CNI Task Force Meeting: A Summary Report
| Published date | 01 July 2005 |
| Pages | 4-5 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050510620208 |
| Date | 01 July 2005 |
| Author | Colby Riggs |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
CNI Task Force Meeting:
A Summary Report
Colby Riggs
4LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 6 2005, pp. 4-5, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050510620208
The Coalition for Networked
Information (CNI) held the Spring 2005
Task Force Meeting for its Task Force
representatives and other participants in
Washington, DC, on April 4-5, 2005. The
meeting offered a wide variety of timely
presentations that advanced and reported
on CNI's programs, projects and issues
from Task Force member institutions and
emphasized significant activities on the
national and international arenas.
``CNI is an organization dedicated to
supporting the transformative promise of
networked information technology for the
advancement of scholarly communication
and the enrichment of intellectual
productivity. Some 200 institutions
representing higher education, publishing,
network and telecommunications,
information technology, and libraries and
library organizations make up CNI's
Members. CNI is sponsored by the
Association of Research Libraries (ARL)
and EDUCAUSE, and are governed by a
Steering Committee chaired by Richard P.
West, of California State University.
Executive Director Clifford A. Lynch
leads the CNI Staff at our Washington,
DC headquarters.''
The opening plenary session was a
moderatedpanelsessionleadbyClifford
Lynch called the Research Libraries and
the Goggle Digitalization Initiative
which included representatives from the
key institutions involved in the project
University of Oxford, New York Public
Library (NYPL), Harvard University,
StanfordUniversity and theUniversity of
Michigan. In December 2004 Google
announced its effort to make offline
information searchable online. To
accomplish this Google Inc. working
with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford,
the University of Michigan, and the
University of Oxford as well as The New
York Public Library to digitally scan
books from their collections so that users
worldwide can search them in Google.
The panel discussion revealed a better
understanding of the project undertaken
at each institution since the role of each
institution is different in the project:
.In the Harvard's libraries they plan
to digitize a substantial number of
the 15 million volumes held in the
University's extensive library sys-
tem. Google will provide online
access to the full text of those
works that are in the public do-
main. Harvard's plans also include
the eventual development of a link
allowing Google users at Harvard
to connect directly to the online
HOLLIS (Harvard Online Library
Information System) catalog for
information on the location and
availability at Harvard of works
identified through a Google search.
.At the NYPL they will make a subset
of its books, a collection of its public
domain books, which will be
scanned in their entirety and made
available for free to the public online.
Users will be able to search and
browse the full text of these works
availableinfulltextontheweb.
.For the University of Oxford's
BodleianLibrarytheyplantodigi-
tize more than one million of it's
printed books, and make works
available worldwide on the Internet,
through Goo gle's popula r search
services and the Oxford web site.
.The project provides Stanford Uni-
versity which is publisher of both
the Stanford University Press and
the HighWire Press to expand their
digitalization efforts beyond scho-
larly journals to include books
which had been severely limited
in scope for both technical and
financial reasons.
.University of Michigan libraries will
add the seven million volumes to the
Google search engine. For works in
copyright, a search will point the
way to the existence of relevant
volumes by returning a snippet of
text, along with information that
identifies publishers or libraries
wheretheworkcanbefound.
The following are highlights of the
more than thirty diverse breakout
sessions. Some sessions had strong
connections to the Coalition's 2004-
2005 Program Plan and other sessions
were of special interest to the
participating institutions.
There were a few sessions on the
topics of institutional repositories and the
management of locally-produced
scholarship. One session on this theme
was presented by Daniel Greenstein and
Peter Brantley for the California Digital
Library, The Digital Archival Repository
at the California Digital Library. They
reported on a new library services model
they are implementing and the
fundamental re-engineering of the
underlying technology of their digital
archival repository. Greenstein discussed
their goal of lowering the costs involved
in building high-quality trusted
collections by providing a suite of web-
accessible services that libraries and
other information organizations can use
to create and gather collection content
that their users require, to organize and
present that content in ways and with
tools that meet their users' needs and to
manage the content persistently over the
longer term. Brantley described the CDL
Common Framework (CF). The CF is a
philosophy governing software
development , a conceptual de sign for
digital library services, a specific
technical architecture, and a set of
developed services. The CF philosophy
is to design composite, modular,
lightweight products that can be designed
quickly and make replacement and
enhancement of the product easy.
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