Coalition of Networked Information: Fall 2005 Task Force Meeting
| Date | 01 January 2006 |
| Published date | 01 January 2006 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050610653922 |
| Pages | 17-21 |
| Author | Hannelore B. Rader |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
Coalition of Networked Information:
Fall 2005 Task Force Meeting
Hannelore B. Rader
LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 1 2006, pp. 17-21, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050610653922 17
The Coalition of Networked
Information (CNI) held their annual
Fall Task Force Meeting in Phoenix,
Arizona on December 5-6, 2005. More
than 320 participants representing
approximately 120 member institutions
and several vendors attended this event.
CNI was founded in 1990 by the
Association of Research Libraries
(ARL), and EDUCAUSE.
The Coalition is guided by the
following mission:
CNI is an organization to advance the
transformative promise of networked
information technology for the advance-
ment of scholarly communication and the
enrichment of intellectual productivity.
The organizations represented
within CNI share major interests related
to the use of digital information in
higher education, building digital
repositories and applications using the
internet, Google and others for
scholarship research and educational
partnerships. CNI is supported by a
taskforce representing more than 200
dues-paying member institutions. The
task force meets twice a year to address
three central themes:
(1) Developing and managing net-
worked information content.
(2) Transforming organizations, pro-
fessions and individuals.
(3) Building technology, standards and
infrastructure.
In addition, CNI engages in
advocacy and consultative activities.
CNI executive director Clifford
Lynch presided over the opening
plenary session, and addressed key
developments in networked
information, discussed progress within
the CNI agenda and summarized CNI's
program plan for 2005-2006, available
at www.cni.org
Mr Lynch reviewed the 2005 CNI
activities and summarized the
Coalition's priorities for 2006 in terms
of content, organization and
technology. He stressed the role of CNI
in managing digital assets in a rapidly
changing scholarly communication
environment. He underscored the
importance of cooperation among
universities in building digital
repositories and he stressed that new
partnerships are needed between
libraries, information technology and
research. Data sharing, open access and
public engagement will create greater
visibility for institutions. He stated that
40 percent of the larger academic
institutions in the USA have
repositories and that the nature of these
repositories differs from other nations.
This was documented by
representatives from the UK and The
Netherlands who described their
national repository efforts.
Mr Lynch also described data
management, grant-funding, collabora-
tion, database longevity, and trust
issues. He outlined various scenarios
related to digital libraries and their
involvement in teaching and research,
particularly, in the distance education
environment. He also presented issues
related to intellectual property rights in
terms of faculty and students, course-
management systems, privacy concerns
within the digital world and scholarly
communication. The importance of
learning spaces, multimedia, web
archiving, digital preservation and new
learning and teaching methods, disaster
recovery plans and storage were also
mentioned.
The final challenge discussed by Mr
Clifford was the landscape of
information services. There is a
tendency to increase systems which are
overlapping as demonstrated by
massive digital collections, learning
objects repositories, institutional
repositories, disciplinary repositories,
institutional archives, faculty and
personal collections. Exploring these
various landscapes and defining their
functionality will be an exciting
endeavor in the future.
Tony Hey, vice president for
Technical Computing, Microsoft
Corporation, presented the closing
session. He spoke about ``E-science, the
library community and the support of
research.'' The talk reviewed the
elements of the vision that
``Cyberinfrastructure'' will provide a
collaborative research environment for
the global academic community.
Scientists and engineers are
collaborating with computer scientists
and the IT industry to create the new
e-Infrastructure. Such an infrastructure
will support the creation of dynamic
``virtual organizations and collaborated
environments'' in academia and
industry. Such cooperation will also
support both the e-learning and digital
library communities and many business
applications. It may also change the
way scientific publications, institutional
repositories and digital archives are
linked.
A total of 36 project briefings
provided an excellent snapshot of
current digital activities related to
higher education and national library
activities. The briefings are
summarized below.
CIOs look at research support
A panel of chief information officers
from the University of Michigan, the
University of Washington, the
University of Iowa, Pennsylvania
University, Purdue University and
Arizona State University, highlighted
current issues, plans and strategies for
dealing with support of researchers in
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