The Internet Activities Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force are convening a very interesting and unusual workshop (invitation copied below) exploring what might be done analyzing the extraordinarily well documented and open record of standards-making and related developments for the internet over the past decades. I thought that this invitation might be of interest to some CNI-announce readers who perhaps might not have seen it.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Show me the numbers: Workshop on Analyzing IETF Data (AID), 2021

The University of Oregon, in partnership with the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will host the "Digital GLAM Spaces: Building a Community of Practice for User Experience and Accessibility Conference.” The one-day virtual event will take place on November 10, 2021. The event themes of building community around user experience and web accessibility align well with issues of interest to many within the CNI community.

Proposals will be accepted through September 10th, 2021.

See the event website for details: https://glamalliance.uoregon.edu/

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

The Sloan Foundation technology program is sponsoring a scholarship fund to enable participation in OSPOCon by faculty, staff, students, and/or administrators actively engaged with or interested in learning more about Open Source Program Offices in Academic/Research institutions. Anyone working at an academic institution is eligible - there’s a cap of 2 scholarships per institution so interested applicants are encouraged to apply soon; the submission deadline is September 7th. As I understand it, you can register to attend either virtually or in person; there are separate programs that Sloan is offering to support registration and travel.

Scholarships & travel funding are available for the event in Seattle in late September, see

Scholarships | LF Events

The Linux Foundation’s registration scholarship program exists to support individuals who may not otherwise have the opportunity to attend Linux Foundation events in two categories: Scholarship…

and also a London based event in October , see

I wanted to share the announcement for the annual Pacific Neighborhood Consortium meeting. I've attended many of these over the years, and they are consistently full of interesting material in my experience.

I don't know how the sessions are going to be scheduled in terms of time zones, but hopefully they'll be available for subsequent replay as well.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

We’ve received a number of inquiries regarding our fall meeting so I wanted to share with you what we’re currently thinking so you can plan accordingly; we expect to share more details in mid-September. Our hope is to hold an in-person gathering in Washington, DC this December, but of course uncertainties abound, as those of you in the process of starting a fall term at your institutions well know.

For the Fall 2021 Membership Meeting, at this time, we expect to hold BOTH a virtual meeting and an in-person event, each independently of one another, and designed to complement each other: The virtual meeting will take place during the afternoons, Eastern time, on Dec. 6-9. It will include the Executive Roundtable (Dec. 6 and, if necessary, Dec. 9), selected plenary, panel, and project briefing sessions (mostly on Dec. 7 and Dec. 8), and pre-recorded presentations. I think we can safely say this meeting will take place as planned. The current plan is to hold the in-person meeting the following week, on Dec. 13-14, at the JW Marriott Hotel in Washington, DC, as originally scheduled. This event will be re-designed to maximize time for gathering and connecting, with longer breaks, fewer concurrent sessions than we’ve traditionally had at our in-person meetings, and organized discussion opportunities. Per usual, we’ll have a first-time-attendees welcome on the morning of the first day, and my opening plenary will begin around 1:00 PM Eastern. The meeting will adjourn on Dec. 14 around 3:30 PM Eastern. Our guess is that this meeting will have fewer attendees than a usual CNI fall member meeting for various reasons. We intend to record essentially all presentations from this meeting and make them rapidly available. Our contingency plan, if we cannot hold the in-person meeting Dec. 13-14, will be to move at least most of those sessions to a virtual meeting on Dec. 13-14, perhaps extending to December 15 if needed; these would take place during afternoon hours, Eastern time.

All member representatives will be invited to register for either or both the virtual or in-person meetings, and we will ask you to indicate your intention on the registration form for our planning purposes. We do understand, however, that plans can change, especially in the current environment.

Hopefully the rough outline shared here will help answer some of your basic questions about how we plan to proceed in December. Until then, please feel free to contact me (cliff@cni.org) or Diane Goldenberg-Hart (diane@cni.org) with any questions or concerns you may have. I hope to see many of you in the days and weeks ahead.

In June 2021, CNI conducted its most recent Executive Roundtable exploring the status and plans for the research enterprise, particularly in light of developments in the pandemic. The report summarizing this discussion is now available, and I think it contains a good deal of useful information in how institutional strategies and priorities are evolving. You can find the report at

I'd note that the report calls out a number of areas where CNI is seeking additional information, and we'd welcome hearing from additional organizations on these topics.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

The BitCurator Users Forum is an annual meeting focusing on digital forensics and born-digital materials. Posting the announcement below on behalf of the Educopia Institute. -Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

———

Dear Colleagues,

The BCC Program Committee is pleased to announce that the program for the 2021 BitCurator Users Forum and Educators' Summit is live and registration is open!

Please join me and colleagues Damecia Donahue, Wayne State University, Joe Lucia, Temple University, and Henry Myerberg, HMA2 (architectural firm) for a conversation about library spaces - what we expect of them and how they are changing. See below for the link to the session this Wednesday, September 18 at 4:15pm Eastern; there is no fee to join the Learning Spaces Collaboratory Conversation. —Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director Emerita, CNI

Greetings:

Join us on Wednesday, August 18, 4:15pm – 5:15pm EDT, for LSC Open Conversation #6: Making It Work: Job Descriptions for Library Spaces.

Earlier this summer I attended the online International Conference on Information-communication Technologies Enhanced Social Sciences and Humanities (ICTeSSH) - the event included a number of very good sessions, many of which would be of interest to the CNI community. Conference proceedings and presentation videos are now available from: http://ictessh.uns.ac.rs/ictessh-2021/

I note in particular an excellent keynote on FAIR computational workflows by Carole Goble (University of Manchester professor of computer science). Here’s the direct link to Carole’s talk: https://youtu.be/p9wDZSakHc0

ICTeSSH 2022, which will also be free and online, will take place June 27-29; more information is at http://ictessh.uns.ac.rs/ .

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

The NIH has several Requests for Information open which will be of interest to many of you - see deadlines and details below for RFIs on access to controlled data from NIH data repositories - controlled data emerged as a critical problem for UK as well as US researchers in our recent Jisc/CNI meeting (note that the deadline on this one is coming up soon, Monday, Aug. 9th), consent language for use of data and biospeciments, and increasing access to cloud computing to diverse biomedical research institutions.

I think the CNI community has useful contributions to make to these discussions.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

—Begin forwarded message—

The continued propagation of retracted scientific results has been a long term problem that has become particularly important and challenging with the rise of preprint servers and the growing emphasis on very rapid dissemination of results (in part driven by the pandemic). This is a very timely and welcome (though lengthy) report on the shaping of a research and implementation agenda to address some of these challenges.

see

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

This is really celebrating an amazing set of accomplishments that have had great impact across a surprising range of disciplines. Registration is free.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

---- Begin forwarded message ——

The US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have jointly issued what's technically a Request for Information (RFI) on their Implementation Plan for a National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource.

See

There's a lot here, and I think the CNI community may have comments on a number of different aspects, including the availability of high-quality data for this effort. I encourage you to at least review the call for information.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a major initiative underway to develop an AI Risk Management Framework. You can read more about this, including information about an upcoming workshop and a call for information here:

NIST Requests Information to Help Develop an AI Risk Management Framework | NIST

As a key step in its effort to manage the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI), the U.S.

The questions posed here deserve some careful consideration.

One particular sub-part of this, which I unfortunately missed when it was announced, is a call that is about to close for comments on methodologies for evaluating user trust in AI based systems. You can find information about this here

Colleagues,

I share, below, some news regarding the Library Publishing Directory, including a all for entries for the 2022 edition, and the exciting news that a research data set of all years of the directory is now available for researchers interested in the field of library publishing.

Full disclosure: CNI is an LPC strategic affiliate.

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

As a measure of how vastly information technology, computational methods, big data, and machine learning are transforming research practice, I invite readers to consider the following amazing achievement. DeepMinds, an AI-focused subsidiary of Google (Alphabet), has been developing an extremely accurate program to predict protein folding configurations, a notoriously difficult computational problem. Today they released a database that essentially captured their predictions for almost all known human proteins (about 350,000 of them) plus similar data for a number of other highly studied reference organisms such as the e. coli bacterium. The database, as I understand it, is fully public access, which is wonderful.

This is a major game changer and the implications are hard to fully predict, but I expect they will be striking. They summarized this work in a paper (preprint) in Nature. See

Highly accurate protein structure prediction for the human proteome | Nature

AlphaFold is used to predict the structures of almost all of the proteins in the human proteome—the availability of high-confidence predicted structures could enable new avenues of investigation from a structural perspective.

I expect there will be a flurry of media coverage over the next few days. Here are a couple of good early pieces to provide some context:

One of the issues that CNI has been tracking for decades is the implications of the gradual shift to entirely born-digital content in various markets. This is critical because at present the majority of this content is made available under a license regime, unlike physical objects (books, sound recordings, etc) where the doctrine of first sale applies. Under a license regime, rights holders can refuse to do business with specific institutions such as libraries at all (though there is legislation in place or under discussion in a few states to try to address this at a state level), or price material for libraries much higher than the same material offered to the general public, or only make materials available under restrictive conditions (for example, no ability for libraries to preserve for the long term).

The rapid transition of a great deal of video material to streaming services (and in many cases, newer materials are exclusively streaming) has placed the use of this material for teaching and research under serious stress, and also made it impossible to ensure the preservation of these materials for future researchers. When the pandemic forced the physical closure of many libraries and a move to online instruction and research, academic libraries found that they would have to pay substantially more for digital versions of materials that they had had in physical formats (VHS or DVD, for example). They also found that in many cases, digital versions were either totally unavailable, or unavailable to libraries. There's a good deal of anecdotal evidence that I've heard suggesting this has been a major pain point for research libraries in the pandemic, and while older materials in physical formats are now accessible again as our campus libraries reopen, which helps a good deal, it's clear that there are major problems ahead for libraries as markets shift to more and more digital only content.

With this as context, I was delighted to see the announcement today that Ithaka S+R is undertaking a major, systematic look at the landscape for streaming media in collaboration with a group of academic and research libraries. I think this is badly needed. You can find details on this at:

Making Streaming Media Sustainable for Academic Libraries - Ithaka S+R

There has been an explosion of interest in streaming media marketed for educational purposes in recent years, and the shift to remote instruction during

The second in the Learning Spaces Collaboratory Open Conversation series was just announced and will take place on Wednesday, July 14 at 4:15pm Eastern. While I will not be posting each week’s topic, I know many cni-announce subscribers will have a particular interest in the focus this week on Planning and Designing for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

If you missed last week’s session on biophilic spaces and student success, I highly recommend the recording, linked below.

--Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director Emerita, CNI

Alert: LSC Open Conversation #2 - Wednesday, July 14 at 4:15 PM EDT Planning and Designing for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Go to https://www.pkallsc.org/ for more information. Conversation Facilitators: Richard Holeton, Assistant Vice Provost for Learning Environments, Emeritus-- Stanford University and Susan Whitmer, Consultant—Susan Whitmer Studios

Our colleague Thomas Padilla, now at the Center for Research Libraries, is doing a survey as part of a new project called Ground Truths which in is looking at the very important issue of using cultural heritage data in machine learning contexts (there are real problems with well-labelled training datasets, for example). If you follow this link, there's more background on the project before you start the survey form. See

Ground Truths: Surveying GLAM Data for AI

* estimated completion time 5-15 minutes * Cultural heritage organizations are developing collections as data for a variety of purposes, including for use in artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The potential for community-wide benefit is significant, yet it is challenging to move forward in part because data are difficult to find. In an effort to make finding and reusing cultural heritage data for AI easier, Thomas Padilla (Center for Research Libraries), Elizabeth Lorang (University of Neb...

I think this should develop some very interesting data for the community, and as it's compiled I'll share pointers here. Also, hopefully, we can get an update on this work as it moves forward during one of our upcoming CNI meetings.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

For a change, I'm sharing these in a reasonably timely fashion. I hope these are helpful. I thought it would be better to aggregate these rather than send separate emails if readers feel strongly that I shouldn't do this, let me know.

First off, the University of Notre Dame obtained an IMLS grant looking at a number of machine learning issues and held a really good focus group session (I was very grateful to be able to participate in some of this) prior to the pandemic. Eric Lease Morgan and his colleagues have now completed the outputs from this work, which are extensive and really valuable. With his permission, here's Eric's summary of the work and the outputs.

Goal - To understand the unique current practices of domain experts, librarians, and computer science specialists and to identify possibilities to use topic modeling and NLP to enhance or augment current library classification in order to meet current cross-disciplinary research needs