CNI News

REMINDER: Proposals will be accepted until August 26 for the October edition of CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series.

Proposals may be submitted via online form: https://www.cni.org/resources/pbvs/submit-a-proposal

Important Details:

• Anyone may propose a pre-recorded project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.
• Videos should focus on a timely topic or a specific project related to digital information. We especially invite briefings on recently published reports and updates on new or ongoing projects, programs, or organizations that may have reported at CNI in the past.
• We recommend that these videos run no more than 15-20 minutes, though longer presentations may occasionally make sense.
• Videos will NOT BE SCHEDULED for viewing at a pre-arranged time; they will be available ON-DEMAND, released as a collection, and accompanied by a guide for contextualization. Their availability will be announced on CNI’s listserv, website, and social media.
• No more than 12 pre-recorded project briefings will be accepted for each edition; we will issue calls for proposals approximately every two to three months.
• More information is available on the CNI website and the second edition (July 2022) is now available.

Please let us know if you have any questions. Thank you!

-Paige Pope, CNI Communications Coordinator

The US National Academies is hosting the Endless Frontier Symposium 2022: Research and Higher Education Institutions for the Next 75 Years from 12-5pm EDT on September 22, 2022. As I understand it, the event is being broadcast online, but it may also be possible to attend in person at the National Academies in Washington, DC; I also think it’s likely that the talks will be made available for subsequent viewing, though I don’t know this for sure. For more details and the agenda for the afternoon, and to register, see

https://www.nationalacademies.org/event/09-22-2022/endless-frontier-symposium-2022-research-and-higher-education-institutions-for-the-next-75-years

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

The US National Institutes of Health is presenting the Lindberg-King Lecture and Scientific Symposium: Science, Society and the Legacy of Donald A.B. Lindberg, MD. This will run online all day on September 1, 2022. The session will also be recorded and available for later viewing.

The late Dr, Donald Lindberg was the visionary director of the National Library of Medicine for many years, and was a great leader in biomedical informatics. He also played a key role in establishing the US Federal Government’s High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) program. Lindberg received CNI’s Paul Evan Peters award in 2014 (see https://www.cni.org/about-cni/awards/pep-award/2014-donald-lindberg ).

For full details, and to register for the Symposium, see

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/NLM_Lindberg_King_Lecture_Scientific_Symposium.html

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Proposals are now being accepted for the next edition of CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series. More information about this year-round program is available on the CNI website and the second edition (July 2022) is now available.

Pre-recorded project briefing videos should focus on a timely topic or on a specific project related to digital information. We especially invite briefings on recently published reports, and updates on new or ongoing projects, programs, or organizations that may have reported at CNI in the past. In general, we recommend that these videos run no more than 15-20 minutes in length, though longer presentations may occasionally make sense; we leave this decision to the discretion of presenters.

Anyone may propose a pre-recorded project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.

Videos will NOT BE SCHEDULED for viewing at a pre-arranged time; rather, they will be available ON-DEMAND, released as a collection, and accompanied by a guide for contextualization. Their availability will be announced on CNI’s listserv, website, and social media outlets.

No more than 12 pre-recorded project briefings will be accepted for each edition; we expect to issue calls for proposals approximately every two to three months.

Proposals may be submitted via online form: https://www.cni.org/resources/pbvs/submit-a-proposal

Important Dates

• Deadline for submissions: August 26, 2022
• Notification of acceptance: September 2, 2022
• Video submission deadline for accepted proposals: September 23, 2022
• Video collection release: October 2022

Please contact me with any questions.

-Paige, CNI Communications Coordinator

EDUCAUSE has just issued a new report in its Horizon series, focusing specifically on institutional data and data analytics in higher education. See

https://library.educause.edu/resources/2022/7/2022-educause-horizon-report-data-and-analytics-edition

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Ithaka S+R has just issued a really valuable report titled “The Effectiveness and Durability of Digital Preservation and Curation Systems”, authored by Oya Rieger, Roger Schoenfeld and Liam Sweeney, funded by a grant from the US Institute for Museum and Library Studies. This is the kind of broad landscape survey that we very badly need as we seek to understand priorities and strategies for digital preservation; it’s also extremely helpful in that it sheds considerable light on the roles that commercial preservation services are taking on in this landscape, which I do not believe has been much analyzed. The report is here:

https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/the-effectiveness-and-durability-of-digital-preservation-and-curation-systems/

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Edition Guide
Coalition for Networked Information
Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series
July 2022

Welcome to the second edition of CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series, intended to provide timely reports on projects, events, and other initiatives or issues of importance to the community. This guide contextualizes the video collection, which reflects CNI’s ongoing programmatic interests and ongoing challenges in digital information, including changing research methods, the evolution of scholarly communication, the urgency of digital preservation, and more.

Members of the Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) project, a rapid-response digital humanities project focused on archiving Ukrainian cultural heritage websites at risk of being lost, have shared a fascinating account of their work. In Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online & Rapid-Response Digital Humanities, project participants Quinn Dombrowski, Alex Gil, and Anna Rakityanskaya describe how SUCHO builds on earlier socially-engaged digital humanities work while facing new challenges around web archiving in unstable circumstances. The presentation brings together several perspectives: SUCHO co-founder Dombrowski offers an overview of the work and evolving situation, Rakityanskaya describes project components and her own experience as a volunteer, and Gil discusses previous rapid-response projects.

Also focusing on digital cultural heritage preservation, Revitalizing the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) at Age 18 provides an update to a fall 2020 project briefing. dLOC is a collaborative digital library by, from, and for Caribbean libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations. In 2021, after facing various challenges, dLOC released updated bylaws, launched its first mobile-responsive patron interface, split its website into three systems, and planned its first all-virtual partner meeting. The briefing takes stock and maps a future revitalization project funded by the Mellon Foundation.

A team from the University of Michigan also provides an update to a previous CNI briefing and explores an increasingly important feature of the university in Transformative Partnership: Digital Scholarship Services at University of Michigan. Joe Bauer and Anne Cong-Huyen discuss the ongoing library and academic IT collaboration to deliver digital scholarship services to a large, distributed campus. What started as a grassroots effort, resulted in a comprehensive pilot program offering consultations, workshops, public events, research support sprints, a certificate program, and a pilot anti-racist grant initiative. The pair reflects on the challenges encountered, lessons learned, and the strategies and values that guide the work.

Two briefings explore facets of scholarly communication and publishing. The volume of open journal publications and related metadata about scholarly communication has increased dramatically in the past 15-20 years. Yet there is evidence that scholarly processes still create barriers to inclusion and measuring progress toward openness, equity, and inclusion remains difficult. In Community Tracking Indicators for Open and Inclusive Scholarship, Micah Altman describes the work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries’ Center for Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services-supported project that aims to develop open, reliable, and standardized indicators to understand who participates in open scholarship. The briefing describes the project plans and preliminary pilot research results.

In Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community, a team from Brown University and Emory University summarizes a recently published report on the landscape of digital scholarly publishing and the findings of a spring 2021 summit on multimodal digital monographs. The summit convened members of the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Monograph Initiative and focused on author and audience needs. Attendees discussed eight case studies and the most pressing questions about digital scholarly publishing. The report offers promising ways forward and calls attention to faculty-led experimentation and reimagined forms of humanities scholarship as the dissemination of multimodal digital monographs unfolds.

There has been increased focus on leveraging research information management systems (RIMS) of late. In Building the Unicorn: Or How to Balance Magic and Practicality in Research Information Systems Cynthia Hudson Vitale (Association of Research Libraries) and Dan Coughlin (Pennsylvania State University) describe their approach to developing a solution for discovering and aggregating distributed information about research performed on an academic campus. Their briefing includes a presentation on the technology and data sources used to power the system, and discusses how they were able to meet and comply with various institutional and federal requirements.

A sincere thank you to our speakers for their contributions to this edition; we hope you will share these videos widely with your communities. We welcome your comments about this series or any other aspect of CNI’s work. The call for proposals for the next round of pre-recorded project briefings will be posted to CNI-ANNOUNCE and CNI’s social media outlets in the coming weeks.

The most recent volume in the Charleston Briefings: Trending Topics for Information Professionals series, titled “Artificial Intelligence in Libraries and Publishing”, is available as an open-access download at

https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/r781wj47w?locale=en

The relatively short volume, edited by Ruth Pickering and Matthew Ismail, is a series of essays; these are very accessible and focus on the ways that AI may change the work of libraries and publishers (and to a lesser extent, the work of researchers and scholars more broadly), rather than the details of AI technologies themselves.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

The LD4 2022 Linked Data Conference, “Linking Global Knowledge”, is taking place virtually July 11-15, 2022 (yes, that’s next week, sorry to share this so late). Registration is free. The conference runs around 9am-2pm EDT daily. I am unclear about whether or when recordings will be available, but the LD4 conferences have made them available for previous conferences. The conference website is at:

https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/2022-ld4-conference/home

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

As part of its ongoing series of reports on the future of the internet, the Pew Research Center has recently released a report titled “The Metaverse in 2040”. As is usual with this series, the Pew researchers invited a wide range of people (disclosure: including myself) to reflect on several questions, and basically have compiled and organized these responses, and extracted some key themes, views and predictions; the report also quotes extensively from the responses Pew received. The report can be found here:

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/06/30/the-metaverse-in-2040/

The use of the term “Metaverse” in the report title is unfortunate, in my view, as the report really deals very broadly with the prospective evolution of immersive environments and user interfaces and various types of AR and VR technologies and how this connects up with today’s online experiences. I’d urge you to have a look at the page above to get a sense of the scope of the Pew study.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI