I am delighted to share this call for nominations for the Paul Evan Peters Award. The Committee welcomes your nominations, which do not need to be elaborate or lengthy. The complete details are below.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI CALL FOR NOMINATIONS: THE PAUL EVAN PETERS AWARD DEADLINE: March 29, 2024

The Paul Evan Peters Award recognizes the most notable and lasting international achievements related to information technology and the creation and use of information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Past recipients (with affiliation at the time of their award) have been Paul Courant (2022), Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan; Francine Berman (2020), Computer Scientist, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Herbert Van de Sompel (2017), research scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Donald A.B. Lindberg (2014), director of the National Library of Medicine; Christine L. Borgman (2011), professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies, UCLA; Daniel E. Atkins (2008), inaugural director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure; Paul Ginsparg (2006), founder of arXiv, an e-print archive for articles in the sciences; Brewster Kahle (2004), founder and chairman of the board of the Internet Archive; “father of the Internet” Vinton Cerf (2002); and Tim Berners-Lee (2000), inventor of the World Wide Web. All recipients embody the rare combination of strategic vision, technical innovation, and humanitarian outlook that the award seeks to promote.

Award winners are recommended by a committee of representatives of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), and EDUCAUSE, and selected by the chief executives of the three organizations. Guidelines for submitting a nomination are detailed below.

We are now accepting proposals for the next edition of the CNI Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series. More information about this year-round program is available on the CNI website.

Proposals may be submitted via online form: https://www.cni.org/resources/pbvs/submit-a-proposal

Videos should focus on a timely topic or on a 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. We recommend that these videos run no more than 15-20 minutes, though longer presentations may occasionally make sense; we leave this to the presenters’ discretion.

Anyone may propose a pre-recorded project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations. No more than 12 project briefings will be accepted for each edition; we issue calls for proposals approximately every two to three months.

The Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University has just released its first report since Lee Rainie , recently retired from the Pew Internet and American Life project, joined his collaborator Janna Anderson at Elon University to continue their program of canvassing experts and surveying the public to gain insight into possible futures for the evolving digital environment. This study looks at possible impacts of Ai on society over the next 15 years. There are almost 300 contributors to the report (disclosure: I am one of those contributors, and my contribution can be found in chapter 6).

Website for the overall report and survey project

Link to the expert insights report (about 150 pages)

The Stanford University Center for Human-Centered Ai has just published an important paper titled "Societal Implications of Open Foundation Models" which covers a number of topics but also helps to clarify questions about what constitute "open" foundation (or large language) models, which is a very vexing question; the intertwining of code, process and data leads to very different ideas about what it means to be open when compared to historical open source community practices. Strongly recommended.

Announcement of paper

On the Societal Impact of Open Foundation Models | Stanford HAI

New research adds precision to the debate on openness in AI.

Summary of paper

Edition Guide Coalition for Networked Information Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series February 2024

This edition guide overviews the nine contributed videos in the February 2024 edition of CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series. Click the links to watch the videos and see accompanying details and resources.

A pair of briefings showcases strategies for staff development, particularly in light of libraries’ positioning as research-intensive campus partners:

The libraries at Virginia Tech, the University of California, Riverside, the University of North Texas, the University of Colorado Boulder, and Los Alamos National Laboratory are implementing a three-year joint professional development institute (PDI) to support interdisciplinary research collaborations among library staff across the country. In Joint Professional Development Institute to Cultivate Collaborative Library Scholars , learn how the PDI will demonstrate a career path while exemplifying the benefits of embedding librarians directly in research activities. The briefing also shares preliminary results from Virginia Tech's program. Librarian-in-the-Loop Deep Learning to Curate Very Large Biomedical Image Datasets  presents a research data management project where librarians are embedded in a medical school research team. The librarians apply artificial intelligence (AI)/deep learning techniques to large biomedical images, and the work demonstrates a data management approach that engages librarians early in the research process.

There are several important reports from various parts of the US Federal Government that I've been meaning to share with the CNI community. Even though they cover some rather diverse areas, I've aggregated them here in the interests of getting this done sooner rather than later or not at all. My thanks to Gary Price for bringing several of these to my attention. Also, I cannot resist reflecting how amazing I find it that government is actually engaging some of these issues; I can't imagine this happening a decade ago, and if nothing else it underscores how central issues related to security and computational infrastructure have become.

First off, an update on efforts to secure the open-source software ecosystem (includes links to related material)

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Securing-the-Open-Source-Software-Ecosystem-OS3I-End-of-Year-Report-MASTERCOPY.pdf

Next, three documents on memory-safe programming languages and technologies, and the need for better metrics for software quality. Very interesting if somewhat technical reading.

There's an important article that's just come out (technically as an accepted pre-publication version) in the Harvard Data Science Review titled "Institutional Efforts to Help Academic Researchers Implement Generative AI in Research ". This uses the recent experience at the University of Michigan as a case study of institutional-level strategic planning to support the research enterprise in adopting generative AI as a new large-scale technology; there have been similar efforts at several other institutions, notably Harvard and the University of California, San Diego. At the same time, the authors suggest that we may be moving into an era where other large scale technologies will create similar opportunities across the research enterprise (efforts like the Cloud Labs at Carnegie Mellon University come to mind here). Very much worth reading. See

https://assets.pubpub.org/9evdl9pm/Liu%20&%20Jagadish%20(2024)_Just%20Accepted-71708981791796.pdf

For another view of the University of Michigan experience from the perspective of IT leadership, see

I wanted to take the opportunity to share some highlights and the preliminary project briefing line-up for the upcoming CNI Spring Member Meeting, scheduled for March 25-26, 2024, in San Diego, California. This information is a little later than usual, for which I apologize. We will keep registration for the meeting open for a few extra days, until February 28. All the information here will be included and expanded upon in the upcoming meeting roadmap, but I wanted to make this available now.

We have a fantastic keynote speaker whom I’ve been hoping to entice to CNI for a long time: Dan Reed, Presidential Professor of Computational Science at the University of Utah and Chair of the US National Science Board. The most important thing to know about Dan is that, through the various roles he has had in his career, he has an enormously broad and deeply informed view of not just developments in computational science, but also their interplay with the practice and communication of science, the evolution of science policy, and how science policy fits into the broader national political and policy spheres. Dan will share some of these perspectives with us in his keynote, which will open the conference on Monday at about 1:00 pm.

For more on Dan and his plenary, see: https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2024/plenary-sessions-s24

Dan has also very graciously agreed to do a follow-on breakout in conversation with me later on Monday, which will allow us and the audience to explore a few topics in greater depth and/or examine additional issues of particular interest to the CNI community.

Registration is now open for the IS&T Archiving 2024 conference, April 9–12 in Washington, D.C. CNI is delighted to serve again this year as a cooperating society of the conference, which covers digitization, imaging, preservation, metadata management, archival workflows, and more.

The conference details and registration information are available at: https://imaging.org/IST/Conferences/Archiving/Archiving2024/Archiving2024_Home

Note that registration rates will increase on April 1.

Paige Pope, CNI Communications Coordinator

I am sharing this invitation on behalf of Erik Mitchell of the University of California, San Diego to participate in a design thinking workshop building on the important work of the LEADS and LEADING projects that we've highlighted at CNI. The session will be both in person (at UCSD) and online.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Many CNI-announce readers will have seen the recent very welcome announcement of the NSF-led collaboration for a pilot National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) (see https://new.nsf.gov/news/democratizing-future-ai-rd-nsf-launch-national-ai). My understanding is that the full NAIRR program is pending congressional funding, but this is an important step.

This coming Wednesday, February 21, 2024, at 3pm EST NSF will be doing a webinar providing more details on this program. For further information and to register, see

NAIRR Pilot Webinar | NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation

NAIRR Pilot Information Session - February 21, 2024 - 3:00pm-4:30pm Eastern

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Registration for the 19th International Open Repositories Conference (OR2024) is now open. The conference will be held from June 3–6, 2024, at Post Hotel, Gothenburg, Sweden, and CNI is pleased to once again serve as a cooperating organization.

OR2024 focuses on the practices of the international repositories community to develop and implement standards, frameworks, architectures, and methodologies for open repositories to promote open science, research transparency, elevate underrepresented communities and open research for global progress and climate justice.

Full details and the registration form are available on their website: https://or2024.openrepositories.org/registration/ 

-Paige, CNI Communications Coordinator

We’re sharing the final reminder that the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) invites project briefing proposals for the Spring 2024 Membership Meeting (March 25–26), to be held at the Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego, CA.

The submission deadline is Friday, February 9, 2024

Submit your proposal via online form, available from the Project Briefing Proposals page: https://www.cni.org/events/mm/spring-2024/project-briefing-proposals-s24/

Anyone may propose a project briefing: you need not be affiliated with a member organization to propose a session. The meeting will be held entirely in person; we will record all sessions and make the videos openly available after the meeting.

I share the invitation below, on behalf of Cynthia Hudson Vitale of ARL, for a webinar to discuss the findings of the NSF-funded research project, Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS), to examine expenses for public access to research data. Please see Cynthia’s invitation for details, including a link to access registration. The event is open to all.

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

— — —

Please join us on Monday, February 12, 2024 from 2-3pm ET to learn the results of ARL's NSF-funded research regarding the costs of making research data publicly available. These results show the financial investments in infrastructure and services institutions have made to support public access data-sharing policies.

As a reminder, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) invites project briefing proposals for the Spring 2024 Membership Meeting (March 25–26), to be held at the Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego, CA.

Submit your proposal via online form, available from the Project Briefing Proposals page: https://www.cni.org/events/mm/spring-2024/project-briefing-proposals-s24/

The submission deadline is February 9, 2024

Keep in Mind: Anyone may propose a project briefing: you need not be affiliated with a member organization to propose a session. The meeting will be held entirely in person; presenters are expected to speak in person except in very unusual circumstances. Speakers are invited to attend the entire meeting (there is no registration fee), though they (or their organizations) are responsible for their own expenses. Project briefings are typically 30-minute to one-hour sessions. We also accept proposals for lightning round presentations (limited to five minutes, one presenter) We will record all sessions and make the videos openly available after the meeting. In some exceptional cases, we may accept a session that is not recorded at the request of presenters. Submission & Evaluation Information A limited number of project briefings will be accepted. We encourage submissions that: Address state-of-the-art developments and issues of interest to the membership (see CNI’s topics pages and recent member meetings for some themes that have been important to our work in recent years) Focus on novel, timely, or creative approaches to community challenges related to digital information Are geared to high-level administrators and policy makers Feature topics that would particularly benefit from interactive discussion More meeting and proposal information is at https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2024.

Today the US National Academies released a new report titled "Facial Recognition: Current Capabilities, Future Prospects and Governance" which takes a wide-ranging look at various kinds of facial recognition applications. The report can be downloaded without charge at

Facial Recognition Technology

Facial recognition technology is increasingly used for identity verification and identification, from aiding law enforcement investigations to identifying potential security threats at large venues. However, advances in this technology have outpaced laws and regulations, raising significant concerns related to equity, privacy, and civil liberties. This report explores the current capabilities, future possibilities, and necessary governance for facial recognition technology. Facial Recognition T...

Earlier today there was an hour-long report release event; the video from this can be found at

Facial Recognition: Current Capabilities, Future Prospects, and Governance (Report Release Webinar)

REPORT RELEASE WEBINAR Facial Recognition Technology: Current Capabilities, Future Prospects, and Governance Facial recognition technology is increasingly used for identity verification and identification, from aiding law enforcement investigations to identifying potential security threats at large venues. However, the use of the technology raises significant concerns related to equity, privacy, and civil liberties. Please join the National Academies for a public briefing webinar on Wednesday, ...

I forward, below, an invitation on behalf of Erik Mitchell of UCSD related to the LIS Education and Data Science Integrated Network Group (LEADING) project. LEADING (and its predecessor program LEADS) will be familiar to many in the CNI community from presentations at our meetings. A workshop associated with this work will be held in March following CNI’s spring meeting in San Diego.

Full disclosure: CNI staff serve on the LEADING advisory board.

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

— — —

The 5th National Research Platform Workshop will be held at the University of California, San Diego, March 20-22, 2024 (the end of the week before the CNI meeting, which is also being held in San Diego). Details will be available at

National Research Platform (NRP)

National Research Platform (NRP) is a platform for researchers to access and share data, tools, and resources.

I was able to attend the 4th Workshop in early 2024, which was a superb look at developments in advanced networking to support research.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Our colleague Richard Marciano at the University of Maryland has been a co-organizer of the Computational Archival Science Workshops for a number of years. The 8th in the series was held as part of the 2023 IEEE Big Data Conference in Sorrento, Italy last December. Materials from the workshop are now available at

IEEE Big Data 2023: CAS#8 – AICollaboratory

8th COMPUTATIONAL ARCHIVAL SCIENCE (CAS) WORKSHOP Sunday Dec. 17, 2023 Part of: 2023 IEEE Big Data Conference (IEEE BigData 2023) — (Sorrento, Italy) – Dec. 15-18, 2023 Sunday, Dec. 17,…

Richard tells me that the next workshop will be held in Washington DC this December as part of IEEE Big Data (December 15-18, 2024). I'll share more information on this when it's available.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

The final collection of project briefing videos from the CNI Fall 2023 Membership Meeting are now openly available on the CNI website (https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2023), YouTube , and Vimeo channels. All meeting materials, including selected presentation slides, project briefing videos, the lightning round video, and opening and closing plenary videos are now available .

What’s New

Bringing Digitized Special Collections into the Research Workflow through JSTOR: Outcomes of a Three-year Pilot Bruce Heterick, ITHAKA Kevin Guthrie, ITHAKA YouTube: https://youtu.be/_n4Rb2jCm7c Webpage: https://www.cni.org/topics/special-collections/bringing-digitized-special-collections-into-the-research-workflow-through-jstor-outcomes-of-a-three-year-pilot

Duke University’s Research Support Initiative: Assessment, Recommendations, and Implementation Timothy McGeary, Duke University Rebecca Brouwer, Duke University John Board, Duke University YouTube: https://youtu.be/Q9ochY9Kjnc Webpage: https://www.cni.org/topics/assessment/duke-universitys-research-support-initiative-assessment-recommendations-and-implementation