I’m pleased that I’ll be speaking at this conference, which has a great program lined up; fee registration information is linked below.

—Joan Lippincott, CNI

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Now that we are in the holiday season with Thanksgiving behind us and the New Year ahead, it’s time to begin thinking about resolutions. There is no better way to kick off 2018 than to come to Austin, TX for Re-think it: Libraries for a New Age !

I'm thrilled and honored to to share the news that I've got a paper in the new December 2017 issue of First Monday (open access), which summarizes about a year of thinking about and studying how we might document the plethora of systems (including social media) that make heavy use of personalization and often also machine learning algorithms of various sorts. I have come to the conclusion that traditional digital preservation approaches are not likely to be helpful here and that very different approaches are needed. This raises some interesting questions about roles and responsibilities in the enterprise of stewardship of the cultural record. I suspect that some of this may be controversial, but I think it's a conversation that we need to undertake. I would welcome any thoughts from our community on this.

I'll have a few things to say about this in my opening plenary at the upcoming CNI member meeting in Washington DC in a few day.

Here's the pointer to the paper:

In honor of today being International Digital Preservation Day, our colleagues at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) have produced what they call the "Bit List" of "Digitally Endangered Species". This is actually a fascinating survey of how well we are doing at preserving various kinds of digital materials, why specific types are at greatest risk, and similar issues. The overview page can be found at

and divides the survey into Concern, Lower Risk, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, and Practically Extinct.

Very much worth looking at. If you are not familiar with the work of the DPC, they have produced many valuable reports, and it's also worth spending some time exploring their site.

I wanted to share this announcement with the CNI-community. The report is short (9 pages) and a good read; it includes a number of very, very helpful recommendations that I hope get very careful consideration by the US Federal research funders.

From the announcement:

"The Association of American Universities (AAU) and Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) today released a report that details principles and recommended actions universities and federal agencies can take to advance timely access to data from federally-sponsored research grants.

The report, produced by a working group of research university leaders that AAU and APLU convened, details steps federal agencies can take to facilitate public access to research data in a viable and sustainable manner that advances science in the public interest while minimizing the administrative burden on agencies, universities, and researchers. The report also contains actions universities should take both collectively and individually to align with the goals of research data sharing."

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has just issued an interesting report describing their views on technical requirements and functionality for next generation repositories. A summary and a pointer to the full report (PDF) are available at:

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

I'm sharing this message from the Learning Spaces Collaboratory - their next webinar addresses some important questions. Registration for a fee. --Joan Lippincott, CNI

Join us for the 3rd in the LSC Series of Roundtable Webinars focusing on USER on Monday, December 4, 2017, 3:30 - 5:00 pm EST. Many questions about users must be addressed in process of planning learning spaces. This webinar focuses on two central questions about user that planners must address. The first is about the world beyond the campus and the skills, understandings, and sensibilities that users must have to be confident, creative members of a 21st century workforce and society. What are learners to become? How can spaces enable that becoming? The second question is about the experiences students should have in what might be called spaces for becoming. How do faculty reimagine programs, pedagogies, technologies that focus on preparing learners for the future?

Registration is now open for IDCC 2018. Details below. CNI is very pleased to again be a collaborator in this event.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Apologies for cross-posting.

I wanted to share this call for proposals with the CNI community.I have been to almost all of the earlier conferences in the series, and while they have varied widely in focus, they are invariably interesting and thought-provoking.

Clifford Lynch

Save the Date!

Personal Digital Archiving 2018 #pda18 April 23-25 2018 in Houston, TX Hosted by the University of Houston Libraries

CNI is pleased to serve once again as a partner for this important event, which provides librarians with an opportunity to learn about data science and visualization.

Save the Date! The Data Science and Visualization Institute for Librarians will be held June 4 - 8th, 2018 at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library, North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

CNI is pleased to be a collaborating organization for the Open Repositories conference again this year. Details about the call for papers is below.

The 13th International Conference on Open Repositories, OR2018, will be held on June 4th-7th, 2018 in Bozeman, Montana, USA.

Open Repositories 2018 is now calling for proposals around the theme of Sustaining Open.

Last week we held the CNI - ARL Digital Scholarship Planning Workshop at Brown University. 100 participants attended and worked in small groups on topics including needs assessment, staffing, governance and funding, teaching and learning, and spaces and places after hearing short talks on these topics. The closing plenary was a presentation by Dan Cohen, focusing on the topic of institutionalizing digital scholarship. It was a wonderful talk, drawing on his experience at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, his time as Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and his current position as Dean of Libraries, Vice Provost for Information Collaboration, and Professor of History at Northeastern University.

Brown University filmed the talk, and the video is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=A7ifFVVBSy4 and currently from a link on CNI's homepage at http://www.cni.org.

--Joan Lippincott, CNI

Posting on behalf of Malcolm Brown, Director of ELI. Take a few minutes and add your opinions to the survey!

--Joan Lippincott, CNI

Greetings, As you may know, each year the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) has surveyed the higher education teaching and learning community to identify the key issues for the coming year. The ELI has released its survey for 2018, and we invite all those who are associated with higher education teaching and learning to participate. We are striving for results that reflect the full diversity of teaching and learning.

The survey is short! Requires only about 5 minutes to do. The survey instrument is here:

The registration deadline for the Fall 2017 CNI member meeting is this FRIDAY, November 10. If you have not registered for the meeting or made hotel accommodations, please do so by Friday. Information about registration & accommodations is available online: https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2017/registration-accommodations-f17

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

We look forward to seeing you in DC!

I was delighted to see the announcement this week that the SNAC (Social Networking and Archival Context) cooperative program had received second phase funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I have reproduced the full announcement below; it is also available at

This is a hugely important project that should lead to essential infrastructure for libraries, special collections, archives, and scholarship broadly. In the longer term, it may be important in changing the way documentary editing is done, and help to advance the development and sharing of digital factual biographies. I believe that anyone who deals with archives or special collections should be tracking this work.

We have had several reports on this effort at CNI meetings, and will continue to track developments. I've also been serving as in an advisory role to the project.

OCLC has recently released a report on Research Information Management and Libraries, which can be found at:

Research Information Management: Defining RIM and the Library's Role

In this paper by Rebecca Bryant, OCLC Research Senior Program Officer, and a working group of librarians from OCLC Research Library Partnership institutions, learn more about what RIM is, what is driving RIM adoption, and the libraryâ s role in RIM.

I have reproduced the abstract of the report below. It was developed by OCLC research jointly with a team of librarians.

A second report is due in November and I'll share details and availability when it's released. OCLC is also running a survey jointly with EuroCRIS on worldwide library practices with regard to research information management. You can find the details on how to participate here:

I'm pleased to share this message from Educopia's Library Publishing Coalition (LPC). --Joan Lippincott, CNI

Announcing the new Strategic Affiliates Program We are delighted to announce the official launch of our new Strategic Affiliates Program and our initial list of affiliates: the Association of American University Presses(AAUP), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), NASIG, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), and the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP). See the announcement on the blog for more information about the new program.

Future strategic affiliates To be eligible for affiliate status, an organization must be membership-based, must have a focal area in scholarly communications, and must have substantial engagement with libraries, publishers, or both. If there is an organization that meets these criteria that you would like to see LPC explore a closer relationship with, please talk to me or to an LPC Board member.

Here are some opportunities to hear from CNI during the upcoming EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Philadelphia, PA: Supporting Digital Humanities: Does Your Institution Have Capacity? including Joan Lippincott as a co-presenter: Nov. 2, 1:30-2:20pm, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Meeting Room 113A, 100 Level CNI Community Update: Nov. 2, 2:40-3:30pm, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Meeting Room 201A, 200 Level We hope you can join us for one or more of these events.

More information about the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference 2017 is at https://events.educause.edu/annual-conference.

Diane Goldenberg-Hart

I am very pleased to announce that videos of the sessions from the recent Designing Libraries conference at North Carolina State University (NCSU), co-sponsored by the University of Calgary, CNI, and NCSU, are available. I know many more people wished to attend the program than were able to, and you will find a rich array of presentations.

Links to the videos of the sessions have just been added to the schedule here:http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/designing-libraries-conference-2017/schedule

Joan Lippincott, CNI

I spoke at this conference last year and encourage those with projects or ideas to present to submit a proposal for the conference in April, 2018. --Joan Lippincott, CNI

Call for Proposals: Digital Initiatives Symposium 2018

The Digital Initiatives Symposium at the University of San Diego is accepting proposals for its full day conference on Tuesday, April 24, 2018. Proposals should fall into one of three formats:

Panel discussions: 90 minutes (please allow 10-15 minutes for Q&A) Concurrent sessions: 45 minutes (please allow 10-15 minutes for Q&A) TED-style talks: 15-minutes

Earlier this month, I had the good fortune to be able to attend most of a University of California, Berkeley conference on learning analytics. This was a superb meeting, and I cannot recommend the opening talk on learning analytics strongly enough: it was a superb, faculty-based overview of why this is important and where they they are likely to be most useful, and deeply informed by a pragmatic perspective. The video for this (and additional sessions and materials) is now online linked from

(you may need to click on the plus symbols to get to the links).

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI