The premier conference on the topic of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) will be held this year at University of Texas in Austin. Institutions working in this area are invited to submit session proposals. If your institution is just beginning to consider an ETD program, this is a great place to learn about the issues and implementation strategies from around the world. --Joan Lippincott

ETD 2010: Collaboration, Innovation, Sustainability 2nd Call for Papers, Posters, Presentations & Tutorials Deadline for Abstract Submission: March 5, 2010 Themes: Collaboration, Innovation, Sustainability, Latin America ETD 2010 Call for Papers, Posters, Presentations and Tutorials On behalf of The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), and the University of Texas Libraries, we would like to invite you to submit a paper, poster or presentation for "ETD 2010: Collaboration, Innovation, Sustainability" - the 13th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations to be held June 16 – 18, 2010 at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, U.S.A. ETD 2010 will explore the issues of collaboration, innovation, and sustainability in promoting ETDs, Institutional repositories and Open Access in the realm of scholarly communications. The NDLTD initiative consists of hundreds of contributing member universities, libraries, information organizations, consortia and individuals. Membership details are available on the NDLTD website and dues-paying members are offered a discount on the conference registration fee. The NDLTD's activities are focused on those who produce, manage, store and use electronic theses and dissertations in order to support the authoring, indexing, archiving, dissemination and retrieval of ETDs worldwide. Conference attendees typically include librarians, graduate school administrators, information technology professionals and graduate faculty, staff and students. "ETD 2010: Collaboration, Innovation, and Sustainability" is organized by the NDLTD, The University of Libraries, and the Texas Digital Library, with generous sponsorship provided by non-profit interest groups and corporations that produce hardware, software, and knowledge management solutions for digital archives and repositories. The purpose of "ETD 2010: Collaboration, Innovation, and Sustainability" will not only be to present research outcomes and demonstrate new developments and initiatives in the field of electronic theses and dissertations, but also to encourage even more universities around the world to become a part of the NDLTD and to promote free, open and long-term access to online scholarship. For institutions and individuals that are at the early stages of investigating how to operate and promote an ETD project or program, the conference will also offer a range of learning and networking opportunities within an international collegial atmosphere of a premier university for graduate professional education.

THEMES Collaboration, Innovation, Sustainability, Latin America You are invited to submit proposals that address any of the following themes: COLLABORATIONS Projects in ETD and IR Collections. Topics may include the following areas:

As a final reminder, project briefing proposals for the CNI Spring 2010 Membership Meeting are due by this Friday, February 19. Proposals may be submitted by email to joan@cni.org, or via the online form available at

The spring meeting will be held April 12-13, 2010 in Baltimore, MD.

If you have any questions about submitting a proposal, please contact Joan Lippincott (joan@cni.org) or me (diane@cni.org).

Interviews conducted by EDUCAUSE during the Fall 2009 CNI Membership Meeting are now online:

The podcasts include a conversation with plenary speaker Bernard Frischer, a leading digital humanist who discusses 3D modelling in the humanities, and Brett Bobley, CIO for the National Endowment for the Humanities, on using supercomputers in humanities research. These recordings are designed to function as an extension of the meeting, complementing the standard program, and providing an opportunity for the broader CNI community to hear from some of our key presenters and attendees.

The meeting was held December 14-15, 2009 in Washington, DC. Thanks to all who attended and presented!

I wanted to bring this call for award nominations to the attention of the CNI community. Internet2 has been running this program for the last few years, and it's a great opportunity to showcase and recognize applications that combine high performance networking and data intensive scholarship in creative ways.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Internet2 Issues Call for IDEA Award Nominations Award recognizes innovative applications of advanced networking

Project briefing proposals for the CNI Spring 2010 Membership Meeting are due Friday, February 19. Information about project briefings and an online submission form are available at

The spring meeting will be held April 12-13, 2010 in Baltimore, MD.

If you have any questions about submitting a proposal, please feel free to contact Joan Lippincott (joan@cni.org) or me (diane@cni.org).

Over the past two years I've been a part of the so-called Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access; we issued an interim report last December and are now in the final stages of preparing our final report, which should be out within the next month (I will put out an announcement on CNI-announce when this is ready). On April 1, 2010 the Task Force will be hosting a symposium to discuss the report findings. We have some superb speakers lined up. I've included the announcement below. My understanding is that space is very limited, so I'd urge those who want to attend to register early. I'll be doing some summary remarks at the end of the day at the symposium.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Blue Ribbon Task Force to Host Symposium on Economics of Sustaining Digital Information

I'm looking forward to giving a keynote for this online conference. For librarians interested in learning more about services to users with mobile devices, this is a good opportunity to hear a wide variety of presentations.

--Joan Lippincott

Alliance Library System and LearningTimes Offer Handheld Librarian 2!

CNI is a co-sponsor of this event.

Research Data Access and Preservation Summit

An ASIS&T Summit Phoenix, AZ | Hyatt Regency | April 9-10, 2010

In cooperation with the Coalition for Networked Information

The Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting a major multi-year study of how faculty needs and research practices shape their choices about scholarly communication. The final report on this work is now available, as described in the announcement copied below. In my view, this is a very important look at where faculty thinking and practice stands in regard to the changing scholarly communication environment, including a sensitive examination of differences across disciplines. We've been fortunate to have updates on this work at some of the CNI member meetings, and I hope to be able to host a report on this most current work in the near future.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

We are delighted to announce the publication of the final report: Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines.

I'm giving the keynote at this conference, providing perspectives on how users are discovering and using information today. --Joan Lippincott

Join NISO for a one-day forum on Discovery to Delivery: Creating a First-Class User Experience on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center, Atlanta, GA. NISO educational forums are routinely praised for their excellent selection of speakers representing a diversity of viewpoints across the scholarly information community and the small size which provides opportunities to network with speakers and other attendees.

ABOUT THE FORUM

The next session of CNI Conversations will take place on Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2010, 1-2pm EST and is open to individuals at member institutions. If you are interested in participating in CNI Conversations, please contact Jackie Eudell at jackie@cni.org.

The archived audio recording of the Dec. 17 session is now available at http://conversations.cni.org/ (to subscribe to the audio feed add http://conversations.cni.org/feed to iTunes, or any podcatcher). The discussion featured a recap of the recent CNI Membership Meeting by Executive Director Clifford Lynch and Associate Director Joan Lippincott. Cliff also reviewed the 5th International Digital Curation Conference, as well as the NSF-funded workshop “Scholarly Evaluation Metrics: Opportunities and Challenges.”

About CNI Conversations CNI Conversations provides an opportunity for individuals from member institutions and organizations to take part in discussions on current topics with CNI Director Clifford Lynch and others; currently the events take place in audio-conference format. Real-time participation in CNI Conversations requires pre-registration, which is open only to those at member institutions and organizations; if you are interested in participating in CNI Conversations, please contact Jackie Eudell at jackie@cni.org . We plan to continue to make audio or other records of these exchanges generally available after the event.

For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at Joan@cni.org.

CNI has been a long-time co-sponsor of this conference.

Call for Papers http://www.jcdl-icadl2010.org/

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries JCDL 2010

June 21-25, 2010 Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.

Two new videos from CNI's December membership meeting in are now available for streaming or download:

Memento: Time Travel for the Web, a project briefing presented by Herbert Van de Sompel & Robert Sanderson of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Michael Nelson from Old Dominion University, is at http://vimeo.com/8365394

Also by Robert Sanderson and Herbert Van de Sompel, the project briefing Interoperable Annotation: Perspectives from the Open Annotation Collaboration can be accessed at http://vimeo.com/8481040

All CNI-produced videos are available from the CNI channel at http://vimeo.com/channels/cni . Subscribe to the CNI video channel feed to receive automatic updates when new material is available: http://vimeo.com/channels/cni/videos/rss .

The Spring 2010 CNI Membership Meeting will be held on April 12-13 (Monday and Tuesday) at the Baltimore Waterfront Marriott in Baltimore, MD. The opening plenary will be a panel exploring institutional implementation strategies for open access mandates, and Dr. Liz Lyon of UKOLN will explore developments in science at web scale in the closing plenary. Registration materials will be sent by the end of this month to designated member representatives. Please note that the meeting and hotel registration deadline is Friday, March 12. For more information, see the meeting website:

We are now accepting proposals for project briefings, one hour breakout sessions which focus on a specific institutional project related to networked information or a discussion of a hot topic. A limited number of project briefings are accepted. Proposals may be submitted via a Web form available at

I recently read a very interesting report titled "The Long Tail of News" prepared by Kathy English, the public editor of the Toronto Star newspaper. This is a discussion, from the perspective of newspapers, of the growing issue of demands to "unpublish" articles that are persistently visible through search engines such as Google. This discussion has implications for the integrity of the historical record, and also some interesting connections to the issues that libraries, archives and other institutions face in digitizing collections, and will, I think, be of interest to some members of the CNI community.

Information on the study, and a pointer to the report, can be found at

I'm grateful to Melinda Burns for the pointer to this report.

A video recording of the CNI 2009 Fall Membership Meeting closing plenary session is now available for streaming or downloading. Bernard Frischer's presentation Beyond Illustration: New Dimensions of 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites and Monuments can be accessed from:

CNI: Beyond Illustration: New Dimensions of 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites and Monuments

Bernard Frischer Director, Virtual World Heritage Laboratory University of Virginia Closing Plenary Session Beyond Illustration: New Dimensions of 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites and Monuments Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall 2009 Membership Meeting December 14-15, 2009 Washington, DC

More video from the fall 2009 meeting will be announced shortly. All CNI-produced videos are available from the CNI channel at http://vimeo.com/channels/cni . Subscribe to the CNI video channel feed to receive automatic updates when new material is available: http://vimeo.com/channels/cni/videos/rss .

There's an interesting report available for downloading from the Aspen Institute titled "The Promise and Peril of Big Data", summarizing a workshop the Institute held in 2009. This can be found at

This report explores some of the same issues discussed in Microsoft's recent book "The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery" which I posted about earlier, and which can be found at

The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery - Microsoft Research

Increasingly, scientific breakthroughs will be powered by advanced computing capabilities that help researchers manipulate and explore massive datasets. The speed at which any given scientific discipline advances will depend on how well its researchers collaborate with one another, and with technologists, in areas of eScience such as databases, workflow management, visualization, and cloud computing technologies. […]

Video of Clifford Lynch's opening plenary address from the CNI Fall 2009 Membership Meeting is now available for streaming or downloading:

CNI: Welcome, 2009 in Review, & Overview of the 2009-2010 CNI Program Plan

Clifford Lynch Coalition for Networked Information Opening Plenary Session Welcome, 2009 in Review, & Overview of the 2009-2010 CNI Program Plan Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall 2009 Membership Meeting December 14-15, 2009 Washington, DC

In this talk, CNI's Executive Director provides updates on major developments in areas of interest to the CNI community, and he gives an overview of the newly released 2009-10 CNI Program Plan, http://www.cni.org/program/ .

Look for more announcements soon on the availability of other sessions from the fall 2009 CNI meeting, including Bernard Frischer's closing plenary talk, Beyond Illustration: New Dimensions of 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites and Monuments.

Last week we held what I think was a very successful fall meeting in Washington DC. I used the opening plenary session to survey events of the last year and to introduce the 2009-2010 CNI Program Plan, which was distributed at the meeting. The Program Plan is also available online, linked from our home page at http://www.cni.org. We'll be mailing printed copies to member representatives in the new year, and can make additional copies available on request.

We took video of my opening talk, of Bernie Frisher's wonderful closing plenary, and a few selected breakout sessions. We'll be putting these online over the next few weeks, and we'll put out an announcement to CNI-announce when they are ready. We're also accumulating presentation materials from the breakout sessions and putting that online as quickly as possible; this should be complete early in the new year. I also used a substantial part of last Thursday's CNI Conversation audio event to reflect on some of the developments from our Fall Meeting, and also from the Fifth International Data Curation Conference, which was held in London in early December. The recording of the CNI Conversation is now available through our web site as well.

I want to provide a few pointers and citations to things that I mentioned in my opening talk, as I've gotten a few questions about them, and also give visibility to some other related materials.

Elinor Ostrom shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, which recognized her work in understanding the economics and governance of commons of various kinds. Of particular interest to many in the CNI community would be the 2006 book that she co-edited with Charlotte Hess titled Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice.

An audio archive of the December CNI Conversations session is now available at http://conversations.cni.org/ (to subscribe to the audio feed add http://conversations.cni.org/feed to iTunes, or any podcatcher).

The discussion featured a recap of the recent CNI Membership Meeting by Executive Director Clifford Lynch and Associate Director Joan Lippincott. Cliff also discussed the 5th International Digital Curation Conference, as well as the NSF-funded workshop “Scholarly Evaluation Metrics: Opportunities and Challenges.”

About CNI Conversations: As part of an ongoing effort to explore additional ways to connect with our members, CNI launched a new program in September 2009, CNI Conversations, in which participants from member institutions and organizations take part in discussions on current topics with CNI Director Clifford Lynch and others; currently the events take place in audio-conference format.

Real-time participation in upcoming CNI Conversations events requires pre-registration. Registration is open only to those at member institutions and organizations. Dates for future events will be sent to the CNI representatives at our member institutions in January; if you are interested in participating in a future session of CNI Conversations, please contact one of your organization’s CNI representatives. We plan to continue to make audio or other records of these exchanges generally available after the event.