----------------------------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 [log in to unmask]