A Guide to the Fall 2000 Coalition for Networked Information Task Force Meeting

The Fall 2000 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held in San Antonio, Texas at the Hilton Hotel on December 7-8, 2000, offers a wide range of presentations that advance and report on CNI's programs, showcase projects and issues from Task Force member institutions, and highlight key activities in the broader field of networked information and progress on the Coalition's work. This provides a roadmap to the sessions at the meeting, which includes an unusually rich and varied range of breakout sessions focusing on current developments in networked information.

Along with plenary and breakout sessions, the meeting includes ample time for informal networking with colleagues and a reception on the evening of December 7. The reception will conclude by 7:30 PM, allowing time for attendees to stroll and enjoy the many dinner options available on the San Antonio Riverwalk.

The Plenary Sessions

I have reserved the opening plenary session to address key developments in networked information, discuss progress on the Coalition's agenda, and to highlight initiatives from the 2000-2001 Program Plan, which will be distributed at the meeting (and will also be available on the Coalition's web site, www.cni.org following the meeting). This will include time for questions and discussion from Task Force member representatives. In this opening plenary, I will be joined by Don Waters, Program Officer for Scholarly Communications at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, who will give a short presentation on some of the initiatives that the Foundation is funding to advance networked information and scholarly communications. I think that you will agree with me that the Mellon Foundation has become a central force in supporting progress in many of the most critical areas for scholarship in the digital world, and Don's presentation will provide an important perspective on the scope and goals of this work.

The closing plenary address will be by Dr. Herbert van de Sompel, currently a visiting professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. Herbert is well known to the CNI community for his work on the Open Archives Initiative and SFX; one of the attendees at his breakout session on this work at the Spring 2000 CNI meeting described his presentation as "transformative". Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to serve on his Ph.D. committee at the University of Ghent, and was greatly impressed with both the breadth and depth of his work. In this keynote, Herbert will share his thinking about central issues in scholarly communications and networked information architecture. This is an opportunity to hear from one of the leading thinkers and implementers from the new generation of networked information applications. Herbert will also lead a breakout session more narrowly focused on progress in the SFX initiative.

Highlighted Breakout Sessions

I cannot cover all of the nearly 40 breakout sessions that we will offer here. However, I want to note particularly some sessions that have strong connections to the Coalition's 2000-2001 Program Plan, and also a number of other sessions of special interest. The breakout sessions at this meeting are particularly exciting, I think, and I'm afraid you will again have to make some difficult choices about which ones to attend.

There is now a substantial base of knowledge developing about e-books and digital books; presentations by the University of Texas, Austin, Octavo, and new CNI member Questia will explore these developments.

The evolution of the scholarly communications system will be explored in a series of sessions that include Rick Johnson of SPARC and Tom Hickerson of Cornell; Kimberly Douglas and Eric Van de Velde of Cal Tech; and Elsevier's work on preprint collections.

The themes of archiving are well represented, with two sessions by the Library of Congress, one focused on the web and the other on audio visual materials, and an additional session from JSTOR. David Bearman will introduce his work on the Knowledge Conservancy, a new framework for making digital resources broadly available to the public. Finally, we'll have a presentation from Rob Spindler and Jeremy Rowe on the ECURE electronic records conference and program.

Portals and gateways will be examined in sessions from UC San Diego, SUNY Buffalo, and the group developing the JA-SIG open source portal. In addition, Tom Neiss of SUNY will offer a breakout on SUNY's efforts to implement the Worldwide Web Consortium accessibility guidelines for the SUNY system; this is the most extensive effort to date in this area that I am aware of.

Several sessions will help us shape future CNI initiatives; Joan Lippincott will lead a discussion of library/It collaboration, in conjunction with Susan Perry of Mt. Holyoke and other member leaders. I will lead a discussion of the development of benchmark image databases with Anne Kenney of Cornell and CLIR, and one on open archives with Dan Greenstein of the Digital Library Federation.

We will also have presentations on the OCLC Open Names Service, the Canadian national site license project, updates on the Educause National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) and two session on the Instructional Management System (which has undergone some important developments over the past year, including a spinoff from NLII to an independent organization), one concentrating on the broad program and the other on more technical issues. There will be a report on the National Research Council study of the future role of the Library of Congress (the "LC 21 study"), a breakout on the NINCH Building Blocks Project, and a discussion led by Jerry Campbell of USC on policy issues involved with Napster use in the higher education environment. Policy issues involving copyright and UCITA will be addressed.

There will be two sessions covering issues involved in information literacy, one from the University of Texas at Austin and the other by Howard Besser of UCLA, who will discuss the UCLA/PacBell information technology literacies partnership.

Finally, I want to mention a session to be presented by Kirsten Swearingen, who worked with Peter Lyman and Hal Varian on a study attempting to quantify "How much information is there?" which has received heavy coverage in the popular press recently; she'll present a discussion of the results of this study and the underlying methodology. There will be several other sessions dealing with measurement and assessment, including one on the ARL E-metrics project.

You will soon be able to find a full list of the breakout sessions that are scheduled on the CNI web site <http://www.cni.org/>.  This list will be updated as last-minute changes invariably occur.

I look forward to seeing you in San Antonio this December for what promises to be another extremely worthwhile meeting. Please contact me (cliff@cni.org), or  Joan Lippincott, CNI's Associate Director (joan@cni.org) if we can provide you with any additional information on the meeting.

Clifford Lynch
Coalition for Networked Information

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