On March 18, 2015 I had the opportunity to participate in a faculty symposium on the future of research libraries hosted by McGill University, where I joined Larry Alford from the University of Toronto Libraries, MIT Libraries' Chris Bourg, and Harriette Hemmasi of Brown University Libraries in a series of presentations and a discussion. I think that the presentations came together nicely to offer a view of key issues in the development of strategies to guide the evolution of the library.

There are recordings of all the preservations, plus slides and in some cases texts at

My topic was collections and collecting in the 21st century, and I've got a fairly heavily edited text of my talk on the site as well.

Proposals are now being accepted for project briefings to be presented at CNI's Fall 2015 CNI Membership Meeting on December 14-15 in Washington, DC, at the Capital Hilton.

Project briefings are 45-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. A limited number of project briefings are accepted.

Proposals may be submitted via online form: https://wp.me/P1LncT-64z

Proposal submissions are due no later than Monday, October 19.

Dear cni-announce subscribers: Here's the fall kick-off workshop of the Learning Spaces Collaboratory - Makerspaces - a very timely topic. CNI subscribers are also invited to contact Jeanne Narum, the head of LSC, with examples of innovative Makerspaces in their institution - photos particularly needed. Jeanne can be reached at jlnarum.lsc.ico@gmail.com

--Joan Lippincott, CNI

Sending on behalf of our ELI colleagues, an invitation to register for the fall online ELI focus session "Leadership for Teaching and Learning: More Choices, More Complexities, New Models." --Joan Lippincott CNI

Colleagues, just a reminder that we have recruited a terrific set of speakers for the ELI online focus session (Sept 15-16). Among them are Jen Stringer (UC Berkeley), Vince Kellen (University of Kentucky), and EDUCAUSE’s new president, John O’Brien. The attached PDF contains the complete program.

Today, responsibility for support of teaching and learning is shared across different campus organizations. For this focus session, we will explore the issues and opportunities for leadership in teaching and learning in this new context. Each of our presenters will be contributing a set of leadership lessons learned to what we are calling a leadership toolbox, which will be a valuable resource for all attendees.

Dear cni-announce subscribers:

The New Media Consortium (NMC) has released the Horizon Report - Library Edition 2015. It is available at http://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2015-library-edition/

The report identifies trends accelerating technology adoption in academic and research libraries in three time "horizons" and also notes challenges impeding technology adoption and important developments in technology for academic and research libraries.

Some of the findings are that "Increasing Value of the User Experience" and "Prioritization of Mobile Content and Delivery" are key short-term impact trends driving changes in academic and research libraries over the next one to two years. The "Evolving Nature of the Scholarly Record" and "Increasing Focus on Research Data Management" are mid-term impact trends expected to accelerate technology use in the next three to five years; and "Increasing Accessibility of Research Content" and "Rethinking Library Spaces" are long-term impact trends, anticipated to impact libraries for the next five years or more. The report contains much more, including links to initiatives in libraries.

Dear cni-announce subscribers:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has issued a report prepared by OCLC Research summarizing their meeting of thought leaders to discuss " Learning in Libraries." The focus meeting was held in Kansas City in May.

One of the themes from the report urges libraries to "design participatory learning programs that demonstrate innovation and scalability." The panel I moderated at the meeting highlighted that theme and featured lively presentations on projects from speakers from the University of Nevada, Reno, the Westport Library, and Library as Incubator Project. The presentations are summarized in the report.

IMLS suggests that the report might be useful background for those preparing proposals for some of their grant programs.

I wanted to share this announcement of an interesting preliminary report of a broad based study on access practices for born-digital collections in cultural memory organizations, which I think will be of interest to CNI-announce readers.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Dear colleagues,

Institutions wish to enhance and promote their reputation to attract funders and faculty and to increase their ranking. Since universities change their official names as part of branding activities, academic departments change their names to reflect new curricular emphasis, and schools merge with or separate from parent institutions, institutional identifiers are crucial to accurately represent scholars’ affiliations both on their output and on grant applications. Institutions may not realize they already have such an institutional identifier, ISNI, and that this identifier has already been disseminated, used by ORCID and included in VIAF and Wikidata. In this presentation from CNI's spring 2015 meeting, Karen Smith-Yoshimura of OCLC Research summarizes the current work of a task force on use cases and challenges of representing organizations in the ISNI database.

Challenges Presented by Institutional Identifiers is now available online: Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/136100763 YouTube: https://youtu.be/csHjdVL3DLU

Previously-released videos from this meeting:

-Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective (Cawthorne, Lewis, Spiro) https://vimeo.com/134886596

In this presentation from CNI's spring 2015 meeting, Jon Cawthorne (West Virginia), Vivian Lewis (McMaster) and Lisa Spiro (Rice) present key results from a pilot global benchmarking study on digital scholarship expertise. The project involved visiting leading digital humanities and digital social science organizations in several countries and conducting interviews with research staff, faculty, graduate students, and administrators in order to understand the core skills required for digital scholarship and the characteristics of organizations that cultivate these skills.

Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective is now available online: Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/134886596 YouTube: https://youtu.be/7fZ2ovtC3N0

Previously-released videos from this meeting:

-Integrating Digital Epigraphies (Sosin) https://youtu.be/bJjavOjaEKs

On June 4, 2016 Columbia University convened a conference on Web Archiving Collaboration: New Tools and Models. Presentations and videos from the meeting are now available, and they are linked to the conference agenda here:

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

I want to share a pointer to a paper published in PLoS ONE July 24, 2015 titled "Sizing the Problem of Improving Discovery and Access to NIH-Funded Data: A Preliminary Study" by Kevin Read et al.

Sizing the Problem of Improving Discovery and Access to NIH-Funded Data: A Preliminary Study | PLOS One

Objective This study informs efforts to improve the discoverability of and access to biomedical datasets by providing a preliminary estimate of the number and type of datasets generated annually by research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). It focuses on those datasets that are “invisible” or not deposited in a known repository. Methods We analyzed NIH-funded journal articles that were published in 2011, cited in PubMed and deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) to identify th...

This is an excellent example of work that is badly needed to help us ot better understand the scale of the challenge of managing research data to facilitate its discovery and reuse by other scholars, and to illuminate the roles that repositories of various types may play in this effort. I've reproduced the abstract below.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

In the UK, the Jisc has been doing some great work on learning analytics that doesn't seem to have gotten wide visibility beyond the UK yet; I wanted to particularly share their "Code of Practice for Learning Analytics" which addresses privacy and other ethical issues involved in the deployment of learning analytics. While of course some of this work is adapted for specific UK legal requirements, the broader principles are highly relevant. See

There's also a very helpful literature review that they developed as part of the effort, which is at:

http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/5661/1/Learning_Analytics_A-_Literature_Review.pdf

Last week, the Obama administration issued an executive order creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative to "maximize the benefits of high-performance computing research, development and deployment". The executive order, which is not lengthy, is well worth reading; it both establishes a series of objectives and defines roles and responsibilities among a large number of government agencies involved in the program.

The executive order is here:

And there is also a blog post from Tom Kalil and Jason Miller providing additional context here:

Dear cni-announce subscribers:

The program and list of speakers are now available for the 4th Designing Libraries for the 21st Century Conference, which will be held at the James B. Hunt Library in Raleigh, NC on September 20-22, 2015. North Carolina State University Libraries will host the conference, and CNI is very pleased to be a co-sponsor along with the University of Calgary. We have a stimulating program planned and attendees will be able to tour the Hunt and Hill Libraries at NCSU. I encourage you to visit the conference website at go.ncsu.edu/designinglibraries for registration and additional information.

We are nearing the maximum number of attendees we can accommodate so if you are interested, I urge you to register as soon as possible. We will have a waiting list when the registration numbers have exceeded capacity.

--Joan Lippincott, CNI

Dear Colleagues,

The New Media Consortium (NMC) was recently awarded a planning grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. For this Collaborative Planning Grant, the NMC is to assess the need for online professional development for academic and research library professionals. The goal is to identify sector-wide needs for in-service training for academic and research libraries that could be met with with high-quality online offerings. If the need is clear, the next steps are to develop a plan to deliver such training, and seek funding to design curricula and approaches that can be delivered to participants in any US academic or research library for free. CNI is actively involved in this work.

We hope that you will lend your perspectives to this survey and give us feedback about your professional development needs. The survey is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/arlsurvey1

We encourage you to complete the survey whether you personally have needs for professional development or whether you can identify needs for your professional staff if you are a library administrator. Please complete the survey by Friday, August 14.

On April 24, 2015 Harvard hosted a very interesting conference titled "University as Collector" at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (which, sadly, I was unable to attend personally). Video recordings for all of the sessions at this meeting are now available at:

University As Collector | Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University

Universities gather knowledge and specialists, as well as historical artifacts. Using Harvard University’s extensive collections as a starting point, this conference will assemble its own group of specialists to explore the history and mission of universities through “university objects.” Each presenter will examine one exemplary holding at Harvard to consider the insights its presence offers into the world of knowledge. Speakers from a variety of Harvard communities will also add...

There are some fascinating materials here about ways in which various "collections" (in the broadest sense, certainly including but going beyond library or museum materials) amassed by Universities over time interact with institutional missions of teaching and research and can contribute to scholarship.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

For the last few years, I have been tracking the growth of an exciting series multi-disciplinary research programs at some of our member organizations (and a number of other institutions) dealing with what I'll call for want of a better term "Urban Informatics". This deals both with the design of smart cities through information technologies (and other developments such as new lighting and power systems that integrate with information systems), and the use of telemetry from various systems that can be used to better understand and to improve urban life. The particular range of disciplines and balance between design and analysis varies widely from institution.

The CIties of Data project (see http://www.citiesofdata.org), which as I understand it is part of the overall Data and Society program (see http://www.datasociety.net/ ) has just issued a very useful report surveying these developments titled "Making Sense of the Science of Cities" which is available at:

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Personal Digital Archiving 2015 was held in New York City April 24-25, 2015. The presentations from this meeting are now available at the conference web site, where they are linked to the individual day agendas, at

Video from the sessions can be found at the Internet Archive, at

Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2015 Videos : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Video of the 2015 Personal Digital Archiving Conference, held April 24-26 in New York City.

Dear cni-announce subscribers: I'm posting this on behalf of Bucknell University, which will be hosting a digital scholarship conference. I know many of you are both interested in this topic and doing innovative work. This call for proposals encourages presentations highlighting collaboration in digital scholarship. Please see below for details. --Joan Lippincott, CNI

Call for Proposals #BUDSC15 http://dsconf.blogs.bucknell.edu/cfp/ Bucknell University, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will host its second annual digital scholarship conference on November 6-8, 2015. The theme of the conference is “Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Public Scholarship.”

This conference will bring together a broad community of practitioners–faculty, researchers, librarians, educational technologists, and students–engaged in digital scholarship in research and teaching who share a focus on public scholarship. The topic acknowledges the importance of expanding learning experiences beyond the University. Whether privileging research that is public in scope or topic, encouraging work that pursues public impact, or fostering digital literacy skills necessary to create multi-modal projects for public audiences, digital scholarship provides many avenues to consider and reconsider multiple publics.

I wanted to share this request I recently recieved broadly with the CNI community. The National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) is working through a strategic planning process, and is reaching out to various groups, including the CNI community, for input and comments. The announcement that I've reproduced below includes information on how to submit responses to the NHPRC.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI