonderful talks at the Buckland-Lynch seminar at the Berkeley ISchool, where I’m a long-time adjunct professor.

Our colleagues at the German DFG have recently published a valuable new report title “Data Tracking in Research: Aggregation and Use or Sale of Usage Data by Academic Publishers”  which adds some additional insights to issues that CNI and other organizations have been tracking in recent years. See

https://www.dfg.de/download/pdf/foerderung/programme/lis/datentracking_papier_en.pdf

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI