CNI Task Force Meeting

Citation

Rader, H.B. (2001), "CNI Task Force Meeting", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918cac.002

CNI Task Force Meeting

Hannelore B. Rader

The Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) held their annual Fall Task Force Meeting in San Antonio, Texas December 7-8, 2000. The lovely holiday atmosphere surrounding the San Antonio Riverwalk setting of the conference made it a most memorable event for the more than 250 participants representing member institutions and vendors.

CNI was founded in 1990 by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), CAUSE and EDUCOM. CAUSE and EDUCOM represent organizations concerned with the use of information technology in higher education while ARL represents research libraries in North America. With the establishment of CNI the sponsoring organizations broadened the higher education community's thinking to encompass networked information content and applications using the Internet for scholarship research and educational partnerships. CNI is supported by a taskforce of about 200 dues-paying member institutions. The task force meets twice a year to address three central themes:

1. 1.

   Developing and managing networked information content.

2. 2.

   Transforming organizations, professions and individuals.

3. 3.

   Building technology, standards and infrastructure.

In addition CNI has an ongoing program of education and advocacy to develop networked information and its role in transforming organizations and scholarly activities.

The opening plenary session, given by CNI Executive Director, Dr Clifford Lynch, addressed key developments in networked information, discussed progress within the CNI agenda and highlighted initiatives from the latest CNI program plan:

For the 2000-2001 program activities CNI will continue to address the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH), a broad coalition of arts, humanities and social science groups.

CNI will also work with national and international institutions on digitizing theses and dissertations.

Metadata initiatives with OCLC, access to multimedia through Internet 2 and digital preservation are several other initiatives CNI will focus on.

CNI is fostering dialog and collaboration among information professionals to preserve electronic records and archives, to assess networking and networked information resources and services and research.

CNI is exploring distance education and instructional technologies in higher education.

CNI continues to be actively involved in key areas of standards and infrastructure development.

The open archives initiatives, the image retrieval benchmark database, authentication and authorization, future search standards, digital books and Internet are additional CNI current and future initiatives.

More information regarding CNI programs is available at the CNI Web site http://www.cni.org

During the opening plenary session Don Waters, Program Officer of Scholarly Communications at the Mellon Foundation, gave a short presentation related to the initiatives of the Foundation to advance networked information and scholarly communication. He outlined the many initiatives the Mellon Foundation supports in areas of archiving, scholarly subject portals, and special collections preservation and digitizing. Particularly noteworthy was his presentation on digitizing visual materials as primary sources for scholarly purposes. He discussed the example of the Dunhuang grotto paintings in an oasis town in the Gobi Desert in Western China along the Silk Road. The cave discovered in 1900 had a large library now dispersed throughout the world and hand-carved cave shrines and murals, which are being documented through digital photography with the help of the Mellon Foundation.

The closing plenary address was given by Dr Herbert van de Sompel, currently a visiting professor at Cornell University. He addressed very complex, central issues in scholarly communication and the networked information architecture. His presentation summarized the new generation of networked information applications including the open archives metadata harvesting protocol. He discussed interoperability specification for the recurrent exchange of metadata between systems including such items as database synchronization and harvesting the deep Web. He reflected upon the possibility of a digital system for scholarly communication based not merely on scanned copies of the paper system. With his highly technical talk he definitely challenged CNI participants to think out-of-the-box.

More than 40 breakout sessions covered a myriad of topics and addressed the CNI 2000-2001 program plan:

E-books and digital books ­ Presenters from the University of Texas, Austin, Octavo and Questia explored new developments in these areas in terms of library concerns, and user needs. Questia is a unique, online research service for undergraduate students.

Evolution of the scholarly communications system was explored by Rick Johnson of SPARC; and Thomas Hickerson of Cornell University described Project Euclid, an initiative to advance effective and affordable scholarly communication in theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics. Kimberly Douglas and Eric Van de Velde of California Technical University described strategies for university self-publishing at Cal Tech.

Cassy Ammen from the Library of Congress (LC) addressed preservation in terms of Web preservation at LC.

David Bearman, resident of Archives and Museum Informatics described how this non-profit organization makes privately held intellectual property accessible online to the public for free and how it assures preservation.

Rob Spindler and Jeremy Rowe from Arizona State University explored successes of ECURE 2000: Preservation and Access for Electronic College and University Records.

The libraries at the University of California, San Diego have begun development of a digital Pacific Rim Library in support of education and research in international studies through solving technical issues for information resources encoded with Chinese, Japanese and Korean character sets.

Hugh Jarvis from the University of Buffalo reported that MYUB, an Intranet Portal has been developed as a coaching, mentoring system for students complementing human advisors bringing resources to the students at any time.

The JA-SIG Portal was explained as an open-source enterprise portal, offers a solution by a vendor, Interactive Business Solutions, for higher education to ensure security, integration and interfaces throughout the campus information technologies.

Tom Neiss of SUNY described SUNY's efforts to implement the World Wide Web Consortium accessibility guidelines for the SUNY system, the most extensive effort in this area up to now.

Future CNI initiatives, such as collaborating with information technology and developing benchmark image databases, were addressed by Joan Lippincott of CNI and Susan Perry of Mt Holyoke.

Cliff Lynch talked about the development of benchmark image databases together with Anne Kenney of Cornell University. Another session on open archives was held with Dan Greenstein of the Digital Library Federation.

Kirsten Swearing form the University of California, Berkeley presented the results of a study conducted by Hal Varian and Peter Lyman at that university regarding the cost of magnetic storage and how much information needs to be stored.

ARL's E-metrics project

• •

  ­ The E-Metrics Project: Developing statistics and performance measures to describe electronic information services and resources for ARL libraries Rush Miller, University of Pittsburgh, Sherrie Smith, Arizona State University and Jeff Shinn, Florida State University presented an update on ARL libraries activities regarding developing statistics and performance measures for electronic information services and resources. The project is a first step to address issues such as resource allocation, improved service quality and higher education outcomes in the networked environment. They gave preliminary findings regarding managing networked data, obtaining and using vendor-based statistics and managing current statistics. http://www.arl.org/stats/newmeas/e-metrics.html

Two sessions focused on information literacy ­ one from the University of Texas at Austin and the other from UCLA by Howard Besser who discussed the UCLA/PacBell information technology literacy partnership.

• •

  ­ TILT: Texas Information Literacy Tutorial Clara S. Fowler, University of Texas at Austin, discussed TILT, a highly interactive Web-based tutorial designed to teach undergraduate students based research skills. The program has been a model for online pedagogy in distributed learning, has received awards and has been adapted by other universities. http://tilt.lib.utsystem.edu

  ­ PACBELLl/UCLA Twenty-First Century Literacy Partnership Howard Besser from the University of California, Los Angeles reported on their campus-Pacific Bell collaboration to promote twenty-first century literacies. This $1 million project funded by Pacific Bell, unites education, information studies and libraries to teach students information, visual, media and cultural literacies by building curricula, guidelines and best practices for information systems designers and prototyping adaptive information systems. A summit initiated this project on October 21, 2000. More than 300 educators, librarians and policy makers participated. http://www.newliteracies.gseis.ucla.edu

IMS E-Learning Specifications: Technical Update ­ Dr Thomas D. Wason, IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc discussed how IMS working groups gather functional requirements, technical capabilities and deployment priorities from end users, vendors, purchasers and mangers. These requirements are consolidated into one or more specifications for content management and for learner information packaging to be used by such groups as Blackboard, Eduprise, universities etc. for electronic teaching and learning. http://www.imsproject.org

The CNI Fall 2000 Task Force Meeting was a most successful event. The sessions were highly informative and technologically advanced and most appropriate and educational for managers of academic libraries. The conference planners did an excellent job.

Hannelore B. Rader - (h.rader@louisville.edu) is the University Librarian at the University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, USA.