CNI Task Force Meeting

Citation

Riggs, C. (2002), "CNI Task Force Meeting", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919hac.002

CNI Task Force Meeting

Colby Riggs

The Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) held their annual Spring Task Force Meeting in Washington, DC, April 15-16, 2002. Twice each year representatives of CNI's member organizations gather for Task Force Meetings. Each meeting covers a broad array of topics. The meetings are designed to explore new technologies, content, and applications; to further collaboration; to analyze technology policy issues; and to catalyze the development and deployment of new projects.

The CNI Task Force Meeting includes:

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  Project briefings, which are one-hour breakout sessions that address issues of current interest to the membership, including architectures and standards, economic challenges, and innovations in teaching and learning. Briefings include at least 20 minutes of general discussion and are attended by 25-75 IT and library administrators, publishing executives, government officials, and others with a high level of interest in and understanding of networked information issues.

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  Plenary sessions, which offer presentations of CNI's latest initiatives and insights from national and international leaders in the networked information community.

There were two plenary sessions at this meeting. The opening session was a presentation by a panel from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Hal Abelson, Vjay Kumar, and Ann Wolpert, describing two new institutional projects. The first is the Open Courseware Initiative. The purpose of this initiative is to make MIT course materials available world-wide free of charge via the Internet. The second project is called the Dspace initiative, which is a project to build a multidisciplinary, durable digital repository that will persistently store and disseminate faculty educational and research material.

The closing session included the presentation of the Paul Evan Peters award to Vinton Cerf. Cerf is Senior Vice President for Internet Architecture and Technology for World Com. He gave a thought-provoking presentation revolving around technology predictions for the future. Cerf is known for "thinking out side of the box" and described situations that seemed fascinating and compelling.

There were more than 30 breakout sessions, which covered a variety of topics. The following are a few of the highlights:

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  Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Initiative. Clifford Lynch, CNI, Daniel Greenstein, California Digital Library, and Herbert Van de Somple, Los Alamos National Laboratory, described the activities of the OAI community. The community has been defining and experimenting with an interoperability architecture that is based on metadata harvesting. The goal of the project is to provide an easy way for data providers to expose their metadata and for service providers to access that metadata and use it as input to value-added services.

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  Digital preservation. Vicky Reich, Stanford University, spoke about a joint Stanford University and Sun Microsystems project called LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe). The project provides a strategy for long-term preservation by systematically caching content in a self-correcting P2P network. The LOCKSS software enables libraries to maintain high integrity persistent caches of electronic journal content to which they have subscribed.

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  Digital reference. Diane Kresh, Library of Congress and Chip Niles, OCLC, described the Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS) which provides professional reference service to researchers any time, anywhere, through an international, digital network of libraries and related institutions. CDRS has over 250 members and is lauching the next generation of its co-branded (with OCLC) peer-to-peer service with added features that will make it easier for a library to escalate an information need from one network to another seamlessly.Rachel Cheng, Wesleyan University, and Denise Troll, Carnegie Mellon University, described the innovative ways their university libraries are meeting the client's needs for reference assistance. They are involved in the first year of a pilot project to test a real-time collaborative reference service on the Internet for a group of liberal arts colleges including Wesleyan, Connecticut, Smith, Wellesley and Vassar.

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  Authentication. Michael Gates, Georgetown University, spoke about Shibboleth, a project of Internet 2 Middleware architects working closely with IBM/Tivoli, which is developing architectures, frameworks and practical technologies to support inter-institutional sharing of resources that are subject to access controls. Shibboleth's emphasis is on user privacy and control over information release differs from other efforts in the access control area and makes it of particular interest to higher education content providers.

The CNI Spring 2002 Task Force Meeting was a very informative meeting. The plenary sessions and project briefings were of the highest quality. The next CNI Task Force Meeting is Fall 2002 in San Antonio, Texas from December 5-6, 2002.

Colby Riggs(cmriggs@lib.uci.edu) is Co-editor of LHTN and a Systems Librarian at the University of California Irvine Libraries in Irvine, California, USA.