A Guide to the Spring 2001 Coalition for Networked Information Task Force Meeting

The Spring 2001 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held in Washington, DC at the Hilton Hotel & Towers on April 9-10, 2001, offers a wide range of presentations that advance and report on CNI's programs, showcase projects developed by Task Force member institutions, and highlight key activities in the broader field of networked information at a national and international level. This provides a roadmap to the sessions at the meeting, which includes an extensive series of breakout sessions focusing on current developments in networked information.

As usual, the CNI meeting begins with an optional orientation session for new attendees at 11:30 AM and refreshments 12:15 on April 9, followed by the opening keynote and breakout sessions. It ends with lunch and a closing keynote concluding at 2:15pm on April 10; note the slightly earlier than usual ending time (which is to accommodate the opening sessions of Net 2001).

Along with plenary and breakout sessions, the meeting includes ample time for informal networking with colleagues and a reception on the evening of April 9. The CNI spring task force meeting is followed immediately by the EDUCAUSE Net 2001 meeting, covering policy issues related to networking in higher education. Net 2001 has an opening session and a welcome reception on April 10, and continues on April 11. CNI attendees who are still in town are welcome to join us for the Net 2001 opening session and reception on April 10, even if they cannot stay for the main Net 2001 conference. Information and registration information for Net 2001 can be found at <www.educause.edu>.

As always, the meeting agenda is subject to last minute changes, particularly in the breakout sessions, and you can find the most current information at <www.cni.org>.

The Plenary Sessions

Tom Kalil was Deputy Director, National Economic Council and Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy during the Clinton Administration.   In this role, he played an important role in an amazing range of policy issues related to the Internet and networked information during a very unique period when the Internet really emerged into the public consciousness and became both a dynamic source of change and integral part of the American economy and American society; he was involved in critical questions as diverse as intellectual property, encryption regulation, privacy, distance education, the role of standards in the development of the information infrastructure, and access to government information resources. Tom was also an vital bridge between the administration and the research, higher education and library communities. Tom will offer an opening keynote that takes advantage of his unique viewpoint to both look back at the development of policy issues during the 1990s and forward to how these issues will evolve in the new decade.


Paul Resnick is a faculty member at the University of Michigan's School of Information.  His research over the past decade has occupied a unique place at the intersection of social systems and advanced information technology. He has worked on rating systems for network resources (the PICS system); recommender and collaborative filtering systems, and more recently the roles that identity, anonymity, reputation, and trust play in network-enabled social environments (I particularly recommend his excellent paper on reputation management, published last year in Communications of the ACM, and available through his web page). Paul will deliver a closing keynote address on "Computer Networks, Social Networks, and Social Capital" which will present some provocative new thinking on ways in which networked information systems can be used to empower new kinds of community collaborations. You can find many of Paul's papers and more details on his work through his web page at <http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/>.

Highlighted Breakout Sessions

I cannot cover all of the many breakout sessions here. However, I want to note particularly some sessions that have strong connections to the Coalition's 2000-2001 Program Plan, which is available at <www.cni.org>, and also a few other sessions of special interest. We have a packed agenda of breakout sessions, and as always will try to put material from these sessions on our web site following the meeting.

CNI and the U.K. Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) have had a long and productive collaborative relationship; in the summer of 2000 we held a joint meeting in Stratford-on-Avon, England which was attended by a number of CNI member representatives. As a follow-on to that meeting, we have developed a series of breakout sessions highlighting developments in the U.K. in areas ranging from advanced networking to digital preservation; these sessions are structured to facilitate exploration of both parallel and divergent approaches between the U.S. and the U.K.

We have a very strong group of sessions addressing issues related to evaluation, assessment and the analysis of current practices, which includes a report from the Middle States Association on thinking about accreditation issues, an update on the ARL E-metrics program for libraries, a report on the LibQUAL+ project, a presentation on the findings of a faculty survey about electronic information resources conducted by the JSTOR project, and results from the Mellon-funded analysis at Yale of "books you teach every semester".

In the area of advanced networking, we have presentations on Internet2 and the UK SuperJanet4 project, on middleware developments, applications of advanced networking in the health sciences, and a discussion of the roles and opportunities for research libraries in Internet2.

Infrastructure developments are covered through an update on the Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Initiative, a report on a pilot project for localized resolution of identifiers at Harvard, and a presentation on the very promising Shibboleth authentication work coming out of Internet2's middleware efforts. Two sessions will address Z39.50: one on profile developments, and another on its relationships to W3C XML-based protocol work. Metadata developments are covered, including the emerging ONIX standard for extended bibliographic metadata.

A joint U.K.-U.S. session will address preservation developments, with emphasis on the archiving of scholarly journals in digital form; this will include discussion of some of the Mellon-sponsored work in the U.S. which builds on last year's CNI, CLIR and DLF hosted discussions on the archiving of scholarly journals. In addition, there will be a presentation on the Stanford LOCKSS Digital Preservation system, which may become a very important infrastructure component for preserving digital information, and a report on the National Library of Medicine's innovative framework for assigning permanence ratings to web resources.

Collaboration and cooperation is another crucial theme that is highlighted at this meeting through sessions that explore institutional collaboration strategies for developing digital libraries at the University of Maryland, potential collaborative strategies among institutional and disciplinary open archive projects, and instructional innovation strategies at the University of Arizona.

Course management systems are emerging as an extensive new component in institutional information infrastructure; we will have a session that examines the policy issues that are emerging with the deployment of these systems that should be of broad interest to both information technologists and librarians. In addition, we will have a session on the legal and policy implications of licensing that spans both library and information technology perspectives and concerns.

Finally, innovative new scholarly information resources and services are well represented through a series of sessions on the construction of digital libraries in areas ranging from South Asia materials to 3-dimensional artifacts; round-the-clock reference services; international work on a global digital library presented by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and the U.S. Library of Congress; an update on the Pubmed Central project at the National Library of Medicine, and a report on the very substantial progress that has taken place in the development of the NSF-supported National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library. In addition, we will have an update on experience with the AMICO art image database.

I look forward to seeing you in Washington this April 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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