In the chaos of the past two months, I’ve mostly refrained from sharing published materials with the cni-announce list, partially because I’ve been swamped, and partially because I think many readers of this list have been swamped. Here are a few that I’ve accumulated which I think are particularly important or timely:
Congressional Research Service, Report on the Effects of COVID-19 on the Federal Research and Development Enterprise, April 10, 2020
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46309
This is a very valuable synthesis addressing a critically important topic; note that it’s focused on science agencies like NSF, NIH, NASA. The higher education research enterprise is much broader and also encompasses, for example, the humanities, and the federal government does fund work in this area through organizations like NEH, NARA, and IMLS. Note that CNI has been convening a series of extraordinary Executive Roundtables over the past two weeks looking at the continuity of the research enterprise; we hope to have a report of these conversations out in early to mid-May and will announce it here.
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Danielle Cooper, Technologies at Hand: On Researcher Practices During a Pandemic, April 14, 2020
https://sr.ithaka.org/blog/technologies-at-hand/
A fascinating and relatively brief report from Ithaka S+R, very much worth reading.
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Results of an EDUCAUSE quick poll on the help that institutions are providing students in the transition to fully remote access.
https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/4/educause-covid-19-quickpoll-results-help-for-students
A quick and very interesting read.
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Public Workshop on Opportunities for Accelerating Scientific Discovery: Realizing the Potential of Advanced and Automated Workflows \
This was a hugely important public symposium that was hosted by the National Academies on March 16-17, 2020. It was moved from an in-person to a virtual event at the last minute; I was fortunate to be able to attend. It was convened to support the work of a National Academies committee exploring the same topic which is being chaired by Dan Atkins of the University of Michigan (and Paul Evans Peters Award winner, among many many other honors). More information and all of the presentations are available at:
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Matthew Kirschenbaum, BOOKS.FILES: Preservation of Digital Assets in the Contemporary Publishing Industry, March 26, 2020
Here’s Matt’s announcement:
I am happy to announce BOOKS.FILES: Preservation of Digital Assets in the Contemporary Publishing Industry, a 25k-word report written with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and in collaboration with the Book Industry Study Group.
Download the PDF here:
https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/25605
This open access research report builds on a Convening held two years ago at the Pierpont Morgan Library that brought together representatives from book history and bibliography (among other fields) and the publishing industry. It addresses the global transition of contemporary publishing and bookmaking to digital workflows, and the implications for publishers’ archives and other forms of primary source evidence for future book history, bibliography, and literary and cultural history more generally. It seeks to explain how books are actually made nowadays and at what points in the production process digital assets might be earmarked for future archiving.
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AI for Science, Department of Energy Report, March 11, 2020
This is a massive report from the DOE National Labs looking at applications of AI in scientific research. It has interesting connections to other work going on internationally, such as the Jisc Research 4.0 study which I’ve discussed here before, and also to thinking such as Tony Hey from Rutherford Labs in the UK described in his talk at the AAAS meeting in February 2020 (see more on Tony’s work at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsta.2019.0054 ). The announcement and a link to the report is at
https://www.anl.gov/ai-for-science-report
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I hope these links are helpful.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI