CNI News

I wanted to (somewhat belatedly) share information about the availability of a substantial OCLC Research study on Research Information Management practices in the US. It documents a fascinating picture: while in much of Europe, for example, these practices are fairly mature and fairly centralized at a national level, the US has taken a very different and highly decentralized path. The report is in two volumes. The first provides a broad overview of findings and recommendations, while the second includes five in-depth case studies. See

https://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2021/oclcresearch-rim-united-states.html

My thanks to OCLC for taking a much-needed and timely systematic look at this area. I also note that Rebecca Bryant, the lead author on the study, has told me that she’ll be highlighting elements of the report as well as some additional material that couldn’t be included in the published report in her postings on the OCLC Research Blog at www.hangingtogether.org over the next few months.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has issued a broad call for input on eight emerging technologies as part of the work on a study called for by the 2020 COMPETE Act. Full information here:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/11/22/2021-25428/study-to-advance-a-more-productive-tech-economy

My thanks to the indispensable Gary Price for bringing this call to my attention.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

FORCE11 is holding its annual conference virtually this year, focusing on the future of scholarly communication. There is no fee (donations requested) but registration is required. For more information see

https://www.force11.org/meetings/force2021

This meeting is normally highly international and it starts very early in North American timezones. I do not know if the sessions are being recorded, or what arrangements will be made to provide access to them.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Today, November 4, is World Digital Preservation Day. One of the wonderful things that the Digital Preservation Coalition does to mark this day every year is to release their list of “Digitally Endangered Species”. Here’s their latest announcement. Well worth reading — and well worth your time to think about contributions to future lists!

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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Today the DPC has released The BitList: the Global List of Digitally Endangered Species 2021:

http://doi.org/10.7207/DPCBitList21-01

The BitList offers an accessible snapshot of the concerns expressed by the global digital preservation community with respect to the risks faced by digital content. It is based on the practical experience of professionals with the responsibility to maintain access to content over time.  It is not a theoretical exercise, nor does it serve a political or commercial interest.

In an important development, ‘Adobe Flash Animations and Interactive Applets’ has joined the small set of digital materials designated the highest classification of Practically Extinct.  Flash joins a small group of other Practically Extinct entries in this year’s list, which have been assigned this classification because they have become inaccessible by most practical means and methods and where immediate action is required to avoid loss. These include material where recovery is possible in very small samples but is impractical at scale.

Six other items have been identified at materially greater risk than in 2019, changing to a higher BitList classification, and twenty-nine entries have an identified trend towards greater risk.

Two new items have been added to the 2021 BitList: ‘Virtual Reality Materials and Experiences’ has been added as a new Endangered entry, and ‘Smart Phone Gaming’ as Critically Endangered.

‘New items appear on the list because an established and experienced professional within the digital preservation community has struggled to preserve access to this content and has called for it to be included,’ explained William Kilbride of the DPC. ‘The categories and classifications of content are broad so that the list can be digested quickly. It is a reference set against which any digital object can be compared.’

https://www.dpconline.org/news/time-to-act-bitlist2021

I wanted to share the list of speakers and presentations for CNI’s upcoming December 2021 Virtual and In-Person meetings. There may be a small number of last minute changes but this should provide a very good sense of how rich and diverse the programs are. I expect that we will be making available a schedule for the two events around the end of this week or the beginning of next week.

The virtual meeting will run December 7-9; on December 7 and 8 it will run from about 1-530pm Eastern, and on December 9 we’ll have a closing session from about 1-2pm Eastern.

The in-person meeting will take place in Washington DC from about noon Eastern on December 13 to 330pm on December 14. Let me remind you yet again the for the in-person meeting, you MUST register in advance so that we can verify attendees are fully vaccinated as part of the registration process; we will NOT be able to accommodate walk-up or last minute registrations.

You can find a list of contributed project briefings here

https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2021/project-briefings-breakout-sessions-f21

The virtual meeting includes a large number of pre-recorded briefings, and a smaller number of synchronous project briefings. In addition to these contributed sessions, I’ll open the virtual meeting, and then moderate an invited conversation session with Roger Schonfeld and Deanna Marcum to discuss their new book “Along Came Google”, which charts the progress of large scale book digitization. As we’ve done in recent virtual meetings, we’ve invited another cadre of CLIR fellows to introduce themselves and talk about their important work. We’ll have an invited session describing the new UK Octopus scholarly communication platform and initiative. And on December 9,  we’ll close the meeting with a session led by Laura Brown, Danielle Cooper and Dylan Ruediger of Ithaka S+R on the future of scholarly meetings and the tradeoffs between virtual and in-person events, after which I’ll make a few closing remarks.

The in-person meeting will open with my traditional December keynote, surveying recent events and future prospects. The sessions are primarily a very carefully chosen set of project briefings, plus an invited session to introduce a number of the fellows from the Library and Information Sciences Education and Data Science Integrated Network Group (LEADING) project and their work. The meeting will conclude with what should be an amazing plenary session: a team from Carnegie Mellon University and Emerald Cloud Lab — Dean Rebecca Doerge, University Librarian Keith Webster, and Emerald co-founder Brian Frezza —  exploring new strategic approaches to supporting scientific research through highly automated network-based shared instrumentation facilities, including consideration of the implications for research data management and reproducibility.  For those not attending the in-person meeting, note that we intend to capture video of all sessions, and make that video broadly available as soon as possible after the in-person meeting.

We’ll be putting out a roadmap spanning both the virtual and in person meetings in very early December to help you navigate the wealth of material. I think we can look forward to a pair of outstanding events in December.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Yesterday (November 1, 2021) Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R published a  valuable piece titled “Is Scientific Communication Fit for Purpose?” on the Scholarly Kitchen site. See

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/11/01/is-scientific-communication-fit-for-purpose/

There is a lot to consider here, against the backdrop of various polls and surveys reflecting erosion in public trust in science, and the way that innovations in scientific communication (such as broad adoption of unrefereed preprints for distribution in biomedicine and public health, which were long resisted) have co-existed uneasily with journalism intended for the general public, and indeed with decision-making by public officials during the pandemic. One almost wonders if we are going to see a split in public opinion or scientific communication processes between low-stakes (things that don’t really have much impact on the public, at least in the near term, such as most physics, mathematics, astrophysics, etc) and high-stakes (public health, climate change, some kinds of environmental science, biomedicine) that can reshape public policy going forward.

In any event, I think Roger has done a real service in summarizing the issues here in a succinct, high level survey, and I hope it can serve as the basis for some badly needed discussions.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Last week EDUCAUSE Vice President Susan Grajek did a fantastic presentation at the EDUCAUSE annual meeting to roll out the 2022 edition of the top 10 IT issues report. Today the report proper has been released, and can be found at

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2021/11/top-10-it-issues-2022-the-higher-education-we-deserve

As always, it’s interesting reading, and this year’s version is particularly striking in that the focus is on organizational transformation and institutional communities; technology is framed very much in service and support of these broader contexts.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

CNI is a supporting organization for The International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL); we are pleased to share the following details for TPDL 2022. Please note, the call for proposals has been issued. Thank you!

-Paige Pope, CNI Communications Coordinator

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TPDL 2022, Padua, Italy, 20–23 September 2022
Website: http://tpdl2022.dei.unipd.it/

Over the years TPDL was established as an important international forum focused on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. TPDL encompasses the many meanings of the term “digital libraries” embracing the whole spectrum of the LAM community; operational information systems with all manner of digital content; new means of selecting, collecting, organizing, and distributing digital content; and theoretical models of information media, including document genres and electronic publishing. Digital libraries may be viewed as a new form of information institution or as an extension of the services libraries currently provide.

Representatives from academia, cultural heritage institutions, government, industry, research communities, research infrastructures, and others are invited to participate in this annual conference. The conference draws from a broad and multidisciplinary array of research areas including computer science, information science, librarianship, archival science and practice, museum studies and practice, technology, social sciences, cultural heritage, digital humanities, and scientific communities.

TPDL historically approached “digital libraries” embracing the field at large also comprehending three key areas of interest that can be synthesized as scholarly communication (e.g. research data, research software, digital experiments, digital libraries), e-science/computationally-intense research (e.g. scientific workflows, Virtual Research Environments, reproducibility) and library, archive, museum and information science (e.g. governance, policies, open access, open science). As digital cultural heritage ties into digital humanities, TPDL aims to include this closely connected field as well.

TPDL 2022 is hosted by the University of Padua and will take place in Padua, Italy from 20 to 23 September 2022. We aim at going back to a full in-presence event. This choice does not exclude the possibility to follow talks online, but authors of accepted papers are strongly encouraged to come and present in person. We aim at encouraging discussion both formal after a paper presentation and informal during social events and coffee breaks.

There’s an interesting report that’s come out recently, titled National Strategic Overview for Research and Development Infrastructure, authored by a subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council. I would note that this is very much a perspective from agencies that are involved in scientific research and development activities. My thanks once again to the amazing Gary Price for bringing this to my attention. One very interesting point here is that alongside the expected observational, experimental and computational infrastructure, the report calls out what it characterizes as “knowledge infrastructure” quite explicitly at the same level of importance.

This is a revision of an earlier document from August, I believe.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/NSTC-NSO-RDI-_REV_FINAL-10-2021.pdf

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch will be speaking at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference on Oct. 27th in Philadelphia to report on a series of CNI Executive Roundtables with members tracking how the research enterprise has been impacted and reshaped as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope you can join Cliff to hear about what we’ve learned as a result of these conversations, and how the resilience of the research enterprise can be improved in the face of future disruptions.

Session Title: “How The Pandemic Has Changed Research: CNI Findings” 
Date: Wednesday, Oct. 27
Time: 8:00-8:45am ET
Location: 105AB, 100 Level

Additional conference information is available at http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI