CNI News

There was an important announcement from the Big Ten Academic Alliance, basically (as I read it) committing the member libraries to move towards managing the collections of the members as a single giant common collection. This is an incredibly complex undertaking (as is well documented in the announcement) but promises huge benefits to the participants and their user communities. See

https://www.btaa.org/library/big-collection/the-big-collection-introduction

This follows on a whole series of key strategic collaboration agreements from the Big Ten group, notably their work over the past couple of years on Special Collection interlibrary loan policy.

I hope that we will be able to explore these developments in more detail as part of an upcoming CNI meeting.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has just issued a call for proposals for a $20 million center for open environmental data and science which I thought our community would find interesting. See

https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2021/nsf21549/nsf21549.htm?fbclid=IwAR2RHCftDpbq6aEpWOTni-OvEDtylYfnGC50fsKlVf6vCy86i8GvGE1ye0I

The “synopsis of program” session early on in the document is particularly worth reading, positioning this solicitation in the context of a series of major NSF investments in data management and data intensive scientific projects on a large scale over the past decade and more.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CN

I’m just now catching up on a report issued by a federal cross-agency working group titled “Economic Analyses of Federal Scientific Collections: Methods for Documenting Costs and Benefits” in late November 2020. This may be valuable for stewards of other collections beyond federally-supported ones.

Some background on the development of the report, and a video introducing the report, are at:

https://iwgsc.nal.usda.gov/economic-analyses-federal-scientific-collections

and the report can be downloaded at

https://smithsonian.figshare.com/articles/report/Economic_Analyses_of_Federal_Scientific_Collections_Methods_for_Documenting_Costs_and_Benefits/13241612/1

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Proposals are now being accepted for project briefings to be presented during CNI’s Spring 2021 Membership Meeting (virtual). The meeting will take place online March 15-26, 2021. Anyone may propose a project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.

Project briefings address issues of interest to the membership, as outlined in CNI’s Program Plan. The 30-minute to one-hour sessions focus on a timely topic or on a specific institutional/organizational project related to digital information; they can also explore parallel developments across institutions. A limited number of project briefings will be accepted.

March 15-16 from noon-5:00 pm EDT will be devoted to live project briefings. For the spring 2021 virtual meeting, we are only scheduling a very small number of live (synchronous) project briefings; we expect the great majority of project briefings will be pre-recorded. Once accepted, speakers who are selected for live sessions will be contacted regarding the schedule. More details are on the project briefing proposals page.

Proposals may be submitted via online form:
https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2021/project-briefing-proposals-s21
Deadline for submissions is February 12, 2021

More information, including the complete event schedule-at-a-glance, is at https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2021.
Follow the meeting: #cni21s

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

On December 15, 2020, Professor Francine Berman received the Paul Evan Peters Award and gave the memorial lecture at the CNI Fall Virtual Member Meeting. Fran’s talk was absolutely wonderful, and the video is now publicly available at

https://vimeo.com/491464433
https://youtu.be/jqU4jjYUGsE

If you were not able to see this as part of the meeting, I strongly recommend it.

With best wishes for the New Year.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

I wanted to share some preliminary details of the CNI Virtual Spring 2021 Meeting for your calendar planning purposes. I expect to be able to offer considerably more detail, including dates for registration, executive roundtable participation proposals, breakout proposals and the like around the week of January 4, 2021.

For Spring 2021, largely in response to feedback from the last two meetings and other conversations with members of our community, we are going to a much more compact synchronous meeting format. We expect that the vast majority of the breakout sessions will be pre-recorded and viewable on demand by meeting participants (and subsequently publicly available). We expect that virtually all of the synchronous breakouts and plenary sessions will also be recorded for later viewing and public distribution.

Here’s the rough schedule. All times are EASTERN.

March 15-16, noon-5pm: A small number (5-6) of synchronous (live) project briefings, spread across the two days.

March 17, 18, 19 noon-230pm: Executive Roundtables by invitation. The topic will be Post-Pandemic Strategic Planning Challenges and Approaches. We’ll schedule at least one of these on the 18th; we will schedule additional sessions on 17 and 19 as demand justifies. I will provide a summary of what we heard as a presentation during the plenary session days (see below).

March 17, 18 and possibly 19, 3-4pm invited topical panels, which I’ll moderate. This is a new experiment; more on it in January 2021.

March 22-23: unscheduled; a chance to explore some of the pre-recorded sessions, if you wish.

March 24-26 noon-5pm: Plenary sessions; we expect to have a total of about 8-9 invited synchronous plenary sessions across the three days.

With best wishes for the remainder of the holidays and for the New Year

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

For those who weren’t at my plenary talk Monday at the CNI Fall virtual member meeting, I just wanted to note a couple of specific announcements I made about CNI-related events.

Our spring 2021 meeting will be virtual. Plans for this will be announced in early January 2021.

The JISC/CNI meeting, which will be focused on the future of the research enterprise, will also move virtual and will take place July 7-9, 2021. Again, more details to come in January 2021.

We are hopeful that the scheduled Washington DC CNI Fall 2021 member meeting will take place in person in December 2021. It will likely be complemented by some type of virtual event. More on this in late summer 2021, if not before.

The recording of the plenary talk should be available soon. It covers a broad range of topics. I hope that CNI-announce readers will find it helpful. I would welcome questions and comments.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

EDUCAUSE has just released a great QuickPoll looking at the state of academic research and research support services during the pandemic. Highly informative and highly recommended; this is a very valuable additional data point on the status and continuity of the research enterprise, and connects up with a number of other reports (including the CNI Executive Roundtable reports on Research Continuity) that I’ve been sharing with this list. See

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/12/educause-quickpoll-results-academic-research

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

About ten days ago, the journalist Richard Poynder shared a new ebook summarizing his current thinking about numerous issues related to open access, and I’m just now catching up with it (sorry). While there are certainly plenty of points that will be controversial in this (and I don’t necessarily agree with all the conclusions), as with so much of his work I think it’s extremely thought-provoking and well worth reading and carefully considering. The announcement, and a link to the ebook

https://poynder.blogspot.com/2020/12/open-access-information-wants-to-be-free.html

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNi

There’s a very interesting (and rather lengthy) book of essays out recently titled “The Future of Text”. There are a number of essays contributed by members of the CNI community, and I think it may be of interest to many readers. My thanks to Keith Webster of CMU (one of the essay authors) for the pointer to this project.

For more information about the book, the contributors, the broader project and context, and a launch symposium, including pointers to recordings, see

https://futuretextpublishing.com

The book is available for free download (as PDF or EPUB) at

https://futuretextpublishing.com/future-of-text-2020-download/

You can also purchase a printed version on Amazon fairly inexpensively if you prefer, (It’s print on demand, so it’s serviceable, not beautiful.)

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI