 Good afternoon everybody. I think it's time to open our full membership meeting I'm Cliff Lynch the director of the coalition and I Am so pleased you're all here. I Can't tell you how pleased I am that you're all here having been you know Watching odd moments on the weather channel over the past 48 hours. I particularly congratulate those of you who made your way through some of the inclement weather in the middle of the country and All I can say is I think you're gonna find the trip was worthwhile I've got a number of things to do before I get into my My main topic here, which is to Look back over recent developments and discuss our 2010-2011 program plan. I do want to take a moment to particularly Welcome our international visitors. I know that as challenging as getting around this country is getting Around the world is even more challenging and I know we have a number of international visitors with us a Special welcome to you. I Also want to recognize Our colleague from the library Organization for those of you who aren't familiar with library They are very similar to the Association of Research Libraries for Europe and Walter Schaller their director. I believe is here. I had an opportunity to join them at their end annual meeting earlier this year and I'm delighted that they're that We're able to have these connections with our colleagues in Europe. So Welcome. I Want to also take a moment to introduce Someone to you all I hope she's here and We're gonna find out Every Year CNI working together with With our colleagues ARL and edge cause Award the Paul Evan Peters Fellowship This is a fellowship for a graduate student in Information science or library science That was established in the memory of the late Paul Peters and We look for a kind of a special person for this someone who not only has the Scholarly and intellectual Credentials and goals that you'd certainly look for but someone who in their reprieve in their Statement resonates with the things that made Paul Peters so special his commitment to civic responsibility democracy imagination and humor and We found Wonderful awardee for 2010 Jess Knopfler who is a Doctoral student at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland College Park And I believe she has been able to join us and if she's here would she give a give a wave Congratulations Understand by the way, I can't see anything past the first couple of rows because of these lights So I rely on you all back there to help the last thing by way of Sort of introduction I want to do is on is is another Recognition Believe it or not C&I is actually celebrating its 20th anniversary I Sort of you know, just take a deep breath every time I say that Because one way or another I have been involved since the earliest days When Paul and key group of leaders in higher education Pulled this organization together Today I want to honor one of those people Richard West formerly of the University of California now in an emeritus role at the California State System Richard was there at the beginning in fact there is a wonderful wonderful story, which I will tell And probably get wrong About how the two the leaders of the two predecessor organizations to EDUCAUS Jane Rylund and Bob Heterich before the two merged appointed Richard as sort of their emissary from the CIO perspective to go and approach Dwayne Webster who's now the executive director emeritus of ARL about joining forces to put the coalition together and as it was wonderfully described at a Fesh rift for Dwayne about a year or two ago Richard went into his office and came out and wasn't sure who had sold who what But that's how these things get established and how Good ideas, you know, gel among the leadership Richard has just completed an Astounding and unprecedented 20 years of service leading the CNI Steering Committee and has through those 20 years been Fabulous source of advice leadership Support and Has been one of those people without which I am quite sure we would not be where we are today and we've got a Momento for him which both he and I are afraid to touch So we're just gonna kind of point at it here and then ship it to him, but Richard Thank you for all that you've done and join me in thanking Richard and now Let me go right from there into some conversation about The program plan for the coming year and some of the things that have been happening and The 20th anniversary. I think is a good place to start We've been talking actually with our steering committee for about a year or so now about what we might do to observe that 20th anniversary and We've kind of gone back and forth about it a little bit There was some thought that we might you know do something looking back Historically at all the things we've achieved and at some of the things that have happened over those 20 years, but I think I I felt and I think the steering committee also felt that Really the right thing to do would be to focus on the future to think of those past achievements only as prologue That really what we should be doing to mark that 20th anniversary is something that looks forward to our 40th anniversary as Much more than looking back over our first 20 years so What we're going to do over this program year and part of the next is we're going to put together a e-book and We're tentatively titling that the next 20 years and It will probably have some lengthy subtitle, which we haven't quite figured out yet but it's really intended to be sort of Analytic predictive. It's really not about scenarios Scenarios are something that people do often to help understand the future. In fact ARL has just done a splendid set of scenarios about the future of the research enterprise and We actually will have a session talking about those for people who are interested in scenario planning, but Here I'm thinking much more about trying not about looking at outliers But trying to look at where we're likely to go over the next 20 years and what the key issues are and To look fairly broadly The future of higher education of course of scholarship of Information technology of communication and media all of these will be on the table It's hard to really talk about these though without Talking in some cases more broadly about changes in society We've certainly seen and been reminded again and again over the last 20 years that you know higher education and scholarship are not Disconnected from the economy from changes in the social fabric from changes in the In the geopolitical nature of the world even So, you know, we will go into those as needed Why 20 years? We kind of debated this around a little bit especially in light of Of you know is 20 years just a convenience because it's our 20th anniversary and I actually felt like 20 years is about the right length of time There's actually, you know a whole literature on predicting the future and I've always really enjoyed future predictions understanding full well how Parallels it is There's a tendency often to Overestimate change in the short term to underestimate it in the long term There are different kinds of failure modes There's a wonderful book that Arthur Clark wrote about predicting the future where he tries to parcel them out for example into failures of imagination and failures of nerve in other words not having the The confidence to actually predict the things you you can imagine what happened 20 years Kind of feels like it's in the right spot to me It's it's not moving into science fiction But it's long enough that we can look for things that are more than incremental change so that's what we've settled on and Here's how we're gonna proceed on this I'm gonna prepare an initial opening essay for this and Hoping to have that done by the spring meeting Or thereabouts and we'll put that up on the web and we're gonna invite Everybody who wants to Write essays building on that or responding to that Or challenging that to feel free to do so they don't have to be enormously long essays part of my hope in writing that opening essay is to frame things a bit and to be able to entice people in because they're not just starting completely with a blank slate and We'll reach out to Many of the people not just here today But people who've done keynotes for CNI meetings in the past people in some cases perhaps outside the CNI community and As these come in over the remainder of 2011 we will accumulate them up on a website and then Towards the end of 2011 hopefully in time for next December's meeting we will take That opening essay and a selection of the contributed essays and we will package them up as an e-book We'll probably also provide some kind of print-on-demand At cost Arrangement for that e-book. We haven't worked out all the details of that yet We will of course leave all of the all of the contributed Essays on the website, but we want to kind of have a finite book out of it. That's of manageable size That people can can treat as a book and I'll probably write a sort of a concluding chapter that tries to tie together some of the Some of the submitted essays as well. So I'm hoping that by the end of calendar 2011 we'll be able at our at our fall meeting to have that as a sort of a Recognition of our 20th anniversary and as an opportunity for us all to look ahead To what the next 20 years may bring And I hope that one of the things that it will do Honestly is to provide a little bit of offset From the focus that many of us have been dealing with over the last couple of years, which has been I think Unusually short term for our community because of the various budget and organizational pressures We've been facing and the need to respond very rapidly to those stresses Clearly strategic planning, you know Proceeds in cycles where sometimes you are more short term and sometimes you're more long term I think that when you looked at some of the things that we were doing as a community Five seven years ago. They did have a somewhat longer term Horizon on them and I think it would be useful to inject some of that thinking Back into our strategic work I also Think that when you look at some of the very Abrupt changes that we've dealt with over the past few years They actually have and I think we all know in our guts that they have long-term ramifications Not just short-term responses that really need to be thought through on a strategic basis So I really hope that this project will help us to do that as well So I look forward to working with you on This effort. I think it's going to be a lot of fun and I hope it's going to be Truly intellectually stimulating Work that produces a significant result going forward I Think you know that It really is a particularly Useful and fruitful time to start thinking about some of these longer term things I was really struck as I worked on this talk and I worked through my notes About thing notable things or things that really caught my attention that had happened in the past year that I wanted to Mention in the context of our program plan There really are some very interesting things happening in the world out there some Terribly unexpected things some things that you know if you asked me about five years ago I would have said probably Belonged more in the realm of science fiction or at least you know techno thrillers or something then actually happening out there but I Really want to try and as I talked through some of our programmatic areas also take a few Little detours related to them into some really quite striking things Quite incredible things that are happening out in the world so The place I want to start is with cyber infrastructure E-science the note e-scholarship the fundamental notion that we've been working with in the last few years That high-performance networking the integration of sensors and experimental apparatus high-performance computing very large-scale storage software that facilitates collaboration virtual research environments virtual organizations is Going to change the way we do scholarship change the way we document scholarship Change fundamentally the way we communicate scholarship and I think you can already see You know big steps happening in areas around there If you just look at the underlying networks We've already seen in this past year The emergence of the plan for sort of the next The next level of backbone networking coming out of organizations like national lambda rail and internet, too We're now talking about relatively routinely provisioning Research groups with dedicated 10 gigabit or higher data paths to move data We're actually seeing You know the serious integration of sensors with networks in various ways Imagine a World where somebody can see something and call for help in understanding it and they can get help they can Establish a collaboration in a matter of a minute By marshaling up Observational apparatus around the world to look at an event We're actually moving into those kind of territories and we're seeing this in other places, too Not just scholarly work. I don't know if you've been following some of the Discussion over the past year or two about so-called high-frequency trading in the stock markets basically the deal here is that The action is getting so fast that the speed of light matters and How close you are to the exchange computers and whether you can? Colocate and whether you can get direct fiber or there's a router in the way, you know Regenerating a packet across multiple spans of fiber actually makes a difference This is the new world of fast networks and you know again This is the sort of thing You would never have imagined this or I certainly wouldn't have a few years ago that you know Speed of light would become an issue in a context like that if we look though at perhaps the area of greatest interest to many of us here its data curation and how we manage and ensure the reuse of Data that is produced by scholarly work and here probably the big milestone Was the October announcement by the National Science Foundation that effective January? 2011 they were going to require data management plans for For Proposals that were submitted to the foundation in this they join the National Institutes of Health Which has had a somewhat similar although not as comprehensive? Requirement in place for a couple of years This is a major Step because it brings Researchers across a very wide range of disciplines who are at our institutions face-to-face with the question of how do I Inventory the data products that come out of my work. How do I make judgments about what are likely to be important? For the ones that are important Where do I go to find services and assistance in? documenting and mounting and preserving and Making available these data sets Simply Making that Conversation happen across a very wide range of disciplines is a tremendously important step And I would note that I think it's very likely that you will see other funders follow directly in the footsteps of NIH and NSF over the next couple of years I think you'll see other federal funders stepping up here certainly many private funding Bodies are already starting to take positions here now I want to note that There's still an awful lot to do here One issue just a little you know detail is actually getting services in place to support these researchers At a campus level at a disciplinary level This means everything from helping them to do the intellectual analysis To helping them to carry out to actually execute the plans they put in place There are some serious Unresolved problems with some of what the Funding agencies are doing one issue is that the guidance that they're giving researchers is terribly general another is that if Review panels are supposed to be taking these data of management plans into account in Assessing the merit of Proposals they probably could use some guidance about what makes a good data management plan and what makes a bad data management plan We need to find ways to do this In fact one way to think about what's going on is that this is a sort of a great collective experiment At the same time that it's an important shift in policy One of the things that I think could be a very very useful step Would be to try and make arrangements to get a database of the data management plans For successful proposals my understanding is that those are public That once once proposals fund this kind of material becomes Becomes public and to do to use these as a basis for trying to analyze What we should be doing going forward and to get a better grip on the needs of various institutions and various disciplines to find out how many researchers might be served by profiling or templating approaches which Simplify the kinds of management they need to do on their data because it's of a sort of an Identifiable and relatively well standardized genre as opposed to very much one-off things You'll see some thinking in some of the presentations here about Over the course of the next day and a half about early institutional responses to this but I think that This is a tremendous challenge and a tremendous opportunity and really represents a sort of a milestone in Making a lot of this rhetoric about data being as important as publications a much more tangible kind of an issue Now I also want to note that we don't have a real good understanding of Life cycles of data I mean particular We don't really know how long a lot of that different kinds of data should live This we're gonna need to understand as well. I think one of the things though that is promising maybe a good sign here is that I'm not hearing words like forever perpetuity life of the Republic You know eternity Used a lot in the data curation Context if you look at the early guidance out of NSF for example They they're sort of talking a few years after the completion of the grant like three five You're you're hearing you know conversations about well in the short term for Reproducibility and then in a few for at least a few years For someone to be able to pick up the work now I don't want to suggest that that's for all data obviously there is data that is used particularly in collective ways contributions to Gen Bank meteorological observations that form part of a You know permanent Corpus of time series meteorological observations There are lots and lots of things like that that obviously we're not going to toss out in two or three years, but this notion of sort of The the starting point for the negotiation is keep everything forever Doesn't seem to be on the table and that's a really good thing because We really don't know a lot about how to keep everything forever either economically or technically we're actually pretty good though at keeping bits for five years and Five years or six years is around the plausible horizon where you can probably get away without even having to do a format migration in most cases so maybe we're being led into this in a in a kind of an incremental way for better or for worse and I think I think maybe for better because These are challenging enough things that involve building up Collaborations and trust relationships And it is good to take them a step at a time. I would be remiss to not recognize the open data movement that's showing up kind of in course in Direct conjunction with this the whole idea that scientific data should be open should be shared That we should find ways to do that And that that should be recognized both in the norms and values of scholarly disciplines and in the policy framework within those Within which those disciplines function in society more broadly I think that that is gaining inexorable traction in many areas and You actually can point to remarkable developments here, for example the pooling of data among pharmaceutical companies and And among University academic researchers Through mechanisms like the sage bioinformatics commons or the work that was done recently in identifying Markers for Alzheimer's disease These are these are things that you know would have been Intractable barriers a few years ago, and I think show how much thinking is shifting here One of the areas where I don't think we're paying enough attention though is to software much of this data is inexorably connected to software that interprets it and uses it and in fact one of the very Interesting streams of development that I'm starting to recognize emerging Is really around transparency and reproducibility There are researchers like Victoria Stoddard for example who are doing some very compelling and disturbing work on the erosion of reproducibility in scientific research because of the complexity of the software environments and the data analysis that underpins these making it very difficult even for Researchers to reproduce their own results sometimes Recently there there's been a recognition of how important simulation and modeling have become basically data software and Literature all coming together into models and the notion Promoted by folks like Ian Foster for example that we should be moving towards Models of in areas that are of great public interest that really are open and Where everybody can inspect the model run the model themselves Change the parameters on the model if they want to and compare their results You're seeing this discussion for example in climate modeling where there seems to where of course There are very high-stakes decisions being made now about climate models and climate change and where there seems to be some move from Proprietary models to more open models We really do seem in fact to be entering a sort of an age of very large-scale simulation models I can remember as a much younger person back in the Oh the mid 70s running into people like was a Leontiev who wanted to do a model of the world economy and At least back then this was really quite challenging You really didn't have enough data to do it right. I mean you could do sort of macro economic models People have been doing that for years, but the resolution was not what you would like Now you actually are seeing things like a proposal that I was looking at recently Led by a team out of ETH and Zurich fellow named Dirk Helbing and his colleagues They're asking the European Union for a billion euros of funding to basically build a very large scale simula social simulation of a number of processes having to do with global civilization economic Transportation agricultural and they've actually worked their way through this to come up with roughly 70 major databases that are around right now that are huge Which would provide a pretty good level of input to this and you've actually got the Computational horsepower now to do these kind of simulations at detail We're actually seeing the emergence in the social sciences broadly of new kinds of Simulation infrastructure these huge multi-agent Things that are geographically keyed which I think are going to be both new kinds of scientific instruments new Objects to drive new data sources to drive public policy And they're going to play a hugely important role I think we really need to think about how we're going to manage the documentation of these kinds of things Now It's getting as those comments should suggest to be a pretty strange world out there in terms of artifacts that make a difference one of the other areas where we've been active this year and will continue to be active is in digital preservation and By digital preservation part of what I want to suggest is very much in scope is striving for a continued understanding of what actually Constitutes are sort of collective social and intellectual record One of the places where there's been a very Powerful ongoing Conversation over the past few years has been the changing nature of news as it moves away from very fixed sort of things to these Continually updated databases how you actually document news and news flow and the evolution of news when something happens And there's a series of successive Reports as more is learned and clarity is gained The Library of Congress as part of its end it program has led some very important inquiries in there And in fact did one earlier this fall on the future of community journalism Community journalism actually you can think of and we can get into the distinctions later if For those who are really into this as kind of a form of social network and one of the things that you know, certainly is unquestionable is Just as you may or may not like video games if you look at the number of hundreds of thousands of hours a year That people spend playing them It would be pretty hard to justify not documenting them as an important aspect of our culture today same deal with social media and In fact, we are starting to see serious thinking and a little bit of action about how we are going to Document and preserve social media You may have seen the announcement that the Library of Congress is getting the Twitter archive And there are scholars who are very interested in what can be done with that You know at first glance There was some questions raised about you know, do we really need to archive this? well Yeah, we probably do first on that principle of simply amount of time spent on it, but secondly people actually I think Underestimate and misunderstand how powerful these things are. I saw an incredible and kind of frightening analysis Earlier this year about the role that Twitter specifically played in orchestrating civil protest in Iran after the last election and You know that you could actually people had visualizations of how the word spread from One to one person to another on there Unfortunately, you could also imagine the secret police running the same visualization in darn near real time there So yes, these kinds of tools are important in fact Not only are they important retro actively, but here's another kind of interesting thing that's showing up it's actually turning out that some of This social media and I'm using social media in the very broad sense to include Search systems if you can sit in a place like inside of Google watching all the search queries go by in which case This kind of becomes a social media that's visible to you and not visible to anybody else It turns out these things are predictive They're not simply Subject to retrospective analysis There have been a whole series of papers recently by people like Halverian the chief economist at Google with titles like predicting the present Where basically they look at query streams or on Google or Twitter streams or other sorts of things And they discover that actually These are good predictors of things like how much a movie is going to grow in its first weekend It actually does better than the auction market that Hollywood had been using and other people had been using to estimate this It's pretty good with books and music It turns out that it's not very good at predicting the stock market although arguably That's that's sort of too general a thing and maybe if you frame it in a in much narrower ways it is But there have been studies done there Here's another one. So It turns out that Google has been working with the Centers for Disease Control and The idea is that they want to be able to predict particularly infectious disease outbreaks and They use this to predict flu outbreaks or if not predict Identify, you know somewhere right on that cusp of Identify and predict and the way they do that is they look at people Putting in queries about symptoms all of those queries or most of them are geo located There is so much data here that a little noise hardly matters, you know So you get the geolocation wrong once in a while or tag the wrong thing You actually get something with some correlation there and flu is pretty hard I would suggest for doing this because Flu is a reasonably familiar thing for most people if you think about a more Unusual infectious disease with You know somewhat less commonplace symptoms. I would suspect that this has much more powerful Resolution for identifying outbreaks, so we're actually starting to see some of these social scale media turning out to have predictive powers which are Going to I think be very interesting competitive advantages for various players it is interesting to me how Difficult it is to look at many of these in the context of academic social science research because of the Possibility the complexities that human subjects constraints can involve here But it's clear that something very new is happening here very powerful and That we really do need to come to grips with how we manage these kinds of things I'd throw out, you know, just one other example here about You know how curious this kind of world of public data is getting WikiLeaks All of a sudden these enormous dumps of data on the net that Presumably has some substantial Value in illuminating historic activity public policy things like that We certainly see in a closely allied area Libraries starting and universities starting to move into the area of the stewardship of records of human rights violations and That has proved to be a very important but also a very dangerous area as There are people who are unhappy about the existence of those records much as there are people who are unhappy about the Availability of WikiLeaks. I will spare us the question of How many libraries have decided that they should capture a copy of the WikiLeaks archive as part of their research collections going forward, but I think these are exactly the kind of Puzzles that we're going to be dealing with and You know Again just to go a little farther out there. It's been very interesting to see the level of viciousness that has occurred in some of the network attacks surrounding WikiLeaks and the termination of funding to WikiLeaks by various credit card organizations and things like that the network is actually getting to be a Vicious place sometimes and in different ways than it used to or more extreme ways than it used to How many of you have seen the reportage on Stuxnet that ring any bells? I see just a handful of hands this was a computer Worm I think would probably be the best way to describe it that Turned up a few months ago except that It turns out it was actually targeted at some very specific kinds of electronic control systems that Seem to be used among other things for controlling large collections of centrifuges refining uranium this was a very complicated and very You know sort of precisely designed thing That really seems to have been targeted to very specific places and it's not entirely clear where it came from It is anything but clear whether it actually worked and what effect it had but it begins to You know remind us about How highly targeted high stakes things can get to be on the net I think that there are you know lots of implications here for what the documentation of the social record looks like and our ability to hang on to that documentation and to have continued confidence in its integrity But let me get back to the sort of core issues around Around digital preservation for a minute. I want to say a few more things about that We saw published this year the report of the so-called blue ribbon task force on sustainable digital preservation Which I get the privilege of serving on along with several other people I see here That was an attempt to really look at sort of the economics and the organizational strategies of Preserving various kinds of digital data I can't say that I'm Totally satisfied with the answers we found but I think it was a Helpful step forward and I think it contains a number of messages again about life cycles of data about the notion that stewardship responsibilities may change over time that There's a lot of things we don't know about how long we want to keep various kinds of material and that patterns of Keep it for ten years Hand it off in a formal way make a formal reassessment of it may very well have their their place as we try and find Our way forward here The last development I'll point to in the preservation area is the rise of new scale phenomena and I see David Rosenthal here for example who has done Some of the finest work on that and who we've heard from in recent Months about this What we're starting to see is a new set of phenomena both in Computing and in data storage where basically the sort of simplest version of it is in a big enough system things are always broken and You need to be able to design the system so that it works even though some of the things in it are always broken and You know that's been a theme of computing for Decades and decades once upon a time they made computers out of vacuum tubes and They had a terrible problem as they started making bigger computers out of vacuum tubes Because they'd never work or they'd work for a minute and then die Because you'd blow tubes and it turned out the way they fixed that at least to start is they Decided to burn in the tubes before installing them because normal practice up till that time was you didn't kind of Preburn in tubes, so you lost a lot of them to infant mortality And that let them get over that hurdle now We've actually got you know discs that are getting so big that the probability that you can read the entire disc Physical disc without an error is starting to get lousy So the notion of Reconstructing things by reading the two discs that didn't fail Isn't necessarily a really good strategy anymore And I mean there are much more technical ways to get into this But I'm I'm just trying to give you a flavor of what's happening is that we're we're scaling up in Computation and in storage to places where we need very different ways of thinking about systems some of this work now is being taken up under the banner of resilient system design and It looks to me like this is going to have a very important kind of ongoing Conversation with digital preservation in coming years Let me turn to some other areas though where We're where we have interests in the program plan and talk about a few developments and Maybe a place to start is Mobile computing We had a wonderful executive round table this morning on strategic planning for mobile computing and it really is clear that some very Interesting things are going on here This is not just about laptops when Wi-Fi it's not just about cell phones We're actually starting to see the emergence of a bunch of other devices that sit in the middle we're also starting to see the repurposing of extant things that may have started life as cell phones into Distributed sensor things image capture things Geo location beacons overlays through which to view the world Really completely new kinds of devices and It's very confusing what to make of some of this right now Some of it is having Magnificent social impacts. I mean the simply the notion Which is now old news of putting a camera in everybody's pocket has had an awful lot of ramifications in News in transparency of the activity of public officials All kinds of things have changed as a result of that In pretty significant ways. I think we'll see a lot more change going on there One thing I do want to just note briefly because I think that The people here will be particularly who are often deeply concerned with Access to information resources will resonate with this one Once upon a time back in the early 1990s before web browsers we actually had a Sort of a You know a zoo full of one-off applications Clients that gave you access to one or a silo of Information resources and there were lots of these clients and lots of information Resources there were efforts to develop applications protocols like Z3950 that might let clients talk to different resources But these seem to be fighting a constant uphill battle against various Suppliers who really wanted to keep things siloed Well now we have a very weird thing going on in the mobile world We started with web browsers that were the same as web browsers on laptops or desktop machines Except they just had really really little screens and they were really really slow and then someone had the idea about Well, let's have mobile websites that basically kind of redesigned the Information that's displayed to be more amenable to a very limited piece of screen real estate and take some of the more egregious flash and other garbage out of there Now but but still, you know giving you sort of a common tool that operated across lots of resources Now we see the rise of the app The one-off app on a mobile device that wants to talk to a specific information resource and we actually see the population of these devices by hundreds of apps each of which talks to one specific information resource and There is at least some evidence although the data I've seen is somewhat ambiguous that At least some classes of users express a significant preference for apps as opposed to mobile general-purpose mobile web browsers This is something that we really need to think very hard about as we think about our strategies for integrating mobile devices into World of information resources It's a place. We've been before It's a place where there are definitely pros and cons and Also, there are some very real issues about market forces and Walk in here around certain kinds of content and indeed even the potential to have to Relicense content that you already have in order to use that content in an app kind of ecology That bear some serious thinking about So I note some of those as developments that we will be watching and thinking about Let me say just a few words about some of the things that have been happening in the world of Teaching and learning that I've been watching closely and that Joan Lippincott has also of course been heavily involved with Although I should I want to stress that In my comments here, I'm really putting my own personal spin on some of these things So we're seeing a maturation of the so-called learning management system marketplace Certainly these are well established now They're being indeed extended in some ways into Collaboration environments virtual research environments Places where people can work with people and tools and data can meet and combine What's interesting to me about this is that While this is kind of maturing and moving off in a collaboration direction My sense is that we're also starting to see a reemergence or a resurgence of some of the other kind of classical threads where Computing gets involved in teaching and learning for example intelligent tutoring systems Computer aided instruction places where it's not so much about a faculty member Packaging up material in a computational environment That the students can work through under the faculty members guidance where it's not about Convenience tools to take attendance and give quizzes and things like that but where the actual teaching is done with statistical models and interactively developed highly personalized kinds of Quizzes and things like that look at the kind of work For for examples of recent vintage of this Some of the stuff that's coming out of Carnegie Mellon for example, but they're actually there's a long long history of this that You know really never gained much traction. I would say in Traditional higher ed although it has an industry in some in some niches Which net which now is stored at sort of showing up as a set of parallel developments And you know some of the things that are feeding this of course are the interests in how to how to teach a lot more people particularly at the You know the community college level and things like this often in kind of skills-oriented courses which lend themselves to this kind of treatment at lower costs Invest you're seeing in that you're seeing this as a potential future for What does the textbook turn into that we can still sell for a whole lot of money? As opposed to something that just kind of dissipates into captured lectures and open open educational Materials, so I think there's quite a bit of stuff going on in that sphere that bears watching and if nothing else I think reminds us of the importance of being clear about our language and about What we mean by learning management systems and how we distinguish them from some of these other developments I Will note also that There's another set of issues that I see on the horizon here there's been a lot of interest in learning spaces in learning environments in class redesign and so much of this Really has at its heart the idea that you want to engage your students at a much deeper level than sitting and listening to lectures and You want them to You know take some responsibility for their own learning and for wanting to learn more and to Delve deeply into topics that interest them and to be able to do that and We've come up with wonderful things to help us virtual learning environments learning management systems Mobile systems always available systems very smart ideas about how students can learn from each other and collaborate the thing I worry about here is saturation of the essentially Engagement exhaustion Imagine a student at the receiving end of five beautifully crafted courses All vying for his or her attention this way 24 hours a day opportunities to go deeper There's some there's a problem here and the problem I think or at least a problem is One of local optimization if you will we're optimizing at the level of the course and I think that our Successes here, and I think we are having successes are going to force us to think about environments programs assessment objectives at levels above the course at levels of degree or certificate or Mastering a certain body of material sort of a more holistic view of what's happening to people that go into The educational process particularly if they're not Simply taking an isolated course, but trying to master a body of material that spans time and courses I think that's going to have some very very interesting interaction with some of the discussions about completion about retention about Assessing student progress about time to degree But that this is a place where I'm looking for some unexpected consequences of progress A final place I just want to note in this area where we may be privy to a few unintended consequences is that We are we've been you know busily building all these systems that collect immense amounts of data on students In the last year or two We starting to I'm starting to see a sort of an organized move to do the next obvious thing After you've collected mountains of this data start exploiting it to do good retention measuring student progress The sort of thing all of a sudden we're hearing words like analytics In the context of student interactions in learning environments I Have no question But that these things can be used in very constructive ways I think though that unless we use them in wise ways and in transparent ways We face a potential enormous unexpected consequence in the terms of in terms of privacy explosions if We're not clear with students about what data is collected how it's used who gets to see it How long it's retained in similar matters? I think we are very very much at risk of Losing the ability to make fruitful use of many of these Datastreams that are being established today I Think this is an area that calls for tremendous sensitivity You may have noticed that in the consumer markets after basically years of You know aggressive consumer abuse in some cases We are starting to see Slowly probably ineffectually to be sure the wheels of regulation move here It's not clear to me that these are going to fix the consumer problems, but they are unquestionably going to Complicate the operation of many people who are using the web to deal with consumers It is very easy for me to believe that that same kind of development could transfer over into the teaching and learning sphere Without much trouble all really take is a couple of good incidents so I think this is an area where we need to be very careful and actually an area where some of the traditions and deliberations that have characterized libraries work with with patron trails Could be potentially brought to very fruitful play There's lots more going on and I don't have time to go over it all certainly we see special collections I think Entering a new golden age as they become digital as they encompass the digital There are fascinating fascinating things going on as we look at the changing behavior of individuals With regard to personal records and personal archives CNI has been involved in helping with a couple of Meetings the second one of which will be in February of 11 looking at these developments We've actually seen and there's a session here on The potential uses of forensic approaches to the management and understanding of personal collections We're also starting to see the emergence of some conversations about What David Kersh? Elegantly characterized as the public interest in private records This is a this is a frontier policy area But one that I think will connect Compellingly to both our our issues about scoping the social record on one side and Building the special collections of the 21st century on the other we see many many services now migrating out to the network level to use that kind of That kind of discussion Certainly, we're seeing some very interesting developments in library-based services in Software as a service kind of applications for higher ed Potentially for scholarly disciplines as well There's an awful lot we don't understand there one of the things that I find most fascinating that we really don't understand is What did databases look like in this world and how do their properties change when we get into a world of Diffuse and potentially link data what happens to questions about authoritative version of data about editorial controls About trust and authenticity in these kinds of environments. I think that as we see Various forces inevitably pushing developments down that path. We're going to see Much deeper engagement with these questions One of the places it's already popped up curiously is with bibliographic records And I invite you to look at the history Over the last year or two of the discussions about what does it mean to have an authoritative? database of bibliographic control In this kind of environment that's evolving. I think another place. We're going to see it as names not just names in the sense of name authority, but a really complicated convergence between Authorial names Not just as represented by libraries dealing with the traditional monographic literature But really reaching out for the first time to do Authority control over the journal literature and the gray literature the stuff in Repositories as well as the stuff in journals the kind of things that initiatives like orchid are engaging how that connects up to Databases of things like grant proposals and Researcher interests the sort of work that projects like vivo were doing how this again connects to diffuse databases of biography of Genealogy you see bits of this in Wikipedia now where everybody seems to have a Wikipedia entry all of a sudden There are very interesting Projects for example in mathematics. There's the idea of the mathematical genealogy where Your children are the people you were thesis advisor for and so you can actually trace genealogies of ideas and techniques through multiple generations and people have actually built up a very significant database of Genealogy and math intellectual genealogy and mathematics and statistics what happens when we start linking this Into the author databases that are coming out of things like orchid I think that It's going to be very interesting times to look at the evolution of data Of various kinds of data resources in this world a last place I want to identify as one where I think we're going to see a lot of rapid development is in the Relationship between what campuses are doing and what's happening on a national level Some of this is again coming out of cyber infrastructure work Cubs out of identity management network interconnection between local and National or international Computing in the sense of being able to federate computing and to move Computations from campus to national level resources It's also starting to show up now as we look at these data curation issues the challenge of what should be Institutional and what should be disciplinary this this bridge or Interconnect point or boundary seems to me to be a place where there's going to be a great deal of negotiation And a great deal of action taking place so Those are some of the things that have been very striking to me in the last year some things that to me are really Shaping our agenda going forward I think you'll see a number of them represented in breakouts that we've listed For this set for this meeting in reports that I've been sharing with you through CNI Announce. I Think we'll see some of these reflected in this book. We're going to do together in The spring meeting as well We continue to look for other ways to connect with our members in our community One of the things we've been doing and we'll continue to do at this meeting is to take video of a number of sessions We can't do all of them. We don't want to do all of them actually in fact in some cases It's very clear that people don't want the sessions videotaped because they want them to be a sort of a free one-off discussion But we will be doing some video and making it available as we have in our last meetings We've been running an experiment this year called CNI conversations where we hope where Joan Lippincott and I Do a phone call with about 40 minutes of reporting and then field questions that's been very interesting and We've had relatively light attendance on the Q&A but very large numbers of downloads of the recordings of these So what we're going to do next year is we're going to probably Discontinue these as live sessions and replace them instead by more frequent and shorter recorded podcast type things We may do an occasional live session on a topical basis around a sort of hot topic of interest But I think I think we will morph this one on to to a more podcast type model We will continue though to look at new ways to Stay in touch to communicate and to Connect with you as we explore these issues I Hope you'll agree with me that We really not just have had an interesting 20 years But there's every reason to believe we're in for an extremely interesting 20 years to come and I look forward to First speculating about them with you over the course of the next year and then Exploring them with you as we move on into the coming years. Thanks And I think that went a tiny bit long, but we have a generous break So if there are one or two Questions that people have I would be delighted to feel them before we We have our break David Rosenthal from Stanford just a quick call you on something you're repeating the propaganda about WikiLeaks They have not dumped quarter of a million documents onto the Internet The only people who've seen the full dump are the media organizations who are filtering and retracting them I think that's it since this is the core of the Case that's being Pursued against WikiLeaks. It's important to be correct about this. Oh, yes That that's absolutely correct. Could everybody hear that? Okay, basically the the bottom line there was particularly over the diplomatic Cables that WikiLeaks is that excuse me WikiLeaks. I've had trouble pronouncing that for some reason is Making available only a very small handful a couple hundred are actually available now And they're mostly ones that the newspapers have written up But if you look at their previous Data dumps those have been in in very substantial volume, and I'm quite sure by the time we get all through here We will see these cables in volume, too I think again, you know, it's really just very characteristic of of the way of the world now that Understanding what happens is buried in these huge databases You look at what happens now in these Investigations of of failed or looted corporations, for example Enron You know, they suddenly find themselves dealing with half a million Documents and literally millions of email and the challenge is sense-making out of all of that It's a very it's a very Different kind of the world to be an Investigator or a reporter in Among other things, but thank you. Yes for being clear on that David Other comments questions I see one coming here Bill Cliff and it was nice to hear your history of CNI 20 years ago and Either your memory is at fault or mine is at fault I think the founder from it you come was Ken King and maybe Richard West can Tell me if I'm right or wrong on this one Richard West is nodding and saying it is true that that was Ken King before before Bob came in there and Indeed, I believe you are right Because Richard was there and was the emissary and So we thank both Ken and Bob both of whom were Very helpful in those early years Other questions or comments Looks like we're ready for a break. I'm so glad you were all here just before you go one quick reminder You all made it through the weather. There are a few people who didn't Please keep an eye on the message board if there are Sessions that need canceled or rescheduled we will try and post them there, but Given the way the weather is we're gonna have to just do a few things by ear. Thanks again