 And I think it's about time to get started. Thanks for joining us and welcome to the CNI fall 2020 virtual member meeting on Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI, and I will be. I'll be running the session. The session is being recorded and there is closed captioning available that you can turn on if you'd like. There's a chat box and please feel free to use that. We're going to do this a little bit differently than we've done other sessions and let me just explain a little bit. So, this session is intended to close out the first week of presentations which took place last week through last Friday. This is an experiment that we're running for the fall meeting and we'll see how well it works. The idea. Well, the ideas are twofold to give us a little time to reflect on some of what we heard in the past week together, and also to try and create something that's a little bit akin to the sort of conversations that I would hear over coffee. When, when we met in person at CNI and people came out of the parallel breakout sessions and chatted a little bit with each other about what they found interesting and what they'd been hearing. The idea here is to do very much the same kind of thing. So, I've got a few comments probably 10 minutes, maybe a little bit more reflecting on a few of the themes that I had been drawing out of the presentations. And after I run through them, maybe just offering us a place to start, I'm going to invite others to share their comments. You don't need to wait for me to share your comments feel free to put your thoughts in the chat stream at any time we're not going to be using the Q&A box. Before I finish my comments, I'm going to invite further comments from those in attendance do keep in mind as I said that we are recording this session. I will just invite people to, to raise hands and I will, I can turn on your audio, or if you prefer, I can, I can, I can just read questions or comments that you put in the chat. So I'll, I'll leave that at your option now. The last thing I want to say by way of introduction is that I blocked an hour for this because I didn't know how long it could take. So long it lasts is really largely up to you. As I say, I have only can maybe 15 minutes of reflections max. And this will be true for all of the Monday summary sessions that we will be having week two will start tomorrow. It's on Tuesday at CNI. I did our fall virtual meeting. And next Monday, we'll have a summary of week two. So, with that, let me just dive in and reflect on a few things that really struck me. So, one of the issues that I saw surfacing repeatedly and it's not a new issue for us but it's one that I think is taking on increased importance is sustainability of projects. I think that one of the things we're seeing here is kind of a, I don't want to say an entirely new aspect to this but certainly a slightly shifted emphasis. What we're seeing now is projects that have built up really important relation resources for scholarly communities, usually with grant funding and which have a multi institutional flavor to them I mean, the resource may be hosted at a specific institution. They may move from institution to institution over time, but it's the work of a community of scholars from a number of different institutions who've come together to build this resource and now people are struggling with models that will allow these multi institutional resources to be sustained and managed. It seemed to be moving away from ideas of how will I characterize this subscription models and more into owner or participant models where a relatively smaller number of institutions will put resources into help contribute to the support of the resource and itself will continue along open access to the community. So, in some sense the participating institutions are backing up the contributions of their scholars or scholars at their institution that rely heavily on the resource. And this has lots of interesting dimensions including governance dimensions which show up in many guises. And I think we will continue to follow developments on this with great interest. I'd also note that we're seeing governance issues arise in other collaborative settings as well. There are resources that are being constructed that sort of sit in the tradition of non custodial or collaborative kind of facilitating archives for communities. And here again, there are questions of governance and bringing in the stakeholders in those communities. I think we saw a couple of particularly interested want interesting versions of this. And the set of issues arise in the presentation on the digital library of the Caribbean out of Miami, and also the presentation out of the University of Texas at Austin, about the very interesting work that they're doing with that. I want to call it multi lingual crowdsourcing but that's not exactly what it is. It really has some elements of that but it also has elements of a sort of sustained community of participation. I note that both of these projects that I just cited have substantial international dimensions as well as dimensions of what I don't know what to call it colonial histories and other other things that are implicated in there. But the issues around appropriate governance and appropriate participation and policy development are very, very real in these in these issues in these projects. I would really invite people to take a close look at that UT Austin project though I think some of the things they're doing with multi lingual communities in there, which I've not seen before. Perhaps, you know, there are other great exemplars of it and I just haven't seen them but I really found that very interesting. Another big theme is trying to understand and map out what's in collections we saw some very interesting work on that around web archive collections, for example. And I think I think we can trace other examples of this will be seeing some of these in a more technological context I think later on. But I think increasingly as we get into these large corpora. The challenge of just understanding what's in there is very, very real. Another real eye catching presentation that I'd urge people who missed who are interested in this topic to go have a look at the video of was from Berkeley and it dealt with reproducibility. And specifically computational reproducibility, but it dealt with it through a pedagogical kind of a setting. In other words, it was about how do you provide people with an organized framework and platform for demonstrating reproducibility or investigating reproducibility of a scholarly or scientific resource. And how do you do this on kind of a shared basis. How do you teach people to do it. And I think it's a project that libraries who are engaged in issues about and efforts in teaching people how to be effective scholars. And things like the carpentries like good research data management, good, good reproducibility discipline may find this quite interesting. But I've not seen a lot of emphasis on the sort of pedagogical role of this before and I found that to be very interesting. The talks that we saw last Friday that I found to be quite provocative was a collaboration around trying to organize all of the research that the National Science Foundation is doing with regard to COVID-19 and there's a lot of it. But how to really connect different PIs who and different research projects that are active in different areas of this are is a very real challenge. And we saw a report from the Northeast NSF Big Data Innovation Hub on that on the work that they're doing with a grant from NSF to build a resource for this. And I think this may be a very considerable interest to many institutions and to many of the participants in CNI who are trying to help researchers in their institution to discover collaborators and resource data sets. Now, one of these significant limitations right now is that this, this data, this resource that the, that has been built at Columbia by the data hub does emphasize NSF funded research and of course, there's a huge amount of research that's being funded out of the National Institutes of Health, as well as work coming out of other organizations like the Department of Energy. And they've also been investing in resources and one can hope that going forward these will become increasingly interlinked. And also of course our efforts to tie in research that's being funded in other nations and through explicit multinational efforts. I do want to note by the way the big, the big data hubs that NSF has funded don't seem to be that widely known within NSF and they're doing a lot of interesting work that touches a lot of different areas and one of the things that I did make a note of as, as a result of that session is that we really should bring together a session for the spring meeting that looks across the data hubs at some of the innovative work they're doing and showcases that for, for our CNI community. The last two things I'll just mention are, again, not new certainly but just were important reminders for me. One was in these international collaborations, the importance of thinking through and being mindful of the facts on the ground for your collaborating international partners. And we've seen, you know, many examples of this before, for example, collaborations to digitize material in foreign countries, where, you know, the sort of equipment that you could bring in the customs work, the maintenance kinds of issues are all very critical. One of the, one of the good illustrations we heard was of the dangers of simply assuming that there'll be decent internet connectivity there may be there may not be. And one needs to really think through approaches that are flexible and mindful of those realities on the ground. And that's, you know, that's a lesson we've seen in presentations at CNI many times but it's always one that's, that's easy to forget. And what I'll just say is I was really reminded in a couple of these talks and just how complicated, both technically and in terms of inter institutional arrangements and service interdependencies. The whole scholarly communications infrastructure has become. It is an exceedingly complicated ecosystem at this point and I do worry more and more about both the barriers to entry for new entrants that that complexity represents. But also, I worry a bit about the potential fragility of some of this. When you have lots of interdependent services, you have to start worrying about which ones are critical on which ones aren't and how things do or don't degrade gracefully if one of the services stops working for a while. So that's, that's again something that I think may may be worthy of a bit of careful thinking about going forward. And I told you I'd be brief. Those are some of the reflections that I came away with and you know I'm certainly not going to try and summarize every session. Those sessions I saw and I saw all of them for this first week live. I thought were really, really good. And they covered a tremendous amount of ground. In the coming weeks, I am going to try and get to as many sessions as possible live, but I know, at least, at least for week two, there are a couple where I have conflicts and I'm going to have to watch the videos. And also note that starting with week two, we will be supplementing the record the live sessions that will take place starting tomorrow with a group of pre recorded videos as well which should become available I believe tonight or tomorrow morning. So, with that, I haven't seen anything in the chat yet and I just open the chat. I'd open the floor to comments, if you'd like me to turn your audio on so that you can make some resume, make some observations. Go ahead and raise your hands and I'll turn your audio on and Boaz is asking, she is asking if I can elaborate on my last point about worries regarding interdependencies and services. Is it particular to network level type of work. How may we afford the risk here. It's really, to me, it's kind of a natural consequence of services that build on each other. Because, you know, you see, you see things like orchid and cross ref and increasingly roar. Interleaved into things we see various kinds of gazetteers and name authorities and in similar kinds of services. These are are really two things they're standards you know if you think of orchid for example it's a it's a standard identifier, but there's also a bunch of services attached to orchids that do various kinds of resolution and look up and things like that. Some, some systems just embed orchid as an identifier others make calls in real time to those to some of those services. Still others use those services as part of batch processing streams or or non real time processing streams that support the service. I don't think we have a real great map of those. And, you know, in a certain sense it's great it means we're, we're seeing common services and we're not reiterating or repeating, you know redundant effort. The other side of it though is it does. It does mean we need to think about robustness. I don't I don't know whether that got it what you're what you're thinking about other comments anybody want to want to take the take the floor and reflect on what they've been hearing this past week. I know that many of you have been at many of the sessions, and certainly there's been some great conversation at some of the sessions. I'm very surprised. This is usually not quite the shy group. Would anybody like to nominate out of the first week session. If you were suggesting someone at your institution or one of your colleagues that that was not able to get to the first week that this is one you really should. You really should go back and watch the video of while you're thinking about that and you're welcome to put your nominations in the chat I see there are a couple of comments here. Terri Lynn Fulton says she sees a lot of sessions reporting on work completed. But she worries that coven is causing so many of us to be more institution internally focused at our institutions that will have fewer projects to report on in future. And that is a really, really interesting question. I have one that I have been trying to get a bit of a handle on. And I can answer this in a lot of different ways. So, if you look at what happened to the research enterprise more broadly. What you see is that during the spring and summer. In fact, paper submissions went way up. I've seen reports from a number of the publishers and from a number of our member institutions that say that submissions to journals and grant proposals are up about 30% from where they were a year before. And one of that, obviously, is draining a pipeline. In other words, people couldn't get to their labs they couldn't do their field work. So what they're doing is they're writing new proposals and they are writing up data that they've already collected. And what that says is that as that pipeline empties, we may see some reduction in the amount amount of research that's coming out. I suspect that there is going to be a little bit of that effect for the kind of projects we look at it CNI. But I also am seeing a tremendous amount of innovation among our members, the nature of that innovation is a bit different. But I'm not at all persuaded that we're going to see a great reduction in the level of innovation, at least in the coming year or two. One thing I would say that's really interesting to me is that there are some people that are so, you know, majorly reorienting the focus of their researcher innovation, because the areas they're formerly working with are impossible for some reason or another. For example, I think that there are some reasons to believe that certain kinds of international travel are going to be pretty severely constrained for some time to come. Even as we start seeing hopefully the emergence of vaccines that will help us get this pandemic under control. Seeing people recognize that and do the research that they can do. On the other hand, there's also a stream of conversations that I've been very fortunate to be involved in. In the last few months growing out of work like the sorcery project which will have a video report on in one of the upcoming weeks. I don't remember offhand which one, but more broadly about how do we do remote access to archives. The archives and special collections have tended to be constructed under the assumption that people are going to come visit that that's the primary and best way to do it. Well, we're in a world right now where that's pretty much impossible in a lot of cases. So we're trying to, there's a group of people who are trying to think through and innovate through. We think about remote access to these kinds of things so that's, that's another example in our community of the changing, you know, sort of shape of innovation. I don't know whether that's helpful but it's certainly an area that we're going to be, you know, tracking quite closely. And the younger asks, or says she's intrigued by the move away from subscriptions and towards supporting open access by the collaborative community most interested in making the digital resource available. I think that's a really interesting development as well. You know there there's been a tendency to try and do these things as sort of large scale subscription models and there's a lot of friction to that. And there's going to be a lot of subscription fatigue as that those kinds of models scaled up so I think we really need to watch what's going on there. Several folks were quite taken by the digital library of the Caribbean presentation and mentioned that as one that colleagues might find very valuable. Jennifer younger another concern is how collaborative open access projects will be found to be in the direct interest of libraries to financially support. I say, I think yeah there's definitely going to be a limit of how many of them, but I think it's, it's an easier case to make if you've got people in your own local community who have a strong interest in that project either as contributors or heavy barriers, rather than just this is a nice project and we ought to support it. You know very good kind of case in point is the thoughtful kind of use that was made of access data. In trying to figure out how to support the preprint archive that started at Los Alamos and then move to Cornell. Now, what happened was is they ran out of grant support. They decided they needed to diversify sources of support beyond just Cornell underwriting it. So they looked at who were the heavy contributors, and who were the really heavy users, and they went round to those folks who not surprisingly were mostly major physics or mathematics research centers. There were folks like CERN or the Department of Energy labs or those sorts of places. And they said, you know, folks, it would really be your, your community you realize on this resource really heavily, and it would be really appropriate for you to help a bit to support this and they were very successful in getting support. Now, because of the broad, you know, kind of coverage of that, I believe they've got what a hundred or more supporting institutions. And some of these other resources that we're looking at are going to have much smaller supporter bases than that. It'll be really interesting to see how many, you know, what what those sort of sizes look like as the situation gets more stabilized. Somebody was asking about chat going to where chat goes. It looks like it's going to panelists, otherwise known as me, rather than to everybody. But I'm certainly repeating all the interesting ones here. We don't have any more in the chat so are there further comments in the chat or would somebody like to, would people like to put more comments in the chat, or would someone like to speak, or have we exhausted everybody. As I said, I did, I did, I really, this is the first one of these we've tried. I didn't know how I don't know how long we need for it, whether it's naturally sort of a half hour-ish thing or an hour-ish thing. But I felt that we'd be better off with more rather than less time if we needed it. So I'll make a last call for comments or raised hands. Carolyn Fulton says, will I address in another forum what I think we will see relative to the outcomes of the election. I will say maybe a little bit about that, but just a very little bit about that at the, in my plenary comments on the 14th of December. I think right now, you know, it's very early days and there are huge problems to be dealt with. I think, I think a lot of what I could say there is exceedingly speculative and I'm not sure I have any great insights on that but, you know, I'll certainly touch on a little of that and there will be plenty of time for questions at that plenary and if you want me to speak to some specific issues there, I'm happy to try and do so if I have anything sensible to say about them. And with that I'm not seeing any raised hands or further questions. So I'll just say thanks for this and I hope this was a little bit helpful. And I look forward to seeing you during the coming week two sessions. Please join us tomorrow and for subsequent days and we'll do this again next Monday at the same time. So take care. Have a good evening. Bye-bye.