Jennifer Fredrick and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg of Ithaka S+R have released the first survey (at least that i know about) of library leaders views since the pandemic started; this builds on a series of such surveys that Ithaka has been doing in recent years, and provides some very informative new data. The report is at

Academic Library Strategy and Budgeting During the COVID-19 Pandemic - Ithaka S+R

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ithaka S+R surveyed library directors nationally to examine the strategic changes libraries have made to continue operating. A total of 638 library directors responded to questions about library leadership and decision making, COVID-19 management, budget allocations and cuts, collections acquisitions, and personnel changes. The questionnaire also focused on racial justice in light of recent protests including the Black Lives Matter movement and the related i...

Jennifer and Christine rolled out the report at the CNI fall virtual member meeting today; the recorded video is already available to meeting registrants, and should be publicly available in the next few days.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

While I've previously shared the excellent work that Ithaka S+R published in late October 2020 on the impacts of COVID-19 on the research enterprise (see https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/the-impacts-of-covid-19-on-the-research-enterprise/ ), sponsored by SpringerNature, I somehow completely missed several other reports that SpringerNature supported which were released in the last month or so. See

The report "Emerging from Uncertainty" (at https://resource-cms.springernature.com/springer-cms/rest/v1/content/18537754/data/v6 ) is particularly interesting in that it considers how research work adapted to the constraints of the pandemic and speculates on how some of these adaptations may persist in the post-COVID environment, in much the same way we are seeing discussion about how and to what extent new adoption of online instruction may persist after the pandemic.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Oya Rieger and Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R released a ground-breaking report titled "The Senior Research Officer: Experience, Role, Organizational Structure, Strategic Directions and Challenges" this morning. This study is based primarily on interviews with senior research officers at about 40 large US research universities. I found it to be fascinating reading and am not familiar with any similar recent work. The report can be found at

The Senior Research Officer - Ithaka S+R

The research enterprise continues to grow more complex, competitive, interdisciplinary, and interinstitutional. Although academic research often is conducted in a distributed and grassroots manner, the senior research officer (SRO) plays an increasingly central and unifying role in stewarding research activities and shaping institutional policies and strategies. The SRO—who often holds the title of vice president, vice provost, or vice chancellor for research—typically holds responsibilities inc...

Oya, Roger, and their colleague Jane Radecki will be sharing some of their findings from this work, along with other recent research on the academic research enterprise, in their plenary talk at the Fall 2020 CNI Virtual Member meeting on December 15, 2020; we'll make video of this this presentation publicly available shortly after the session.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

I've been remiss in not sharing the announcement that Ithaka S+R last week issued a really valuable report exploring the range of research data management services offerings in US higher education institutions of different types. See

Research Data Services in US Higher Education - Ithaka S+R

As data-driven research methods proliferate and become more sophisticated across disciplines, supporting researchers who work with data is increasingly a top priority for academic institutions. However, research data services—support offerings which enable and improve data research—are currently provided in an ad hoc manner by a variety of campus units, including libraries, academic departments and institutes, labs, and IT or research computing units. And the provision of research data services ...

The authors of the report, Jane Radecki and Rebecca Springer, gave a great presentation on this work as part of a CNI session a the Fall 2020 Virtual Member Meeting last Friday. The recording of this session is publicly available at

Karen Smith-Yoshimura, who so many in our community know from her work at the Research Libraries Group and then at OCLC, has announced she is retiring at the end of this month.

Karen has done amazing things during her career. I'm particularly grateful for her low-profile but absolutely essential work that ultimately led to Unicode; this is vision and leadership at its very best. Thank you for that, and for so much else you've done, including your more recent work on linked data, Karen.

And of course Karen has written a much better summary of her accomplishments that I could possibly compose. It's absolutely worth reading, and it's here:

In the last few days (it's getting really hard to keep up with everything that seems to be happening suddenly!) Ithaka S+R has issued two really interesting and useful reports.

The first is a survey of art museum directors, completed just before the pandemic started in March 2020, and doesn't take into account the effects of that or other subsequent events. Of particular interest to me are the comments about deaccessions works that are not "strategic" to institutional collections, which loom large in light of changes to the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) policies on deaccessions and decisions being made by various museums in response to both extreme financial pressures and desires to change the composition of their collections. These issues have important stewardship implications. See

Ithaka S+R Art Museum Director Survey 2020 - Ithaka S+R

Art museums serve a unique social role in that they operate between the public sphere, the academy, the art market, and the philanthropic sector. They are invaluable resources for scholars and also serve school children, adults, seniors while engaging broadly in the cultural life of their cities. Beyond these roles, they also have the responsibility to maintain and care for a collection of objects for future generations in perpetuity. The Ithaka S+R Art Museum Director Survey 2020 examines strat...

The second report deals with relationships between academic museums and libraries. This is an issue of long-standing interest to CNI, and in fact the report positions itself in the context of a series of meetings that started with an event hosted at the University of Miami in 2016, co-convened by CNI, the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) , with support from the Mellon and Kress foundations. It examines a number of recent case studies exploring these relationships and opportunities. See

NIST has released a preliminary draft of its work on a Research Data Framework. This is important, as it will establish a set of best practices and an analytic framework for work in this area, and I would urge those interested in research data management to have a look at this work. See

Research Data Framework (RDaF) | NIST

What is the Research Data Framework?A map of the research data space: who, what, where, why, when?A dynamic guide for the various stakeholders in research data to understand best practices for research data management and disseminationA resource for understanding costs, benefits, and risks associate

Bob Hanisch of NIST (and a long time leader in thinking about research data management who I have had the privilege of working with in a number of settings) will be giving a talk on this work at the CNI virtual Fall 2020 Member Meeting on Friday, November 20, 2020. We'll make video of this publicly available after the presentation.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Over the last couple of years, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has been systematically articulating a vision of a new generation of highly distributed but networked repositories and the role that these repositories and services associated with them can play in the evolving system of scholarly communications. It's particularly consistent with developments and aspirations in global open science and scholarship, and perhaps particularly timely given the developments over the past year. While I think that there are some very real challenges in achieving this vision, it's an important one and deserves to be carefully understood and tracked on an ongoing basis.

COAR has recently released its work plan for 2021 to advance this vision and agenda. See

https://www.coar-repositories.org/files/COAR-Strategy-and-Workplan-20211.pdf

General background can be found linked to www.coar-repositories.org

The Computing Research Association (see www.cra.org) has recently released a series of clear, brief and fairly non-technical white papers on key areas in computer science. I have not read all of these (yet) but the ones that I have read are excellent, and point to more technical sources for those who want to go into more detail. I think that these will be very helpful to the CNI community.

These came out at the end of October, but for some reason I missed them. My great thanks to the amazing Gary Price for the pointer to these.

See

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has just launched season two of a podcast series called "Material Memory" addressing the nexus of cultural memory and the climate change crisis, which is an area that I've also been thinking about a great deal lately. For me, this is a very welcome and timely series. I note that there are transcripts as well as audio podcasts available for these programs. See

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Dear cni-announce subscribers:

One of the most stimulating activities in which I’ve taken part during the pandemic is an every other week online discussion organized and hosted by the Learning Spaces Collaboratory (LSC), bringing together architects, academic administrators, faculty, and other professionals such as myself. Sub-groups are creating essays on various topics, and the first one is about the agora, in both the physical and virtual context. Library commons have sometimes been described as agora, and they are noted briefly in the essay. The focus, though, is on how we can take some of the characteristics of the agora and translate them into virtual spaces during the pandemic. The essay notes, "From engaging in learning activities through your smartphone to encountering new ideas and places beyond the limitations of space and time, virtual platforms will extend the opportunities to be a part of a (metaphorical if not literal) campus."

The announcement by Jeanne Narum, head of the LSC, and the link to the essay are below. — Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director Emerita, CNI

"Greetings:

Recently, a group called Frontiers has published the results of an online survey of some 25,000 international researchers on the the ways in which COVID-19 has impacted their research. The study was conducted in May-June 2020. See

Frontiers | The academic response to COVID-19

COVID-19 has posed an unprecedented challenge to the international scientific community. Along with the disruption faced by most of the world’s population, m...

for a summary and a link to the full report, which can also be obtained directly at

Next week, on Tuesday, November 10th, we’ll be launching the first-ever, virtual CNI fall member meeting. Unlike the spring 2020 meeting, where we moved (and largely re-conceptualized) an already-planned in-person meeting virtual on extremely short notice, the fall meeting has been planned from the beginning as a virtual meeting. While we’ve kept some things from our in-person fall meetings (for example, the Executive Roundtable and my annual plenary on December 14, and Francine Berman’s already-announced Paul Evan Peters Award lecture on December 15), much else has changed. We’ve tried to apply what we’ve learned from our experience with the spring virtual meeting, and also what other organizations have learned from their efforts to move events to virtual formats. We’ll undoubtedly make more mistakes, but hopefully at least new ones, and will again be following up this meeting with an evaluation form to be sure we catch as many as possible; please be understanding and generous as we all try to navigate this new environment.

Basically, we’ll have four weeks of project briefings, each built around a major theme, starting November 10th. The first three weeks will conclude with a summary discussion session that I’ll lead which will take place Mondays at 4:00pm EST beginning on November 16th (there will not be a summary session for the 4th week, which will deal with responses to current crises and emerging developments). Recordings of the project briefings will be made available very quickly for registered participants from the session pages in Sched (https://cnifall2020virtualmembershipmeet.sched.com/) so that they can view as many as they wish before the week's summary session; nearly all sessions will be recorded (except for those whose speakers have asked us not to) and videos will be made publicly available through our YouTube and Vimeo channels, as usual, though this may take a little more time. There will be fewer synchronous project briefings than we usually have during our in-person meetings because we don’t want concurrent sessions in the online setting, and attention in the new Zoom universe is a very scarce and contended-for resource; however, we’ll be supplementing live sessions with additional offerings of pre-recorded, view on demand videos covering additional topics; some of these are updates on projects discussed at past CNI meetings.

For registered attendees: You will have access to all live project briefings and plenary sessions, as well as session videos, via Sched, https://cnifall2020virtualmembershipmeet.sched.com/. You will need a Sched account to view the meeting schedule, to see the video stream button for live and recorded sessions, and to create a personalized schedule and set up reminders. All registered attendees should have received an email invitation to the meeting Sched, with instructions and details. If you have not received an invitation from Sched, please contact Beth Secrist (beth@cni.org) as soon as possible. For registration inquiries, please contact Jackie Eudell (jackie@cni.org).

You can find more information about the meeting at https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2020. Final project briefing schedules for all four weeks have been posted to the meeting Sched, https://cnifall2020virtualmembershipmeet.sched.com/ (registered attendees only).

Yesterday, the JISC in the UK , in collaboration with several other key UK higher education organizations, released a major new report "Learning and Teaching Reimagined" arguing for a future blended education model, in part as an outcome of the COVID-19 experience. There are several pages providing summaries and commentary on the report; all of these include pointers to the full report.

See

Every year, EDUCAUSE issues a top 10 IT issue list, usually in conjunction with their annual meeting. Last week, at the EDUCAUSE virtual meeting, Susan Grajek of EDUCAUSE presented an excellent summary of this years', work, and the thinking behind it which actually involves scenarios rather than a simple list, and early this week, they released the full analysis, along with some commentary. Much of the focus is how the pandemic and efforts to recover from it interact with IT strategies.

See

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Members of the CNI community will be interested in this call for proposals for the HathiTrust Research Center for a special cycle on historically marginalized textual communities. Please see the details below. -Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

——— The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) requests proposals for a special funded round of its Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) program , in support of scholarship on historically marginalized textual communities. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, HTRC’s “Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD) ” project offers funded collaborations between researchers and HTRC staff to solve challenging problems related to computational analysis of the HathiTrust corpus.

In this special cycle of ACS, we seek to collaborate with scholars to recover volumes in HathiTrust that tell the story of historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities, and to identify gaps in the HathiTrust collection where such communities are not represented in the digital library.

The selected projects in this round will be awarded $30,000 to cover project costs, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in addition to the HTRC staff time and compute resources typically given to awardees as part of the program. Funding can be used to cover staff and student effort, travel, materials and supplies, and other relevant project costs, as allowable by Mellon Foundation and Indiana University policies. See “Proposals” section in the full CFP for detailed budget information. Each awarded proposal will receive access to HTRC staff to collaborate on the proposed project during the award period. The staff consists of specialists in information science, computer science, cultural analytics, and HathiTrust. HTRC ACS support may include such activities as project scoping; navigating HTRC and HathiTrust tools, data, and collections; volume identification and workset/dataset creation; facilitating data access; and selecting, customizing, or running analysis tools.

In a milestone announcement, after extensive consultation with its communities, the US National Institutes of Health has release the final version of their policy for data management and sharing. This will replace the 2003 NIH data sharing policy, effective January 25, 2021. SEE

NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins statement on the policy

Today, Jane Radecki and Roger Schoenfeld of Ithaka S+R released a very interesting and wide-ranging study of the Impact of COVID-19 on the Research Enterprise. I've reproduced the Executive Summary below. This report echos many themes that we heard at our recent Executive Roundtables on Research Restart and Research Continuity (see https://www.cni.org/go/research-continuity-sept-2020-update) and goes into issues around funding and federal grants in depth. The report can be read online or downloaded as a PDF at:

The Impacts of COVID-19 on the Research Enterprise - Ithaka S+R

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated disruptions have had a major impact on the US academic research enterprise. This report provides a landscape review of what is known about these impacts, from March through mid-October 2020, with an aim of identifying gaps that should be addressed. Our focus is on externally funded research, and therefore we emphasize STEM fields almost exclusively. As a result, we also focus on the largest research universities, which conduct an outsized share of this resear...

Ithaka will discuss aspects of this work at the Fall CNI member meeting

My thanks to Ithaka for helping us to better understand these developments.

The 9-part CNI Digital Scholarship Planning webinar series has concluded and recordings of all presentations are available, linked from each session at https://www.cni.org/events/cni-workshops/digital-scholarship-planning-2020-webinar-series This link will also lead you to a set of discussion questions developed for each session; if you have a digital scholarship planning group at your institution, these questions can be used to frame some of your planning meetings.

You also can go directly to these links for the recordings: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjev6DgUn5W--7vrjGD1MzFBrUfY5kGrS Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/showcase/7561782

Presentations by a stellar roster of speakers include these topics: - The Case for Developing Digital Scholarship Programs - Supporting Digital Scholarship During the Pandemic - Assessment - Staffing - Supporting Research - Initiatives in Teaching & Learning - Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - Space and Place - Reflections on Libraries and Digital Scholarship and Looking Ahead

Please share this announcement and the link to the recordings widely. Thanks, Joan

I wanted to share this very interesting call for proposals from the Library of Congress with the CNI community. I hope that at some point in future we'll be able to have a report on this work at a CNI meeting.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

LC Labs is excited to share the following opportunity to fund four researchers to work with Library digital collections at scale