This workshop announcement will be of interest to the CNI community. Note that as of today registration has not yet opened.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Large Scale Networking (LSN) Workshop on Huge Data: A Computing, Networking and Distributed Systems Perspective

Members of the CNI community will be interested to learn that the latest edition of this useful resource is now available. CNI is a strategic partner of the Library Publishing Coalition.

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

The Library Publishing Coalition is pleased to announce the publication of the 2020 Library Publishing Directory ! This year’s Library Publishing Directory highlights the publishing activities of 153 academic and research libraries, and is openly available in PDF and EPUB formats and via the searchable online directory .

I'm delighted to announce two wonderful plenary speakers for the Spring 2020 CNI Member Meeting, to be held in San Diego March 30-31. As a reminder, registration for the meeting closes March 2.

Both speakers are well known leaders in the community, and both talks take a synthesizing, long-term view of developments over the past decades, the current landscape, and how these developments can inform both our visions for the future and our strategies for achieving them.

Rob Sanderson, Semantic Architect at the Getty Trust, will open the conference. He will focus on the quest to establish a connected and coherent ecosystem of research quality data on cultural heritage. Rob has a very broad and deep understanding of digital humanities, semantic web and linked data technologies, and the challenges of building cultural heritage resources that span multiple sectors and I think he can provide a particularly insightful perspective on what's working, what's likely to work, and where we collectively need to reconsider current strategies.

I welcome Tara McPherson, Professor and Chair at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California back to CNI; you may remember her 2008 plenary talk at CNI describing her work with Vectors, a pioneering multimedia journal for the digital humanities (or several other project briefings at CNI over the years). After launching Vectors, she developed -- very strategically, and in part I believe as both a complement to, and in response to the limitations of, Vectors -- another platform called Scalar also targeted at the digital humanities with very different goals and parameters. Her talk, "Reflections on 20 Years of Designing Digital Scholarship" will consider these developments and much more, including key strategic issues of sustainability, scalability and preservation that can only be really understood in light of operational experience. Tara's unique combination of sustained engagement at the forefront of digital humanities and her very rich body of relevant scholarly work promise a fascinating look at past, present and future of scholarship and scholarly communications.

Dear CNI Community,

CNI is again partnering with Jisc to bring together leading experts in digital scholarship from the US and the UK for the Jisc-CNI Leaders Conference on July 14-15, 2020, in Bristol, UK. A wonderful lineup of keynoters has just been announced, including: Alexa McCray, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School James Wilsdon, from the University of Sheffield and leader of the Research on Research Institute Dan Cohen, dean of libraries and professor of history at Northeastern University

More information, including registration details and conference themes, is available at https://www.jisc.ac.uk/cni-conference . A full speaker line-up will be announced soon.

We hope to see some of you there! -Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

New videos from CNI’s December meeting have been added to our channels:

Data Curation Network Update (Lisa Johnston, University of Minnesota; Cynthia Hudson Vitale, Pennsylvania State University; Tim McGeary, Duke University) Since its launch in 2018 DCN has grown to 10 organizations. This presentation provides an update on DCN activities and discusses how other libraries and organizations can become involved. YouTube: https://youtu.be/f4DznzUwGYo Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/383831121

Accessibility Task Force: Determining Compliance and Organizing Action (Suzanne Wones, Harvard University; Claire DeMarco, Harvard University) The presenters share their experience using Agile frameworks to review systems, identify issues, and set priorities for providing actionable deliverables to facilitate remediation of library digital products and ongoing accessibility compliance with Harvard’s digital accessibility policy. YouTube: https://youtu.be/_tT0qcHmRRk Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/389056913

Previously released from this meeting:

New videos from CNI’s Fall 2019 Membership Meeting have been added to our channels:

Memory Institutions and Deep Digital Disruption: Beyond the Technical Challenges of Born-digital Preservation, (Carol Mandel, Council on Library and Information Resources; Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information) The presenters share the work that each has been undertaking to frame and address the profound changes in collection and stewardship posed by born-digital content. YouTube: https://youtu.be/0Lhxyo8645U Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/383245311

Ready or Not: Here Comes Voice Search, (Carl Grant [for Twila Camp & Tim Smith], University of Oklahoma) This talk discusses the impact of voice search, how libraries can prepare and harness its potential, and the caveats for this artificial intelligence-driven technology. YouTube: https://youtu.be/TjAYmE_Fvz4 Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/383245032

Can We Talk? Adding a Smart Assistant Interface to Library Services, Greg Davis, Lisa Smith (Iowa State U.) The Iowa State University Parks Library has been working with a third-party developer to create a smart assistant app, currently based on Amazon Alexa technology, to interface with various library services. YouTube: https://youtu.be/bQiO1J7HOWM Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/388566401

I'm pleased to share this invitation to register for a short satellite workshop in conjunction with the CNI Spring Membership Meeting in San Diego on behalf of our friends at the California Digital Library. If you have any questions about this, please be in touch with John Chodacki (john.chodacki@ucop.edu) directly.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

The US National Library of Medicine is holding a two day workshop dealing with the curation of biomedical data at scale. For information see

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

I shared the announcement for this conference earlier; the presentation slides ) are now available. See

Video of the opening plenary is at

I'm delighted to be able to share this information about the future of the Keepers Registry, a very important and largely unknown part of our infrastructure for digital preservation, and I congratulate the ISSN International Center for carrying on this vital work. Some readers who attended the December 2019 CNI Membership meeting may have seen a presentation on these developments by Peter Burnhill and Gaelle Beque.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

The day after the December 2019 CNI Member Meeting, a symposium on critical roles of libraries in the research enterprise was held; this was an excellent event that I was fortunate to be able to participate in. The organizers of this event have now produced a report of meeting highlights; this includes pointers to speaker presentations. See

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

This Symposium, being held for the 7th year at University of San Diego, has an outstanding line-up of pre-conferences and speakers; I think many of you would find attending the program a very enriching experience. —Joan Lippincott, Associate Director Emerita, CNI

Registration for the Seventh Annual Digital Initiatives Symposium is now open! Check out the program at: https://digital.sandiego.edu/symposium/2020/ Monday, April 27:

Five pre-conference workshops:

Computer Scientist Francine Berman to Receive Paul Evan Peters Award

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE are pleased to announce that Francine Berman, Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, has been named the 2020 recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award. The award recognizes notable, lasting achievements in the creation and innovative use of network-based information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity.

Nominated by highly respected members of the information science community, Berman is widely recognized for her leadership in digital data stewardship, preservation, and cyberinfrastructure. Such infrastructure is critical to supporting data-driven research and new discovery in a broad variety of fields, including the digital humanities. Appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Humanities, Berman has worked closely with the library and museum communities. She also co-chaired the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access and the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information. In 2012, she helped found the Research Data Alliance, an international, community-driven organization established to accelerate research data sharing and data-driven innovation worldwide.

“This is a wonderful choice; I’ve worked with Fran on various committees and similar efforts over the years; she’s a genuine leader and consensus-shaper with a long record of identifying key community needs very early and then acting to address them,” commented CNI executive director Clifford Lynch, noting that Berman “has been involved in many areas that are critical to the CNI community.”

Just a few short days remain to submit proposals for CNI’s Spring 2020 Membership Meeting in San Diego, CA, on March 30-31.

Anyone can propose a session at CNI, including individuals who are not affiliated with a CNI member institution/organization. For more information, and to submit a proposal, see https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2020/project-briefing-proposals-s20 .

DEADLINE: Monday, February 3, 2020

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

The EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues 2020, now available online at https://er.educause.edu/articles and in the print EDUCAUSE Review, always includes great material for discussion on campus. In addition to the main article, a number of topics are highlighted to provide additional analyses, including library perspectives on the issues. Karen Wetzel, Director of Community and Working Groups for EDUCAUSE and I interviewed 4 library leaders for their views on a few of the identified top trends. Our thanks to Karim Boughida, Dean, University Libraries, University of Rhode Island, Salwa Ismail, Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Information Technology and Associate CIO, University Library, University of California, Berkeley, Sarah Pritchard, Dean of Libraries, Northwestern University, and Keith Webster, Dean of Libraries and Director of Emerging and Integrative Media Initiatives, Carnegie Mellon University, for their insights. Our interviewees had so many valuable perspectives that we anticipate a fuller reporting of our interviews in an online-only version of this article in future.

Joan K. Lippincott, Ph.D. Associate Director Emerita Coalition for Networked Information joan@cni.org joan@cni.org www.cni.org/mailto:joan@cni.org

Late last week, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy has issued an interesting request for comments on a draft set of desirable characteristics of repositories that store federally funded research data. See

The deadline for responses is March 6, 2020.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

The submission deadline for CNI's spring 2020 membership meeting is fast approaching! The meeting will be held on March 30-31 in San Diego, CA, at the Westin Gaslamp Quarter.

Proposals for project briefings are due no later than Monday, February 3. A limited number of proposals are accepted. For details, and to submit a proposal: https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2020/project-briefing-proposals-s20

Meeting and hotel registration deadline is Monday, March 2: https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2020/registration-accommodations-s20

More information is at https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2020 . Follow along: #cni20s

We are pleased to announce that a report on the 2019 ARL-CNI Fall Forum, Research Libraries as Catalytic Leaders in a Society in Constant Flux, is now available at http://bit.ly/ARL-CNI-2019-Forum-Report

Written by ARL executive director Mary Lee Kennedy, with an introduction by ARL president Lorraine J. Haricombe, the ARL-CNI Fall Forum report summarizes the presentations of the keynote speaker and panelists, highlights specific breakout discussions, and outlines a set of shared recommendations around four themes:

• Libraries as strategic institutions in societal flux
• Emerging opportunities for research libraries as collaborative partners in the changing research and learning ecosystem
• New forms of reality to advance research integrity and learning
• Next generation organizations, skills, and competencies needed for research libraries

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

This scholarly communications event will undoubtedly be of interest to many in the CNI community. Proposals are now being accepted; details below.

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

The 2020 Scholarly Communication Symposium is seeking presentation proposals for this year’s conference, which will be held on May 10-11, 2020 in Greensboro, NC. The theme of this year’s conference is “Strategies for Transitioning Journals to Sustainability”, and will focus on how libraries and other academic institutions are planning and implementing interventions, alternative publishing models, and other responses to the ongoing serials crisis.

Proposals are now being accepted for project briefings to be presented at CNI's Spring 2020 Membership Meeting on March 30-31 in San Diego, CA, at the Westin Gaslamp Quarter. Anyone may propose a project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.

Project briefings are typically 30-minute or one-hour sessions that focus on a discussion of a hot topic, or on a specific institutional/organizational project related to digital information; 30-minute sessions MAY BE PAIRED. A limited number of project briefings are accepted.

NEW THIS YEAR - “Short Updates” pilot: 1-hour session(s) comprised of a series of brief updates (approx. 10 minutes each, limited to 1 presenter per update) on new or ongoing projects, programs, or organizations that may have reported at CNI in the past. Contact Diane Goldenberg-Hart, diane@cni.org, for questions about brief updates.

Proposals may be submitted via online form: https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2020/project-briefing-proposals-s20 Deadline for submissions is Monday, February 3.