The US National Library of Medicine is putting on a fantastic workshop addressing issues around the evolving ecosystem of biomedical data and the challenges of data curation at scale in this environment on March 28-30 2022 (unfortunately, heavily overlapping with the CNI Spring 2022 meeting schedule). Preliminary agenda and registration information can be found at

NLM announces rescheduled Curation at Scale Workshop - NCBI Insights

Data curation plays a critical role in today’s biomedical research and ensures scientific data will be accessible for future research and reuse. In the time of pandemics, the need to get scientific information to researchers, medical personnel, and the public as quickly as possible is greater than ever before. In response to the need for … Continue reading NLM announces rescheduled Curation at Scale Workshop →

Clifford Lynch Director, CNi

CNI opened an examination of issues surrounding science nationalism and scientific integrity with an Executive Roundtable in conjunction with our December 2020 Member meeting. You can find the report on this here

Recently there have been a lot of new developments in these areas, and I thought it would be helpful to update the CNI community on some of these. This is not as timely as it should have been due to other demands on my time, and for this I apologize; I hope this summary is still useful.

First off the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has issued an important report on scientific integrity. The announcement is here:

There's a very interesting hybrid (in person in the UK and online) conference on AI for Scientific Discovery taking place March 1-3. For people in the US who are unable to attend the meeting in person, online participation is very inexpensive but you'll need to get up very early, as the conference is operating in GMT. I am not clear about whether recordings of sessions will be available or on what terms.

Full details

AI4SD Conference 2022 : AI 4 Scientific Discovery

This is the main web page for the AI4SD Conference 2022. It will be held on the 1st-3rd March 2022 at the Chilworth Manor Hotel. This is a hybrid conference and as such the entire event will be run via zoom with some participants at the physical location and some joining virtually. Due to this, […]

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

As a reminder, we are now accepting proposals for project briefings to be presented during CNI’s Spring 2022 Membership Meeting. The virtual event will take place online March 21–22; the in-person event will take place March 28–29 in San Diego, at the Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter.

Use the form to propose either a live, synchronous virtual session on March 21-22, or an in-person session on March 28-29. Once accepted, speakers will be contacted regarding the schedule. Deadline for submissions is February 14, 2022.

Anyone may propose a project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations. ALL IN-PERSON SPEAKERS WILL BE REQUIRED TO PROVIDE PROOF OF VACCINATION.

Project briefings focus on a timely topic or on a specific institutional/organizational project related to digital information; they may also explore parallel developments across institutions. Briefings should address themes of interest to the membership as outlined in CNI's program plans as covered in recent member meetings , and as explored in recent Executive Roundtable reports (see also https://www.cni.org/topics for more information).

Against the Grain's latest issue (December 2021/January 2022) includes an open access special section on the past, present and future of web archiving; I've contributed a brief article to the collection. The section was edited by Joe Puccio of the Library of Congress and his introduction can be found here:

the table of contents for the issue, including the special section, can be found here. Note that contrary to what the page says, the links to the web archiving articles are open and don't require you to be logged on.

I'm delighted to share some details about the upcoming 17th International Digital Curation Conference. As in previous years, IDCC is organised by the Digital Curation Centre and once again, I'm delighted that CNI will serve as a supporting partner for this important event.

IDCC22 will be a virtual event. The main conference will span two days 14-15 June, with a social event on the evening of 13 June. The programme will consist of a mix of keynote lectures, papers, lightning talks and poster presentations. This year we will not include demonstrations but we are happy to be able to reintroduce the workshops, which will take place on 13 and 16 June, depending upon number of submissions. The programme will run approximately 9 am - 5 pm British Summer Time (UTC+1), but we will place some sessions in a way that will make it friendly to other time zones. All sessions will be recorded.

The broad conference theme is reusability.

Papers are invited to address one or multiple themes in the broad scope of Reusability. Suggested topics include:

Proposals are now being accepted for the inaugural edition of CNI's new asynchronous project briefing video series, which replaces the pre-recorded project briefings historically part of our virtual member meetings. More information about this new, year-round program is in this recent announcement .

Pre-recorded project briefing videos should focus on a timely topic or on a specific project related to digital information. We especially invite briefings on recently published reports, and updates on new or ongoing projects, programs, or organizations that may have reported at CNI in the past. In general, we recommend that these videos run no more than 15-20 minutes in length, though longer presentations may occasionally make sense; we leave this decision to the discretion of presenters.

Anyone may propose a pre-recorded project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.

Videos will NOT BE SCHEDULED for viewing at a pre-arranged time; rather, they will be available ON-DEMAND, released as a collection, or edition, and accompanied by a guide for contextualization; their availability will be announced on CNI’s listserv, website, and social media outlets. Speakers may be asked to participate in a CNI-hosted virtual session to discuss their project briefing at a pre-arranged, mutually agreeable date/time.

The UK Royal Society has recently released an extensive report on the way online environments have reshaped the dissemination and use of scientific information, with particular emphasis on issues such as communication of such information to the broader society and the propagation of disinformation. An overview of the work, and a series of links to relevant reports, can be found at

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

(Apologies. I have a large backlog of developments that I want to share with the CNI community and I'll be grouping several of them together in a series of postings over the coming days; some of these are very recent and some are a bit older, but still highly relevant. )

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of data Science Strategy has launched a new Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative ; this is an important step in the evolution of the NIH strategy to develop both specialist data repositories and a complementary ecosystem of "generalist" repositories, and I think is highly suggestive of the evolutionary trajectory of at least scientific research data management more broadly. It builds on earlier NIH-led efforts in this area, including a workshop on the role of generalist repositories that I shared earlier on CNI-announce.

In slightly older NIH related news, last week NIH held a workshop on dataset and repository search and discovery, a very important, difficult, and under-addressed issue. Here is the site, which includes the workshop agenda and background materials. I don't know the schedule for availability of the workshop report, or if or when video of the workshop will be available, but will update here if I learn anything further. See

I'm sharing this announcement from our colleague Martin Halbert on a very interesting new solicitation from the National Science Foundation which I think will be of interest to many in the CNI community.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

I am delighted to announce an exciting new cross-agency NSF solicitation that we hope will stimulate progress in adopting Open Science and FAIR data principles across scientific cultures nationally. Please share this information with your colleagues about the Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable Open Science Research Coordination Networks (FAIROS RCN) as described at this URL:

Today, an organization called the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity released a specification for content provenance; as is so often the case, I'm indebted to Gary Price for bringing this to my attention. This specification is interesting for several reasons. It comes out of the content industries and related tool builders such as Adobe; it's framed in part as a response to the spread of t deepfakes, and as a way of preventing modification or corruption of published material. The fundamental ideas here are not new, and there's a large literature on provenance metadata as well as on chains of trust in metadata.

Let me also be clear about what the specification does and does not do, at least as I understand it based on a fairly quick reading.. There is no magic here that ensures, for example, that a video clip is a recording of something that actually happened. What this work can do is allow an entity (such as a news bureau) to certify that they've "published" (and hence presumably vetted and are certifying true) a video clip, and giving you a way to ensure that you have a true copy of what they've published.

For more details see this announcement, which includes links to the relevant technical documents and also to the recording of a webinar that took place yesterday (follow the links to register for the event).

The Open Repositories Conference is planning to return to an in-person event this June, meeting in Denver, Colorado from June 6-9. I'm very pleased that CNI is once again serving as a cooperating organization for this important event. The call for papers and participation is now open and will run till the end of February; it's expected that registration will open at the end of March 2022. All the details are at

I hope to get to this meeting, and to seeing other members of the CNI community there.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNi

CNI is pleased to be a cooperating organization for the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) again this year.

ACM/IEEE JCDL 2022 will be held as a hybrid conference online and in Cologne, Germany, June 20–24, 2022. The conference theme this year is “Bridging Worlds” and various calls for participation are still open. Registration details are forthcoming. Details available on the JCDL website: https://2022.jcdl.org -Paige Pope, CNI

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CNI has long maintained a close relationship with the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program as part of our commitment to supporting emerging leaders in our community - they are a key source of future leaders for our community and beyond, and I am pleased to share with you this latest call for applicants for the 2022 program, focused on community data.

Please note that CLIR is also still accepting proposals from organizations interested in hosting a fellow.

See below for more information; details at https://postdoc.clir.org.

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

Proposals are now being accepted for the IS&T Archiving 2022 conference, June 7–10; paper submission deadline is March 28. Details are available at www.imaging.org/archiving .

CNI is pleased to serve again this year as a supporter of this important event, focusing on the digitization, preservation, and access of 2D, 3D, and AV materials, including documents, photographs, books, paintings, videos, and born digital works.

-Paige Pope, CNI

Recently Research Libraries UK (RLUK) sponsored a webinar Technology is Not the Answer: Why “Digital” is Not the Most Important Aspect of Your Digital Strategy by Athenaeum21 co-founders, Christine Madsen and Megan Hurst as part of their Digital Shift series. A recording of that session along with others in the Digital Shift series are available here https://www.rluk.ac.uk/dsf-on-demand/

The presenters explain that the deliberately provocative title of their presentation (and book) is meant to convey that addressing technological issues is just part of developing a digital strategy for a library. They emphasize the kinds of strategic, institutional alignment, programmatic, and organizational issues that are critical to maximizing the investment in new technologies. I found their session to be right on point and something that individuals at both the top administrative level and the implementation level of library organizations could benefit from.

In addition to the webinar recording, a freely available PDF of Madsen and Hurst's book is available here and you’ll also find information on the print and digital formats: https://www.athenaeum21.com/news/technologyisnottheanswer

Joan

Proposals are now being accepted for project briefings to be presented during CNI’s Spring 2022 Membership Meeting. At this time, we expect to hold BOTH a virtual event and an in-person event, each independently of one another and designed to complement each other.

WHEN: The virtual event will take place online March 21-22; the in-person event will be in San Diego, CA on March 28-29. Use the form to propose either a live, synchronous virtual session on March 21-22, or an in-person session on March 28-29.* Once accepted, speakers will be contacted regarding the schedule. Deadline for submissions is February 14, 2022

WHO: Anyone may propose a project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations. ALL IN-PERSON SPEAKERS WILL BE REQUIRED TO PROVIDE PROOF OF VACCINATION.

TOPICS: Project briefings focus on a timely topic or on a specific institutional/organizational project related to digital information; they may also explore parallel developments across institutions. Briefings should address themes of interest to the membership as outlined in CNI's program plans as covered in recent member meetings , and as explored in recent Executive Roundtable reports (see also https://www.cni.org/topics for more information).

Since the beginning of the pandemic, CNI has sought to evolve its program to find the best balance of synchronous and asynchronous events, and, as in-person events are resuming, the most appropriate choices for in-person as opposed to virtual events. We’ve been listening carefully to feedback from our community, and over the past year we have also become increasingly mindful of the very real constraints on everyone’s time and attention and the importance of recognizing and honoring these constraints. You’ve seen these developments reflected in the evolution of our virtual meetings, the permanent move of our executive roundtables to the virtual environment, and the redesign of our in-person event in December 2021 (including a commitment to comprehensive video documentation).

Today, we want to share the next step in this evolution. We are eliminating the pre-recorded, asynchronous project briefings that have been featured as part of our spring and fall member meetings in favor of bi-monthly (at least tentatively) asynchronous project briefing collections. Every two months or so we’ll issue a call for asynchronous project briefing proposals and select a maximum of 10-12 of these for release, contextualized by an “edition guide.” The intention is to deliver project briefings throughout the year on a more timely basis, while also avoiding the overwhelming and difficult-to-navigate mass of video material that is arbitrarily released in conjunction with our spring and fall synchronous events.

We expect to issue the call for the initial asynchronous project briefing edition in late January or early February; proposals, acceptance, and release of the collection will be on a fairly short timeline. We are still working out some details and possibilities (for example, the nature of the edition guide, the possibility of including special thematic subsections in some editions, and potential methods for organized interaction with the presenters). There’s no doubt that we’ll be further refining this as we gain experience, but we felt that it was important to share the overall strategy as soon as possible, and particularly prior to the calls for submissions for the Spring 2022 Membership Meeting.

We’d welcome any thoughts about this shift from the CNI community.

All videos from the Fall 2021 Membership Meeting (https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2021) are now available for on-demand viewing from CNI’s channels. Several YouTube playlists are available: All sessions , from both the in-person and virtual events In-person sessions only Virtual, synchronous  sessions only Pre-recorded videos in playlists corresponding to CNI's three core program area themes: Developing and Managing Networked Information Content Transforming Organizations, Professions and Individuals Building Technology, Standards, and Infrastructure

Additionally, all slide decks shared with us have now been added to their corresponding project briefing pages (https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2021/project-briefings-breakout-sessions-f21); session videos have also been embedded in these pages.

I would again like to thank all of our speakers for their tremendous contributions to our meeting. There is a wealth of information to explore in these videos; we hope you will find them useful, and we encourage you to share them widely.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Dear CNI Community,

Here are some updates regarding materials from our most recent membership meeting, and the current plan for the spring 2022 membership meeting:

Fall 2021 Membership Meeting Videos

Many videos from CNI’s recent fall meeting, including pre-recorded briefings, live virtual presentations, and many in-person sessions, are now publicly available on CNI’s YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/cnivideo ) and Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/cni ) channels. More videos and any slide decks shared with us will be added to the meeting website in the coming weeks.