Call for Project Briefings for CNI Spring Meeting

The Spring 2009 CNI Task Force Meeting will be held on April 6-7 (Monday and Tuesday) at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis Hotel in Minneapolis, MN. Registration materials will be sent by the end of this month to designated Task Force representatives. Please note that the meeting and hotel registration deadline is Friday, March 6. For more information, see the meeting website:

We are now accepting proposals for project briefings, one hour breakout sessions which focus on a specific institutional project related to networked information or a discussion of a hot topic. A limited number of project briefings are accepted. Proposals may be submitted via a web form available at

**Apologies for Cross-Posting****

DigCCurr 2009: Digital Curation Practice, Promise and Prospects

April 1‐3, 2009, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Draft conference program now available at http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr2009/schedule

Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, has published a new article, Mobile Technologies, Mobile Users: Implications for Academic Libraries, in the December 2008 issue of the ARL Bimonthly Report, no. 261.

In the article, Lippincott discusses mobile technologies, learning, and libraries, and she provides examples of innovative ways in which a limited number of academic libraries are already designing services around mobile technologies and mobile users. Issues that should be considered by campuses interested in examining their role in the move to mobile are also discussed.

The article is freely available on the Web at http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br261.shtml .

There will be several opportunities to hear from CNI at the American Library Association midwinter meeting in Denver, CO, January 23-28, 2009:

• On January 24, CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott will make a presentation on Net Gen Students at the Serials Solution (Proquest) breakfast for library directors and CTOs.

• Joan Lippincott will give a talk on Net Gen Students, Learning, and Libraries at the ARL Leadership Institute on January 24.

• Clifford Lynch, CNI Executive Director, will participate in a panel discussion regarding net neutrality, and he will be part of the LITA panel discussing "Top Technology Trends" on Sunday, January 25.

During the past year, I have been serving as a member of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Digital Preservation and Access, which is being funded by US National Science Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and supported by a number of other key organizations. This Task Force has recently released its first-year report, which can be found here:

http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Interim_Report.pdf

Note that much of this report is concerned with establishing definitions and surveying and synthesizing the current state of knowledge (or, sometimes, lack of knowledge) as well as practical experience gained from a number of digital preservation programs that offered testimony to the Task Force; there will be a second year report containing conclusions and reccomendations that builds on this one.

For more information on the committee and its work, you can visit:

The British Library is hosting a major conference on Feb. 9-11 on the work of their Digital Lives Project and related research, titled "FIrst Digital Lives Research Conference: Personal Digital Archives in the 21st Century". This examines numerous dimensions of the implications of the growing digital documentation of personal and professional lives, including those for cultural memory organizations and the cultural record.

Information on the conference can be found at

and more information on the overall Digital Lives Project at

Next week, the EDUCAUSE Live! program will feature two speakers who discussed copyright balance and fair use in networked learning at a session at the December CNI meeting. This should be a very lively and informative program.

-Joan Lippincott

Subject: EDUCAUSE Live! Webcast: Tuesday, 1/13 on Copyright Balance and Fair Use in Networked Learning

The Call for Papers deadline has been extended to December 19, 2008.

The Second International m-libraries Conference Vancouver, 23 - 24 June 2009

Call for papers Following the successful First International m-libraries Conference in 2007 we are delighted to call for papers for the Second International Conference in Vancouver in 2009. For more information about the conference visit library.open.ac.uk/mLibraries/ The conference will be hosted by the University of British Columbia in collaboration with Athabasca University, the Open University (UK) and Thompson Rivers University. The aim of the conference is to explore and share work carried out in libraries around the world to deliver services and resources to users ‘on the move’ via mobile or handheld devices, including mobile and smartphones, PDAs, portable gaming devices, MP3 players and ebook readers. The conference will bring together researchers, technical developers, managers and library practitioners to exchange experience and expertise and generate ideas for future developments. If you would like to be involved in this exciting conference please submit your abstracts (up to 300 words) to m-libraries-conference@open.ac.uk by December 15th, 2008. These will be subject to peer review and authors will be notified by mid-January. We expect that papers may include research reports, demonstrations of technical developments, practical case studies or reviews. Posters are also invited.

Themes will include; § service models for library services delivered to mobiles § cost and sustainability factors for m-library service development § the changing relationships between libraries and users resulting from innovation in ubiquitous computing § partnership projects for developing integrated services to mobiles § implications of mobile technologies on library space planning § reconfiguring library collection development to enhance ubiquitous access to resources § exploring methodologies for evaluating the impact of mobile and ubiquitous computing on library service development

The Coalition's 2008-2009 Program Plan, which was released in conjunction with CNI's Fall meeting on December 8-9, is now available online at:

Program Plan

Prior to 2020, CNI unveiled a new program plan at the annual fall membership meeting, offering an overview of priorities and plans for the upcoming program year. These provide a rich record of the …

in both HTML and PDF formats. This document provides background on CNI and summarizes our program for the coming year.

We'll be mailing printed copies to member representatives early in the new year, and can provide additional printed copies upon request.

The Library of Congress has just released a report on its initial months of experience in making a portfolio of photographs available to the public via the Flickr photo-sharing service. This is a fascinating project that helps to illuminate the ways in which interactions between cultural memory organizations and audiences around collections are changing in the digital environment, and I think that the report will be of interest to many CNI-announce readers. Both a summary and full report, along with other material on the project, are available at:

Introduction - Photographs on Flickr from the Library of Congress Collections - Research Guides at Library of Congress

This guide provides information about the Prints & Photographs Division's partnership with Flickr, which started in 2008.

My thanks to Caroline Arms for the pointer to this work.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

For more information, contact: Christopher J. Mackie 609‐924‐9424 or cjm@mellon .org

Recipients of Third Annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration Announced

(WASHINGTON, DC) The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation today awarded $650,000 in prizes to ten not-for‐profit institutions in the third annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). The Mellon Awards honor not‐for‐profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities, as well as cultural-heritage not‐for‐profit activities. The awards were presented at the Fall Task Force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information by Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist of Google, a man often called the “Father of the Internet.” Podcast interviews with Vint Cerf and some award recipients are forthcoming at http://www.cni.org.

After a worldwide, public nomination process, the ten recipients were selected by the MATC Award Committee, which included Cerf, Sir Timothy Berners‐Lee (Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and inventor of the World Wide Web), Mitchell Baker (CEO, Mozilla Corporation), John Seely Brown (former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.), John Gage (at the time, Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office, Sun Microsystems, Inc.; now, Partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers), and Tim O’Reilly (Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media). The awardees, prizes, and projects for which they were recognized are as follows: • $100,000 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA: www.mit.edu) for the development and release of the Kerberos network authentication protocol (www.mit.edu/Kerberos/). • $100,000 to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Champaign, IL: www.illinois.edu) for leadership and development work on Project Archon, a set of archiving tools (www.archon.org). • $50,000 to the Appalachian College Association (Berea, KY: www.acaweb.o rg) for leadership of the LAMP consortium (http://www.acaweb.org/content.aspx?sid=2&pid=197 ). • $50,000 to Carnegie-Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA: www.cmu.edu) for the development and release of the Panda 3D and Alice three- dimensional authoring tools (www.open-ils.org). • $50,000 to Ecotrust (Portland, OR: www.ecotrust.org) for the development and release of Open OceanMap, a tool permitting scientists and others to collaborate on marine conservation activities (http://www.ohloh.net/projects/10111 ). • $50,000 to the Foothill College (Los Altos Hills, CA: www.foothill.edu) for the development and release of the Mneme testing engine for the Sakai learning management system (http://etudesproject.org/mneme/ ; www.sakaiproject.org). • $50,000 to George Mason University (Fairfax, VA: www.gmu.edu) for the development and release of the Omeka cultural heritage collections Web presentation system (http://omeka.org/). • $50,000 to King’s College London (London, UK: www.kcl.ac.uk) for the development and release of the Pliny scholarly annotation tool (http://pliny.cch.kcl.ac.uk/ ). • $50,000 to the University of Waikato (Waikato, NZ: www.waikato.ac.nz) for the development and release of Project Greenstone, a set of tools for the creation of digital libraries (www.greenstone.org ). • $50,000 to the University of Washington (Seattle, WA: www.washington.e du) for the development and release of WebAnywhere, a project to increase access and mobility for persons with visual impairments (www.webanywhere.cs.washington.edu/) . • $50,000 to Villanova University (Villanova, PA: www.villanova.edu) for the development and release of Project VUFind, resource portal software for academic libraries (www.vufind.org). Additional information on the awards will be available at http://matc.mellon.org beginning 8 December.

Our colleagues at the Research Information Network in the UK have produced yet another timely and valuable report, titled "Discovering Physical Objects: Meeting Researchers' Needs". This report includes several disciplinary case studies (spanning humanities, sciences, and social sciences) of how researchers find physical objects to support their scholarship, and among other issues considers the historical barriers between researchers and museums. It also offers a very valuable backdrop and baseline for understanding changing information discovery and use patterns as more and more physical objects now also have digital representations. Pointers to the report and to an executive summary as well as additional background can be found at:

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Dear cni-announce subscribers:

Next week CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott will be presenting a session as part of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Live Webcast series.

Next Generation Information Commons: Retooling and Refining the Vision (Dec. 4, 2008; 11 a.m Pacific | 12:00 p.m. Mountain | 1:00 p.m. Central | 2:00 p.m. Eastern; 1.5 hours)

Some information commons are now more than ten years old and are in need of refreshing in terms of conception, configuration, technologies, and services. Others are so popular that additions are planned, either adjacent to the existing commons, on other floors, or in other buildings on campus. Through the use of principles and practical examples, participants will learn about trends in information and learning commons. A wide variety of photos will be used to illustrate the presentation.

The final report of a large multi-year research project titled "Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures" conducted at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley and funded by the MacArthur Foundation is now available. The report is available both in summary form and as an online book (to be published in print by MIT Press); the materials can be found here:

Additional materials and background can be found at the main project home page

This thirty-five minute podcast features a roundtable conversation recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2008 Annual Conference. The topic is Learning Spaces. What is the connection between space and learning? What considerations are most important when designing a new learning space for students? How do learning spaces fit into the strategic plan of an institution? These and other questions are discussed by:

• Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information
• Clare C. van den Blink, Assistant Director, Academic Technology Services & User Support, CIT, Cornell University
• Martin Lewis, Director of Library Services & University Librarian, Sheffield University, UK
• Crit Stuart, Director, Research Teaching and Learning, Association of Research Libraries
• Lauren Brady, IT Space Coordinator, Missouri University of Science and Technology

You can access this podcast at: http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/e08podcastinconversationl/47781

The UK Digital Curation Center is conducting a series of detailed discipline specific case studies of data curation and data sharing practices and issues under the rubric of a program called SCARP (see http://www.dcc.ac.uk/scarp for an overview of the project; I note that there is no obvious expansion of the SCARP acronym). The first such study, dealing with Brain Imaging, is now available. Here are the details:

Our first case study is titled Curating Brain Images in a Psychiatric Research Group [PDF, 1.69MB] and involved the Neuroimaging Group in University of Edinburgh's Division of Psychiatry. A 5-page Summary and Recommendations [PDF, 170KB] from the study is available. The study combined an assessment of risks to the long-term value of the research group's datasets with field work to understand current data practices in their context. An Annex titled Neuroimaging Data Landscapes [PDF, 1.23MB] provides background on the development of imaging, the nature of the data collected for neuroimaging studies in psychiatry, data repository and curation resources available, and legal and ethical constraints on data exchange.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

I had the privilege of serving on an planning committee for and attending a September 15, 2008 joint Council on Library and Information Resources/National Endowment for the Humanities Symposium on opportunities for information technology to enhance scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In preparation for the Symposium, a number of really superb background papers were commissioned; the authors later had the opportunity to revise them based on discussion at the Symposium. These papers are now available, and I strongly recommend them to CNI-announce readers as broad and thoughtful surveys of key developments and opportunities.

The general page for the symposium is here, and includes links to the individual papers:

Contents and front matter • CLIR

Preservation and Access Technology The Relationship Between Digital and Other Media Conversion Processes: A Structured Glossary of Technical Terms by M. Stuart Lynn and The Technology Assessment Advisory Committee to the Commission on Preservation and Access August 1990 Committee Preface In 1989, the Technology Assessment Advisory Committee (TAAC) of the Commission on Preservation and Access Read More

Here is the list of papers:

CNI-announce subscribers may be interested in this upcoming program featuring my colleague Crit Stuart from ARL discussing user-centered techniques for conducting needs assessment for learning spaces. --Joan Lippincott

On Friday, November 21, from 1-2pm U.S. Eastern Time, Steve Worona will be hosting Crit Stuart, Director for Research, Teaching, and Learning, Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Crit's talk is called, "A Space of One's Own: Learning Environments Derived from User- Centered Discovery Techniques". No charge, but registration required at . All EDUCAUSE Live! events are archived.

Summary: Academic libraries are committed to delivering new or improved learning spaces for students. Information/learning commons are de rigueur for libraries seeking to refresh and deepen their engagements with undergraduate learners. The most noteworthy learning environments provide enhanced productivity capacities; exposure to collections and digital information; skills training for knowledge creation; and development of information, verbal, written, and multimedia fluencies.

While it is tempting to mimic learning space solutions delivered by other libraries, such appropriation circumvents staff-owned discovery processes that create a deep understanding of, and commitment to, what is being built.

A schedule of project briefings to be delivered at the Fall 2008 CNI Task Force Meeting is now available online:

Links from this page lead to session abstracts; we are continuing to add supplemental information as it becomes available. The meeting will be held in Washington, DC, December 8-9.

We look forward to seeing you in DC!

Dear cni-announce subscribers:

More libraries are developing services targeted for mobile devices, and the increasing use of all types of mobile devices has implications for licensed content and physical spaces as well as for services.

If you are doing innovative work in this area, please consider submitting a proposal for a session at the Second International m- libraries Conference. (Disclosure - I am on the Organizing Committee for the conference.)

Joan Lippincott