----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This message was cross-posted to VRA-L.
I was pleased to attend the CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) Fall
1996 Task Force Meeting in San Francisco last Friday and Saturday, December
6 and 7, 1996 as the ARLIS/NA and VRA representative.
CNI was founded in 1990 by Paul Peter Evans, and is sponsored by
Association of Research Libraries (ARL), CAUSE, and Educom. CNI is managed
by a nine-person steering committee, and the task force membership consists
of over 220 higher education institutions, publishers, network service
providers, computer hardware, software, and systems companies, library
networks and organizations, and public and state libraries. Neither VRA
nor ARLIS are members, but are invited along with other information
society's to send a representative.
The motto and overall goal of CNI is to advance scholarship and
intellectual productivity. The more specific goals of CNI are to:
1. Facilitate the transition to networked scholarly communication
and publishing
2. Promote institutional readiness and professional development,
and foster cross-sector perspectives, communication, and collaboration
3. Influence the development of advanced information technologies
and services
To find out whether your institution is part of the Task Force, go to the
CNI Home Page and look for the list of Task Force members. I suspect that
most heads of libraries do not regularly report CNI activities to their
staff. The CNI current activities are interesting, primarily because
information or results of these activities work their way into local
projects or presentations or publications in library and information
literature. Since CNI's current activities are not listed on their home
page at the moment, I will just mention a few of the titles:
Enterprise-wide information strategies
Assessing the academic networked environment
Access to and services for federal information in the networked
environment
Networked information discovery and retrieval (metadata)
Metadata for cross-disciplinary access
If you have Web access, you can access the CNI Home page at:
http://www.cni.org
The Spring meeting is usually held in metropolitan Washington D.C., and the
Fall meeting is held in conjunction with the annual meeting of either CAUSE
or EDUCOM. The Spring Task Force meeting will be held April 1-2, 1997 at
the Crystal City Marriott, Washington D.C.
The Task Force meeting is loosely structured. At this meeting there were
three plenary sessions, twenty-eight project briefings, and eight issues
collaboratories. Plenary sessions are open to all registrants and have no
conflicting sessions scheduled at the same time. The project briefings, or
presentations about projects at the asundry institutions, were held in
three time slots. That means that up to ten sessions were held
concurrently! If you have complained about ARLIS or VRA scheduling two or
three sessions simultaneously, imagine having to choose between ten! Issue
collaboratories, or collaborative group discussions around selected themes,
were a new feature this year. There were four simultaneous group
discussions each day. CNI usually schedules a session, whether plenary,
project briefing, or issue collaboratory, followed by a half hour break.
During the breaks, ample and good food is available. Thus, considerable
discussion happens in between sessions. This is particularly useful for
the heads of libraries and network systems who know each other and each
other's work, but can be a bit difficult for the first time attendees who
know few of the other attendees.
The theme of the Fall Task Force meeting was Enterprise-Wide Information
Strategies (EWIS). EWIS refers to the changing information and management
needs of an institution, an enterprise, in the information arena. The
planning for the merger of library, academic and administrative computing
at an institution of higher education is an example of an institution that
will benefit from discussion of enterprise-wide information strategies in
the areas of hardware and software, budgets, policies and practices, staff
and facilities. The theme itself runs only very loosely through the vast
pot-pourri of sessions. Choosing which sessions to attend, with the
exception of the plenary sessions, can be a daunting task.
It is difficult to speak of the highlights of the meeting, for the sudden
death of CNI's founder and only executive director Paul Peter Evans this
November 18th at the age of 53 stunned and saddened most of the attendees.
Paul's presence, even in his absence, was palpable during the many breaks,
of course, and during the moving memorial service held for him Friday
evening. Eulogies about Paul, his substantial contributions to the
progress of scholarly networked information, his great kindness, humor, and
love of food can be easily found on the CNI web site.
Project briefings covered a wide variety of topics, with themes of digital
library projects, electronic publishing, electronic journal libraries
(JSTOR), electronic subscription services (Swets), and numerous
experiments. Many abstracts of the project briefings are on the CNI web
site in advance of the meeting, and will remain there until the report of
the meeting is available. The group discussions covered payment for and
acquisition of electronic resources and, of course, copyright. This
particular session was a bit too unfocused, with comments ranging from "we
have 2.5 years invested in CONFU - maybe we should sign" to "the market
hasn't settled out enough to make it worth our time negotiating site
licenses yet" to "what's wrong with copyright and fair use?" Of particular
interest was the plenary system that featured Sherry Turkle, author of The
Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984) and Life on the Screen:
Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995).
Although I was pleased to represent both organizations, the wealth of
sessions made choosing extremely difficult, a task that would be made
easier with two reps instead of one.
Maryly Snow
Architecture Slide Library
University of California, Berkeley
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