I'm fowarding this invitation on behalf of Steve Carmody; it describes some current work on better interfacing the Shibboleth authorization system with EZProxy, and invites interested institutions to particpate in a pilot effort.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Good afternoon,

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to participate in an excellent symposium titled "The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age" at Texas A&M University. They have just made all of the talks available as streaming video, and these can be found linked to:

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

The registration deadline for the Spring 2009 CNI Task Force meeting is this FRIDAY, MARCH 6th. If you haven't registered for the meeting or made arrangements for hotel accommodations, please do so by Friday. Details about the hotel are available from the meeting website: http://www.cni.org/tfms/2009a.spring/accommodations.html **Remember to identify yourself as an attendee of the CNI meeting for a discounted rate.

A preliminary list of project briefings to be delivered at the spring meeting is now available online: http://www.cni.org/tfms/2009a.spring/project.html Please note that this is a preliminary list and that details are subject to change. Session abstracts will be added soon, and a full conference schedule will be posted upon finalization.

Look for Clifford's Roadmap to the meeting, which will describe plenary sessions and give details on project briefings, later this week.

If you have questions about your registration, please contact Jackie Eudell at jackie@cni.org. The meeting will be held in at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis on April 6-7.

Late last year the UK Digital Curation Center (DCC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) issued a major report prepared by Ralvo Ruusalepp titled "A Comparative Study of International Approaches to Enabling the Sharing of Research Data" which somehow I missed; this looks to be an excellent comparative international policy analysis of data sharing and reuse issues. This report is at:

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/docs/publications/reports/Data_Sharing_Report.pdf

My thanks to Gavin Baker at Peter Suber's indispensible Open Access News blog for the pointer to this.

CNI is once again delighted to be a co-sponsor of the IS&T 2009 Archiving Conference, which will be held at the Crystal City Hilton May 4-7, 2009. I'll be doing one of the keynotes for this meeting on May 7 (Thursday). You can find program and registration information at

http://www.imaging.org/conferences/archiving2009/

Early registration closes April 6.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

The US Interagency Working Group on Digital Data, a part of the National Science and Technology Council, has finally issued its report "Harnessing the Power of Digital Data for Science and Society". Some 22 federal agencies were involved in this effort, which defines an agenda for advancing scientific data stewardship, access and reuse across the federal government. It builds upon more agency-specific efforts such as the National Science Board's earlier report on Long-Lived Scientific Data.

Background on the report is at:

and the report proper can be found at:

On Wednesday and Thursday, February 25-26, there will be a major live webcast from the Federal Committee on Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) in support of their work on development of a five-year NITRD Strategic Plan. The NITRD progam planning comes out of the National Coordination Office (NCO), currently led by Chris Greer, who many CNI-announce readers know from his work with NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure and the National Science Board on data preservation, curation and re-use issues; the NCO has been the source of the well-known annual "blue books" that summarize and integrate federal investments in advanced computing, networking and related information technology.

You can find information on the webcast at

I do not have a final agenda of the panel participants at this time, but they will include many prominent leaders in information technology. My understanding is that the presentations will also be archived for viewing.

As a final reminder, project briefing proposals for the CNI Spring 2009 Task Force Meeting are due by tomorrow, Tuesday, February 17. Proposals may be submitted by email to joan@cni.org, or via the online form available at

The spring meeting will be held April 6-7, 2009 in Minneapolis, MN.

If you have any questions about submitting a proposal, please feel free to contact Joan Lippincott (joan@cni.org) or me (diane@cni.org).

This call to action, described below, was prompted by a Roundtable convened by ARL, AAU, CNI, and NASULGC last summer. We discussed this topic at a CNI Executive Roundtable at our Fall 2008 Task Force meeting. It was clear that a much needed next step is to advance these discussions at the campus level.

The statement will also appear in EDUCAUSE Review.

--Joan Lippincott, CNI

Those of you in the DC area may be interested in this upcoming symposium at Georgetown University.

=============== Eighth Scholarly Communication Symposium Google and the Future of Higher Education

On October 28, 2008, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers announced the settlement of the litigation concerning the Google Books Project [http://books.google.com/]. Under the project, Google has been scanning millions of books provided by major research libraries and other sources. For those books not in the public domain, publishers and authors claimed that Google’s scanning infringed their copyrights.

The settlement [http://books.google.com/booksrightsholders/] presents creates a mechanism for Google to pay rights holders for the right to display more of the books’ texts than it currently does under the current program. Google will then distribute payments to copyright owners. Google, in turn, will generate revenue through advertising and by selling to users the ability to see full text.

Data Movement and Management Forum: Pre-ACRL Program in Seattle

NISO will be holding an educational forum on Data Movement and Management on March 11, 2009 in Seattle as a pre-ACRL conference program.

Modern libraries consist of a variety of complicated data systems, many containing a portion of the data needed to address any specific question. Often data needs to be extracted from one system and moved to or compared with information in another. Frequently, these systems don't communicate well. This in-person conference will explore a number of ongoing data transfer and transformation consensus projects. Whether it is collections or holdings information distributed via ONIX, pricing data via CORE, or usage data via SUSHI, the community is working on strategies and structures to easily transfer data from one system to another. Each of these initiatives will contribute to saving librarians time and eventually money in managing their operations.

Confirmed speakers and topics for the program include:

Project briefing proposals for the CNI Spring 2009 Task Force Meeting are due Tuesday, February 17. Information about project briefings and an online submission form are available at

The spring meeting will be held April 6-7, 2009 in Minneapolis, MN.

If you have any questions about submitting a proposal, please feel free to contact Joan Lippincott (joan@cni.org) or me (diane@cni.org).

Interviews conducted during the Fall 2008 CNI Task Force Meeting are now online:

The podcasts include a conversation with Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, who presented the 2008 Mellon Technology Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). Interviews were also conducted with several of the MATC winners. These recordings are designed to function as an extension of the meeting, complementing the standard program, and providing an opportunity for the broader CNI community to hear from some of our key presenters and attendees.

The meeting was held December 8-9, 2008 in Washington, DC. Thanks to all who attended and presented!

NSF is sponsoring an invitational workshop at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in late March (26-27) dealing with a set of important and in my view badly under-examined issues involving sustainability and reuse of software to support science and scholarly work. The workshop is calling for position papers which will be used as the basis for invitations; these are due by February 20.

Information is at

I will be giving one of the talks at the workshop.

There's a new report from the Association of Research Libraries that looks carefully and thoughtfully at what we have learned about the role of research libraries in Digital Repository Services, and provides an up-to-date perspective of the area in the broader context of developments in areas such as e-research.

The report is at

http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/repository-services-report.pdf

Disclosure: ARL is one of CNI's two sponsor organizations; also, I had some input to the deliberations of the DIgital Repositories Issues Task Force.

There's a helpful new report out titled "Stewardship of Research Data in Canada: A Gap Analysis". It can be found at:

http://data-donnees.gc.ca/docs/GapAnalysis.pdf

Background on the report, and on the Research Data Strategy Working group in Canada, can be found at:

Project briefing proposals for the CNI Spring 2009 Task Force Meeting are due Tuesday, February 17. Information about project briefings and an online submission form are available at

The spring meeting will be held April 6-7, 2009 in Minneapolis, MN.

If you have any questions about submitting a proposal, please feel free to contact Joan Lippincott (joan@cni.org) or me (diane@cni.org).

Open repositories 2009 - The Premier Venue for Implementers and Managers of Repository Infrastructure and Services Proposals deadline extended until Friday Feb. 6, 2009: http://conferences.library.gatech.edu/or/or09

Call for Papers, Posters and Workshops

Repositories are being deployed in a variety of environments (education, research, science, cultural heritage) and contexts (national, regional, institutional, project, lab, personal). Regardless of setting, context or scale, repositories are increasingly expected to operate across administrative and disciplinary boundaries and to interact with distributed computational services and social communities. It is the aim of the Open Repositories Conference to bring together individuals and organizations responsible for the conception, development, implementation and management of digital repositories, as well as stakeholders who interact with them, to address theoretical, practical, and strategic issues.

A program of papers, panel discussions, poster presentations, user groups, and workshops or tutorials will bring together all the key stakeholders in the field. Open source software community meetings for the major platforms (EPrints, DSpace and Fedora) will also provide opportunities to advance and coordinate the development of repository installations across the world. The conference will include a keynote address by John Wilbanks, who runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons.

Below is information about the upcoming European Digital Libraries 2009 Conference, which will be held in Corfu at the end of September. The call for papers is open till March 21; workshop proposals are due at the end of February. I'm delighted to say that once again this year CNI is a cooperating organization for this conference.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

13th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL2009) September 27 - October 2, 2009, Corfu, Greece http://www.ecdl2009.eu/

The New Media Consortium (NMC) released the 2009 edition of the Horizon Report on Emerging Technologies at the EDUCAUSE ELI conference this week. This annual joint project of NMC and EDUCAUSE uses a complex and collaborative process that casts a wide net to try to identify new technologies that will change higher education in the coming years. you can download this from

I've also reproduced the NMC press release below, with gives more details and background. (Disclosure: I have been on the advisory board of this project, and also serve on the NMC Board and the ELI advisory board.)

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI