The annual ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) conference will be held this year at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland on June 4-7, 2008. This is the premier conference on ETD issues and has international representation of ETD programs. The call for papers, presentation, tutorials, and posters is now available on the conference website at: http://www2.rgu.ac.uk/library_edocs/etd08/papersandposters.htm

--Joan Lippincott

ECDL2008

12th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries

September 14-19, 2008 Aarhus, Denmark http://www.ecdl2008.org

cni-announce subscribers, whether in liberal arts colleges, universities, or other educational or cultural institutions, will find this special issue of Academic Commons, edited by David Green, of interest. --Joan Lippincott

Academic Commons today released its December 2007 special issue devoted to CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE & THE LIBERAL ARTS (www.academiccommons.org/). Edited by David L. Green (Principal at Knowledge Culture), the issue is dedicated to the memory of Roy Rosenzweig (1950-2007), an extraordinary historian who inspired a generation of fellow historians and others working at the intersection of the humanities and new technologies (http://thanksroy.org/).

Cyberinfrastructure offers the liberal arts new resources and new ways of working - with revolutionary computing capabilities, massive data resources and distributed human expertise. How will students, scholars, teachers, librarians, museum professionals and others connect, use and contribute to these new capabilities? Will humanists work collaboratively and produce new forms of scholarship "more interesting than the book"? How will institutions change the way they do business in putting cyberinfrastructure to work?

At the fall CNI meeting this week, the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) initiative released its public alpha draft documents; I've reproduced an annoucement from Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel below. I also want to note the two launch events for the ORE specifications -- March 3, 2008 at Johns Hopkins, and April 4, at the University of Southampton in conjunction with Open Repositories 2008 -- mentioned in the announcement below.

I'm delighted to see the progress on this important activity, and urge you to review and comment on the specifications.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

At the CNI fall meeting in Washington DC on December 10 I introduced the new 2007-2008 CNI program plan as part of my plenary address, and everybody who attended the meeting received printed copies. The program plan is now also available at the CNI web site, http://www.cni.org. In January, we will be sending printed copies to member representatives along with the invitation materials for the spring meeting.

The fall meeting was very well attended and, I think, very successful. We have started the process of gathering up presentation materials for the CNI web site, and I will send out an announcement when this process is substantially complete.

Best Wishes for the Holidays.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Howard Besser of New York University will be speaking on preservation of film, video and new media on the Educause Live Webcast on December 19 at 1PM Eastern. The event is free, but registration is required. Registration for these events is limited, and often fill up, so you may want to register early. The webcast will also be archived for later viewing. You can find full information and links to registration at:

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

(WASHINGTON, DC) The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation today awarded $650,000 in prizes to ten not-for-profit institutions in the second 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 Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the inventor of the World Wide Web. More information on the awards ceremony, including podcast interviews with some of the recipients, will be available at www.cni.org beginning 11 December 2007.

After a worldwide, public nomination process, the ten recipients were selected by the MATC Award Committee, which included Berners-Lee, Mitchell Baker (CEO, Mozilla Corporation), John Seely Brown (former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.), Vinton G. Cerf (Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.), John Gage (Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office, Sun Microsystems, Inc.), 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 American Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, NY: www.movingimage.us) for the development and release of the OpenCollection museum collection management system (www.opencollection.org). ‧ $100,000 to Duke University (Durham, NC: www.duke.edu) for leadership and development work on the OpenCroquet open source 3-D virtual worlds environment (www.opencroquet.org). ‧ $100,000 to Open Polytechnic of New Zealand (Wellington, NZ: www.openpolytechnic.ac.nz) for leadership and development work on several open source projects including the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (http://eduforge.org/projects/nzvle/). ‧ $50,000 to the Georgia Public Library Service of the University System of Georgia (Atlanta, GA: www.georgialibraries.org) for the development and release of the Evergreen open-source library automation system (www.open-ils.org). ‧ $50,000 to Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT: www.middlebury.edu) for the development and release of the Segue interactive learning management system. ‧ $50,000 to the Participatory Culture Foundation (Worcester, MA: www.participatoryculture.org) for the development and release of the open source Miro media player (www.getmiro.com). ‧ $50,000 to Talboks- och Punkstkriftsbiblioteket (The Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille: Enskede, Sweden: www.tpb.se) for the development and release of open source tools supporting the Daisy Project for talking books for the visually impaired. ‧ Two awards of $50,000 each to University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana, IL: www.illinois.edu): one award for the development and release of the Firefox Accessibility Extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1891); and one award for the development and release of the OpenEAI enterprise application integration project (www.openEAI.org). ‧ $50,000 to University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario: www.utoronto.ca) for the development and release of the ATutor learning management system (www.atutor.ca). Additional information on the awards will be available at http://matc.mellon.org beginning 10 December. Nominations for the 2008 MATC awards will also be accepted at that site, beginning 12 December.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a philanthropic organization with offices in New York City and Princeton, NJ. The MATC awards are a project of the Foundation’s Program in Research in Information Technology (RIT). More information about the MATC awards is available at http://matc.mellon.org.

For more information, please contact:

A Guide to the Fall 2007 Coalition for Networked Information Task Force Meeting

The Fall 2007 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held at the Renaissance Washington Hotel in Washington, DC on December 10 and 11, offers a wide range of presentations that advance and report on CNI's programs, showcase projects underway at Task Force member institutions, and highlight important national and international developments. Here is the "roadmap" to the sessions at the meeting, which includes both plenary events and an extensive series of breakout sessions focusing on current developments in networked information. As always, we have strived to present sessions that reflect late-breaking developments and also take advantage of our venue in Washington, DC to provide opportunities to interact with policy makers and funders.

As usual, the CNI meeting proper is preceded by an optional orientation session for new attendees - both representatives of new member organizations and new representatives or alternate delegates from existing member organizations - at 11:30 AM; guests are also welcome. Refreshments are available for all at 12:15 PM on Monday, December 10. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be followed by two rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday, December 11, includes additional rounds of parallel breakout sessions, lunch and the closing keynote, concluding around 3:30 PM. Along with plenary and breakout sessions, the meeting includes generous break time for informal networking with colleagues and a reception which will run till 7:00 PM on the evening of Monday, December 10, after which participants can enjoy a wide range of dining opportunities in the Washington area.

In conjunction with our meeting, CNI is co-sponsoring the 3rd International Digital Curation Conference, which will also be held at the Renaissance Washington; it opens with a reception on the evening of December 11 and runs through December 13. Separate, fee registration is required. Information is at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2007/.

I wanted to share this announcement from the Library of Congress with the CNI-announce readership. Comments on the report over the next two weeks would be very welcome, and can be submitted via the web page at the Library of Congress. Disclosure: I serve as a member of this Task Force.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

NEWS FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A preliminary list of project briefings to be delivered at the Fall 2007 CNI Task Force Meeting is now available online:

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. The meeting will be held in Washington, DC, December 10-11.

Looking forward to seeing you in Washington!

A new article by CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott, “Student Content Creators: Convergence of Literacies,” has been published in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of EDUCAUSE Review. The article, which appears as the E-Content column, is available online at

Diane Goldenberg-Hart Communications Coordinator Coalition for Networked Information 21 Dupont Circle, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 202-296-5098 202-872-0884 (Fax) diane@cni.org

Dear cni-announce subscribers:

Note that we will also have an update on the OAI-ORE project at the CNI Fall Task Force meeting in Washington. -Joan Lippincott

Apologies for cross-posting

The registration deadline for the Fall 2007 CNI Task Force meeting is next MONDAY, NOVEMBER 5th. If you haven't registered for the meeting or made hotel accommodations, please do so by Monday. Details about the hotel are available on the meeting website at:

Remember to identify yourself as an attendee of the CNI meeting for a discounted rate.

If you have questions about your meeting registration, please contact Jackie Eudell at jackie@cni.org. The meeting will be held in at the Renaissance Washington, DC Hotel on December 11-12.

Dear CNI-ANNOUNCE subscribers:

Joan Lippincott will be one of the presenters in the seminar "Applying Principles to Initiate and Advance Learning Space Design," on Tuesday, October 23, at EDUCAUSE 2007 in Seattle, Washington next week. Please note that separate registration and fee are required to attend this seminar.

Joan will also present an Organizational Update on Wednesday, October 24, to highlight CNI's program and current developments in networked information. The session will be from 4:55 PM - 6:10 PM in Room 608. We particularly invite individuals who do not regularly attend CNI meetings to come to this introductory session.

EDUCAUSE 2007 will be held October 23-26 in Seattle, WA; additional conference information is available at http://www.educause.edu/e07.

I'm sad to inform you that Roy Rosenzweig, a renowned historian and humanist, died October 11. Roy, who founded the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, was one of the deepest thinkers about the implications of the digital world for both the practice and the communication of history, and of humanities more broadly. Some of you may have been fortunate enough to hear him speak; he gave a memorable keynote at the Spring 2006 CNI Task force meeting. Among his many contributions to the community, Roy served on the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences and was instrumental in developing the case that cyberinfrastructure should serve scholarship broadly, not just science and engineering.

Here is one obituary reflecting on Roy's life and his achievements:

Until his death, Roy was an at-large member of the CNI Steering Committee, and was someone I relied upon for wise counsel, insight and advice about the work of the Coalition; he was generous with all of these. I'm very grateful for his contributions to CNI, and I will miss him greatly.

This is a very helpful review of the current state of data sharing practices from a UK perspective that has come out as part of the JISC funded DISC-UK DataShare project. I'm fowarding the full announcement from the SPARC Open Data list.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Below is the call for the 2008 Open Repositories Conference, which follows a very successful 2007 meeting in San Antonio, Texas.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

OPEN REPOSITORIES 2008: CALL FOR PAPERS & PANELS http://www.openrepositories.org/2008

I wanted to share the announcement of the project web site for the UK Digital Lives Research Project from Neil Beagrie. I think this is a hugely important and exciting project which will call for careful tracking, and I hope that we'll be able to feature reports on it in future at CNI member meetings. (Disclosure: I am a member of the external advisory board for this project.)

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Digital Lives Research Project

Project briefing proposals for the CNI Fall 2007 Task Force Meeting are due Tuesday, October 9. Information about project briefings and an online submission form are available at http://www.cni.org/tfms/2007b.fall/proposal.html. The fall meeting will be held December 10-11, 2007 in Washington, DC.

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

Diane Goldenberg-Hart Communications Coordinator Coalition for Networked Information 21 Dupont Circle, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 202-296-5098 202-872-0884 (Fax) diane@cni.org

The US National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure has just issued two major calls for proposals. The first, Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DATANET), addresses new organizational structures, strategies and collaborations for data curation and preservation. The information on this program can be found at:

Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet) | NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation

In addition, Chris Greer from NSF provides the following additional information on the solicitation:

We are writing to draw your attention to a newly-released, NSF solicitation, entitled Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet). You can access the solicitation at the NSF web site: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07601/nsf07601.pdf