 Alrighty. Welcome. Congratulations. You have found the ballroom. It's well hidden away. And if I understand correctly, you will only be down here for the opening plenary that you're now in. And then for the closing plenary tomorrow, everything else is on the lobby level. And we actually did quite a bit of work with the hotel since last year to try and make that happen. The downside is that we had to go back to spreading things across the east and the west wing. But there is a map in your schedule. So welcome to the fall 2019 CNI member meeting. And I'm delighted you're all here. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI. And we have quite a bit to do here. Let me just start by welcoming everyone here. I think from what I hear at least, this December meeting is unusual in that we haven't had any substantial travel disruptions due to weather. Knock wood. I want to particularly welcome our international members. We've got some people here who've come a very long way. I saw a tweet yesterday that somebody shared with me with a fairly breathtaking itinerary to get here in like five stops. But thank you all for coming. I do want to, before doing anything else, recognize that we have quite a few new members with us. Central Washington University, Ryerson University, Wesleyan University, Lehigh University, McAllister College, California State University at Fullerton, Loyola University, Chicago, Memorial University, Texas A&M at Corpus Christi, the Atmire organization, the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, and to rejoin from the Princeton Theological Seminary Library. Please join me in welcoming all of those new and returning members. A few logistical things that I just want to go over. We have made some scheduling changes. We're trying several new things and fine-tuning things in the schedule this fall. And I just want to alert you to a couple of them. So basically we've slotted the agenda into 60-minute talks. Some are 60 minutes, some are 230-minute talks, and a few are series of short talks that run around seven, eight minutes apiece. You can tell these apart by the way they're numbered. So, for example, in the first slot, if it was 1.1, that would be a, and that was the only point talk, then that would be a 60-minute slot. If you see 1.1.1 and 1.1.2, those are 230-minute slots. Now, for the 230-minute slots put together, I'd urge you to feel free when the 130-minute interval is over to move to another session if there's something else you want to see. Not all of those pairs of 30-minute talks are thematically connected. It also means it's important for the speakers in those 30-minute talks to keep to time. You can tell the series of short talks because there are a lot of point talks. So it would be like 2.1.1 through 2.1.6 or something thereabouts. I hope that's really clear. But it's really, I think, will help us handle the scheduling constraints that people create. And we've had a lot of sessions in the past couple of years where we've said we don't want to turn this down because it's important that our community get a short update from this or hear about this. But at the same time, there's not enough here for a 30-minute session. And stretching it to a 30- minute session doesn't benefit anybody. So we are, as an experiment, trying to get these very short reports. After the meeting, we will be reaching out to you as part of the evaluation to get your reaction to this experiment. So just be aware of that. Where you picked up your badge is where we are going to be posting the list of cancellations, changes, and things of that nature. We also have posted there the list of sessions that we're trying to capture. And keep in mind that just because we're trying to capture it doesn't guarantee that it's going to get captured. It means we're trying to capture it. So those are all of the logistical kinds of comments that I want to make. So let me move on to my remarks. Now, what I want to do is to spend about 45 minutes, maybe a little bit more, doing two things. One is talking about the landscape, about some of the things that I'm tracking on and puzzling over or that I'm seeing as important emerging trends. And I'll do about half of my comments on that. And then for the second half, I want to move directly into programmatic things that we've accomplished this year or that we have underway or planned for the next, let's say, six to 12 months kind of time frame. But I need to start all of this with the elephant in the room. Joan Lippincott, after an incredible roughly 30 years of contributions to building CNI as a capstone to a career that was already pretty distinguished before she came to CNI all of those years ago, is retiring. And Diane Goldenberg Hart will be taking over much of her role. Many of you know Diane. She's been our communications coordinator for almost 15 years. So we will have good continuity. But I just want to take a few minutes to recognize the enormous impact that Joan has had. She has been an essential partner and collaborator for me during my 20 plus years now at CNI. Her leadership has just been incredible. And as so many of you know, she's just done so much for all of us helping us to understand, to shape our work and advance the services we deliver. This is a genuine end of an era, although I am delighted to report that she's going to stay involved as Associate Director of Merida. She'll be representing us in several programmatic efforts, including designing libraries. And also very important to me continuing to give me some good advice and keep me out of trouble. And before we do anything else, I want to just recognize Joan and give her a couple of minutes to say as much as she wants. Joan, please. Thank you. Thank you. And thanks, Cliff, for this opportunity to say a few words to our membership before my retirement on December 31st. Where to begin? In 1990, during my first year at CNI, at the time when there were only two employees, Paul Evan Peters, the founding executive director and myself, we would often stop to talk about CNI as an organization and its future. One day, we exchanged parts of our weekend phone conversations with our parents, during which we tried to explain how CNI was working with library and IT organizations on internet issues for higher education. Our parents could never remember the word internet, and we would explain it over and over. They really didn't understand why he, coming from his positions at Columbia and NYPL, and me from Cornell, would be making this career choice? After we joked about our parents' views, he looked at me and said, what if this internet thing doesn't work out? And then we both laughed and laughed. For us, it did seem absurd that this internet thing wouldn't work out, but we also knew there was uncertainty, and we did not ever imagine how quickly the internet would transform everything. CNI initially was given three years to demonstrate the transformative promise of digital information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity through collaboration between library and IT organizations in higher education, and then was renewed indefinitely by ARL, EDUCOM, and CAUSE. In the early years, publishers, network service providers, technology companies, national libraries, foundations, government agencies, and others joined the higher education institutions as members. CNI quickly became a community, a network of people looking to the future, working to transform research and learning through ubiquitous use of the internet. From the beginning, CNI meetings had an air of optimism, of can-do spirit, of imagination, and experimentation. CNI is itself a network of people and organizations. We are a learning community and a knowledge community. During the three decades I've been at CNI, I've felt I've had the best job possible in my field because of this opportunity to work with this wonderful community. I'm proud to have worked with two brilliant, and I don't use that word lightly, and compassionate executive directors, Paul Evan Peters and Clifford Lynch, how many people get such an opportunity? Thank you, Cliff. For the outstanding leadership you've provided CNI in our community, for the years of fruitful partnership and continually evolving CNI as an organization, and for the freedom you've provided me to pursue my program interests, I'd also like to thank all of our steering committee members, both past and present, both all of our, the executive directors of ARL and EDUCAUS, particularly Dwayne Webster and Bob Heterich, who supported me through the years that I was interim, through the year that I was interim executive director of CNI. In addition, CNI's long-time staff, Diane Goldenberg-Hart, who will soon become your very capable assistant director, Jackie Udell, office manager and meeting organizer extraordinaire, Sharon Adams, our office assistant and technology whiz, and Angelo Cruz, who keeps our technology working, have been a wonderful team. I thank them for all they've done for CNI. Most of all, I'd like to thank you, representatives of CNI member organizations, you make all of this possible. I hope that as associate director emerita, I will be able to continue to keep in touch with the CNI community. Thank you. Thanks, Joan. Thanks on many levels for that and for all you've done. Okay, let me move on to some things I'm watching in the landscape and I'll talk about a couple of things really quickly because I just want to sort of tag them as things that we may come back to at various points and that I'm thinking about or puzzling over and then I'll go into the last bit in a little more depth before talking about programmatic things. So one issue that I am puzzling about right now is what I have finally realized I should generalize as record making versus keeping. You may recall about a year ago, I did a bunch of work trying to understand how we document systems that personalize and this includes most kinds of social media and a lot of other things and is exceedingly problematic. At the same time, you will see a number of fascinating projects that are involved in trying to document events and movements that unfold largely in social media, things like documenting the now or the work on Occupy Wall Street, there are many of these examples. Another set of similar kinds of things are triggered by disasters or crises, things like hurricanes or floods or other kinds of natural disasters and the communities that spring up to get through these and try and recover from them and trying to capture those sorts of things as they emerge. There's a whole discourse around non-custodial shared and collaborative models for collections and archives that are very complicated and that intersect into this area. I think tied up in this are some very interesting and challenging questions about what are the roles for libraries, archives, various professions of journalism, documentary, video making, ethnography even that fill into this space and how they are going to distribute going forward. I'm very mindful of this both as something that deals with professions and organizational activities and also with collections and the documentation of the world. I continue to watch the world grapple with the past and this is a very complicated thing that we could spend a whole plenary on about a past that is being reinterpreted, reevaluated, recontextualized in the face of changing norms about the roles of archives and reconciliation about not just dealing with difficult parts of the past that are in our face but the fact that technology is making big pieces of the past that weren't very visible, a lot more visible. We saw the first generation of this when people started digitizing special collections in earnest and things that had been mostly collecting dust all of a sudden became quite visible worldwide in some cases and what could possibly go wrong? I mean what possible unexpected consequences could there be from something as innocent as oh I don't know digitizing all the old college yearbooks? I think that we're about to have a second round of this that will raise the stakes. It's really clear to me that a number of technologies that are being enabled by advances in machine learning and the two sort of poster children I'm thinking of here are facial recognition and handwriting recognition. These are going to open up our archives further particularly our visual archives which sometimes are more problematic than our written archives although sometimes not to be much more discoverable and face recognition in particular seems to come with a lot of really complicated and unexplored philosophical baggage. How appropriate is it to go through and tag people in various kinds of special collections so that they are discoverable? Really unclear especially when you start thinking about these maybe the ancestors of living people and some of those living people may have opinions about this especially if the ancestors are in a different context than the living people. On the other hand what's the sort of statue of limitations in history? If you take a historical figure from 1700 the number of potential descendants whose permission you might need to seek or whose views you might need to be sensitive to is so large that it's almost meaningless and intractable. I think we're going to see a lot more of these kinds of conversations and they're going to be complicated. I think the facial recognition piece is particularly intriguing and so much of the discussion so far about facial recognition has been in the context of the now and surveillance and tracking people. That is not going to be the only dimension here. I'll move on. I mentioned I believe briefly in my comments last year that the destruction of places in part due to extreme weather conditions and things like that. Certainly we have continued with a string of disasters this year. Interestingly many of them have been sort of directly man-made and can't really be argued very easily that they're a consequence of for example climate change. On the other hand we've recently seen what happened in Venice which I think is a very interesting and troublesome case study of when places become untenable essentially in the face of continued climate change and how we think about that. One of the upshots of this I think is going to be to place a great deal more emphasis on a set of technologies that are already well advanced and being deployed but not necessarily on the scale we're going to need to deploy them for documenting place. We're seeing this in the world of architecture of the built environment. We're seeing this in archaeology. I understand for example that in the efforts to rebuild Notre Dame they are actually using some of the very high precision laser models that were taken of that architectural structure. Here's another one I puzzle over. We talked a little bit about quantum computing before and it's clear that there is some fascinating progress in the lab. It remains unclear when this is going to be a meaningful thing. I mean you certainly are seeing some of the large cloud companies moving into offerings what are essentially simulators and sort of pilot machines in this area. Amazon Web Services made an announcement in this area recently. IBM has had an offering in this area for at least two years. So we don't know when this is actually going to happen at meaningful scale but we do know that probably when it really does happen at meaningful scale the first thing it's going to do is kick the underpinnings out of many of our cryptographic systems and in fact there is a huge move going on and who knows whether it will happen in time or not to transition to what they're calling quantum resistant or post quantum cryptography and you see the national institutes of standards and technology for example right now in a program to qualify and standardize algorithms. Unfortunately just going through that standardization process is going to take years and you're probably looking at on the order of a decade long transition or more in the deployed infrastructure once those things are in place. But here's where it gets weird. So one is hearing tell now of various organizations that are essentially archiving encrypted flows. They can't read these right now but they're betting that they will be able to read these at some point in the future and that the things in there will still be interesting or valuable for whatever perspective you know financial fraud intelligence collection pick your favorite. They'll still be valuable at the time when the technology shows up to make these things make these things decodable. So it adds this sort of dimension to thinking about data security about secure for how long and what our assumptions are there. It also I think raises at least the small specter of some questions about collecting for who and for what purposes does it make sense to do this kind of collecting. I have no idea but I think it's very interesting to see that kind of thinking take place. Let me throw out a final set of challenges. I've had a lot of conversations over the past year or so in particular that really are bringing home to me the notion that we were talking a lot about research data and about the stewardship of research data and the reuse of research data. We're also having a conversation which really to a very great extent is going down a different path which is about structured knowledge. Here you find ideas about linked open data and ontologies and things that machines can directly interpret as opposed to taking a data set and having a human kind of interlock it or help with reusing it. These are collections of ideas that really up till now have run kind of independently and aren't talking to each other very well in a lot of ways. There is a kind of a curious middle ground with these highly curated aggregated databases particularly you see them in biomedicine although there are other examples but mostly this is sort of a split in the world. Now there is a set of conversations emerging around how to make machine readable data like research data fair, the so-called fair principles. Now these are a little bit mystical in some level and there's still quite a bit of debate about what it really means to have data be interoperable but there's at least one school of thinking that seems to be emerging that what it means is that a machine a piece of software can have an encounter with this data and do something meaningful with it. Whether we can bridge that gap or not is I think a enormous challenge and a very high stakes one and I really very much welcome the fact that there seems to be a conversation emerging there in a serious way. So let me turn to the last of my environmental scan kind of things and I'm going to have to do this one at a very superficial level. I actually explored some of this material last Friday out in Berkeley with my seminar there and we spent two hours and we're going strong and we haven't got two hours. We've got about 10 minutes before I need to move on to the next piece of the talk but I've been doing a tremendous amount of thinking about phenomena around balkanization, splintering, centralization and decentralization and there's an awful lot of this going on and I'm starting to find tracking this to be almost an organizing principle around various developments. Let me just give you a few examples. So we have been seeing since the early 2000s and now reaching what I'd call characterized as a crisis point a split between consumer content on one side and content destined for cultural memory or civil society on the others. Put another way there is music, video, ebooks, other materials that to you as an individual consumer are readily available. If you are a public library that wants to circulate it, if you are a research library that wants to study it and hold it as part of a long-term piece of the cultural memory they won't do business with you. These two worlds have split and they split pretty abruptly. This is one of these things. It goes slowly until it goes fast and now it's going really fast. Just look at the amount of material that's not coming out on DVD anymore. Look at the number of ebooks that are basically only available through Amazon. Look at what the public libraries are going through in terms of trying to get access to mass market commercial ebooks. Here's another one that's really interesting. Sourcing is balkanizing in an absolutely weird way. So we've already talked about Amazon taking over a big piece of the publishing world, but another good example of this is the streaming wars. It used to be that there were a very few things like Netflix and they aggregated stuff from a ton of sources and you could get a whole lot of different content through Netflix. And now basically every studio, Disney, Time Warner, HBO through AT&T, they've merged, NBC, Comcast, they're all offering streaming services. Amazon is getting into this business, Apple is getting into this business. So basically now you have all of this exclusive content that is only available from specific sources. I really wonder very much how this is going to play with the consumer that is already not happy with things like their cable TV bill on the size of it and whether they're really going to take subscriptions to six or eight of these or whether they'll re-aggregate. But certainly this is going to be one of the major marketplace shows in balkanization over the next year or so. I would note by the way that none of these services to the best of my knowledge are being particularly hospitable to the cultural memory or civil society sectors that we talked about a moment ago. I would say that balkanization also shows up closer to home. And I just want to note that some years ago when we accepted the model that basically said rather than importing electronic journals into our libraries, we'd use them on publisher or third-party platforms. Things like HiWire, ScienceDirect, Adiphon, etc. We basically resigned ourselves to a balkanized situation right there. And we've done that at considerable cost to our users and ourselves in having to build infrastructure to kind of paper over this, to build link resolvers, to build cross-reference navigators, things like this. It's very interesting to note that you can see things that can be interpreted in part at least as pushback against this balkanization from the users. One could interpret, for example, the use of SyHub from institutions that actually have legitimate subscriptions to almost everything to be a comment on the costs and inconveniences of this balkanization. It's also very interesting to me to see that a number of major publishers have launched a series of efforts now to try and improve the view of this balkanized world to the end user. They started with authentication and now they've moved on to discovery of copies. There were announcements on that just in the last 10 days or so. And there are still some issues that need to be clarified there. But again, it's a way of kind of thinking about what's going on. The last thing I'll say in this particular area is that we're seeing hints of this in the monograph world. It's very interesting to me to see that several major university presses are developing platforms. I'm thinking of PubPub at MIT, Fulcrum at the University of Michigan, and trying to attract other monograph electronic monograph providers onto those. They're using those as platforms for licensing large collections of material to other libraries. Again, I'm struggling with the scaling and interoperability implications of this. Let me move on though to another form of balkanization. And this is what I'd characterize as state and regional stuff. Put another way, the nation state strikes back in various forms. And this is a morass of unintended consequences and other sorts of things. You may recall in the enthusiastic early days of the internet, and even before, books like The Twilight of Sovereignty, Walter Riston, the former chairman of City Corp wrote that, or John Perry Barlow's declaration of cyberspace, where they really perceived the internet as moving us to this sort of borderless environment where nation states slowly and gradually faded away. Well, it's not going so well. So let me just talk about a few examples. So we're now seeing privacy regimes pop up that are kind of regional, for example, GDPR in Europe, although it has the weird property that it also applies to Europeans, even when they're not in Europe, except that that's not really very enforceable unless you're trying to enforce it against entities that have a presence in Europe. These mandates that local data needs to be housed on, data about citizens in a given country needs to be housed on servers in that country. We're seeing that sort of pattern. Now here's a good example of an unintended consequence. So GDPR is a pretty messy piece of legislation that's hard to interpret and feels risky to a lot of organizations. So there are a bunch of US newspapers that fall below and magazines that fall below the sort of, you know, they're read all over the world here. We're not talking the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or the Washington Post here. We're talking about your local paper. If you've been to Europe lately and you've gone to look at your local paper from Europe, what you'll basically get in many cases is a screen that says, oh, you're in Europe. We don't want to go do business with you. It's not really one of our markets. This is just risk go away. So the net effect of this has been to chop off a huge amount of information that was available globally because it just ain't worth the aggravation to the content providers. It's not worth the risk. Another piece of this story is the fines and taxes applied to US technology companies in various foreign venues. But less you think this is just about the US and Europe, we have another phenomenon that's happening, which I'd pay real close attention to. The federal government as far as legislation goes is it could probably kindly be described as dysfunctional. It's really just not getting much done. So you've had a number of issues show up like privacy, net neutrality, copyright related kinds of things for areas where federal law didn't preempt. And since the federal government isn't doing anything and isn't coming in and preempting, what we're seeing is state law starting to go into place. You have this California privacy law that's modeled somewhat on GDPR that's going to go into effect. You have network neutrality laws in place of various kinds in a number of different states or going into effect in a number of different states. What is this going to mean for interoperability and for our willingness to deploy services even nationally? I mean one argument that I've heard made is that this advantages the organizations that are really giant already because they can afford the costs of compliance and basically makes it impossible for new entrants. But it's not as simple as that. Go back to the case I just described of U.S. newspapers and magazines in Europe. Okay, another balkanization. We are seeing national kinds of internets grow up that have limited interaction and interoperability with the internet as we see it. China is the biggest historic example of this. But for those who are tracking on this, Russia has been making extensive provisions over the last couple of years to essentially run its internet if it wants to largely independent of the rest of the internet and with very managed interactions. I would also point out that it's not just the internet as we historically have thought about it. Things like 5G wireless networks are also going down this road. So I'm running out of time fast on this topic. I'll just note that there is a rural urban broadband divide which is not getting better. And what is getting worse is the consequences of this in terms of employment education, medical access to medical things, services. We are not making much progress on this. There is a lot of talk about breaking up big tech. This makes nice rhetoric. There are some parts of this that make a lot of sense like the notion that you could undo some mergers that probably weren't great ideas in the first place like, oh I don't know, Facebook buying Instagram. Or you could take something like alphabet and split it into its constituent companies like Waymo and Google and like that. So you can pull things apart that way in a kind of irrational way. But if you want to go farther than that, you really are thinking about something very different. So you're thinking about things like how you would regionalize interoperable social networks. There are phrases showing up like adversarial interoperability where by force of regulation you make platforms open up APIs so that other platforms can pull things out. In Ireland, there is a pilot going on right now probably in response to regulatory pressure where Facebook is offering a tool that lets you export all your photos to Google. It will be interesting to see if they deploy that in the United States at some point. They have said, as I understand it, they intend to deploy it to additional jurisdictions on some unclear schedule who knows what those jurisdictions are. I was very interested to see a talk at Ithaca's Excellent Next Wave conference last week about the development of something called MoodleNet which is essentially a series of interoperable social networks that can each be set up with their own rules and norms and yet can communicate to some extent and that's supposed to roll out next year. It will be very interesting to watch the developments here. We've talked in the past about decentralized web. I'm not seeing a lot of traction there, but you should know that that's going on. I want to say a last couple of things about balkanization before I get on to our program proper though. One of the other things that we are seeing loosen the world again and it's not new, but it kind of ebbs and crests and valleys ebbs and flows and that's scientific nationalism. All of a sudden, nations are coming up with longer lists of sensitive technologies. They are getting cautious about who they allow, they are researchers to collaborate with especially with federal funding and it's going on here but it's also going on in a lot of other places and this affects technology exports, it affects collaboration, it affects educational participation. We should not forget and it's easy to forget that this is going to have implications for scholarly communications and the scholarly record. I would invite you to have a look at Richard Poinders essay which I shared out to CNI announce about a week or two ago where he unravels a whole series of unintended consequence scenarios about plan s and related approaches to open access. I don't have the time or the desire or in some cases the expertise to try and unravel those. I would stress that they are merely scenarios to make you think but there is no question at this point if you've been reading the papers and the scientific literature things like science or nature, the news parts of that about this increase in scientific nationalism and I think we would be ignoring the implications of this for both scholarly communication and also international open source development which has become a very important part of the research process. We ignore those things that are parallel so those are some of the landscape things that I'm paying a lot of attention to right now and puzzling over. I would just note that most of them while they've got technology mixed up in them are really more about society, about practices, about economics, about organizations, about geopolitics and it's interesting to see how that balance shifts up and down as well and right now I think we're in a period where other developments are dominating the technology driven ones rather than the technology driven ones outrunning everything else. So let me turn to our program and I think you'll see how some of these things fit together a bit and are going to fit together some more. So one of the big things that we've completed this year and we're now in the reporting phase of is a series of conversations that we convened called refreshing the collaboration and we're going to do a whole hour session Joan and I tomorrow on this so I'm going to just give you the framing and one or two highlights here and if you're interested in more detail come to the session tomorrow or we talked about this at edge of cause and there'll be video of that available soon I believe. So here's the set up. So 25 years ago we launched on this collaboration between information technologists and librarians and in the context of the emerging internet and the agenda was you know the agenda was there is so much low-hanging fruit out here I don't know where to start fundamentally. The world has changed an awful lot since then and not the least of which is that there's been a generational shift both in leadership and in the people involved here and for those of you who are in younger generations indulge me for a minute as I talk about how the world's changed in 30 years. We've had in the context of higher ed we've had this massive diffusion of IT expertise from pretty centralized IT organizations into departments into libraries into all kinds of organizations and in fact for many things that matter to scholarship the the greatest expertise doesn't sit in the central IT organization anymore they're worried about administrative stuff and very low-level infrastructure data intensive research has hugely increased much much more research is IT dependent look at how much digital humanities was going on in the early 90s versus today just as an example or look at routine practices of molecular biology genomics epidemiology instructional technology is a thing and a profession if you go back to 1990 there were a few folks fiddling around with instructional technology and a couple of hero projects like Play-Doh but in most big universities instructional technology wasn't a job classification series it wasn't a career path today it is teaching with technology is not something that a few early adopters are messing with it's absolutely happening at scale distance education is happening at scale analytics in the last few years have moved in with a vengeance privacy and security was something we kind of gave lip service to in 1990 but it's a high stakes game today those are just a few of the sort of highest level changes that I think legitimately call for some reassessment particularly in light of this generational shift so let me tell you a few things that have emerged out of this so one is that the nature of collaboration has changed drastically it used to be that you basically had IT and libraries come together to do something that the two of them wanted to do now the challenge is to orchestrate a whole collection of interests inside our educational institutions which includes not just IT and the library but the publishing arm the research folks the risk management folks the student success folks to provide a pretty seamless set of services and right now there are in many institutions so many services being offered that nobody can figure out where to get the services they need it's it's really intractable for faculty for students and our the challenge is to set up collaborations that basically make it not matter make it seamless and that means that a lot more people need to be involved and it's this sort of kaleidoscope of you know common interests around particular parts of that spectrum it's really clear that we need to totally rethink how we're doing research support and you know big pieces of this you know about research data management you know about issues about researcher effectiveness about helping people to understand open access and open science and open scholarship a piece that gets less talked about but that we've heard here on a couple of occasions and we'll hear more about is the role of organizations other than the formal faculty in providing graduate education in basically a whole set of technological skills but sort of more profoundly how to become an effective researcher and our libraries our IT organizations our research support organizations are becoming very deeply involved in this finally I would just say in this area that one of the other takeaways and it's a big challenge and it's a challenge that's going to take a generation to fully address is that we need to professionalize research support in the same way we've professionalized instructional technology as a legitimate profession a recognized profession within our universities that offers career paths and is an integral part of the organization and funded as such not funded out of a random grant and other non-sustainable sorts of collaborations and obviously libraries IT the Office of Research and others are going to play a role in that we had some very interesting you know very preliminary conversations last the spring in San Diego I'm sorry in St. Louis excuse me I'm thinking about our coming San Diego meeting in April 2020 in St. Louis where we got together with a group called CARK which is a sort of a nascent umbrella organization that's trying to get a conversation going among a number of groups that deal with various parts of the research support process so that's that's one set of things that came out I'll just mention a couple of other areas that are that that are very much on people's mind one is data governance and there are just incredibly difficult problems with how to organize this and what its scope should be closely related to data governance but separate is taking leadership in orchestrating a conversation about privacy responsible analytics responsible data collection reuse and retention and this ties into areas as diverse as student success space planning security you name it but there is a very strong sense that libraries and IT are well positioned jointly to bring that conversation forward and to surface it and there is a sense that a really thoughtful analysis of this is very much essential and in everybody's interests at this point accessibility is another cross-cutting question and challenge and particularly as more and more material becomes available in digital form there is a challenge at really large scale about how to address this there also is a growing arsenal of tools automatic transcription and captioning and things like this that can help us with this and there is a continued challenge in many organizations about who really needs to take the lead on this how do we fund it and how do we bring the interested parties together I will conclude with I will conclude my conversation of refreshing the collaboration with one area that surfaced very prominently and that we've already made a decision to start advancing into programmatic work over the next 12 months or so and that's the acquisition of teaching and learning materials now the best thing I can say about this is with the exception of a small number of organizations who seem to have really pulled off some impressive things here and we need to understand those stories and those case studies but aside from a few of those what we've got now is completely broken we have some OER activities that are going to be part of the solution open educational resources but I at least don't buy the idea the prospect that we can transition totally to open educational resources anytime in the foreseeable future there's just too much difficulty in keeping them up to date keeping the quality up in all the different areas we need providing the sort of infrastructure support in problem sets quizzes teacher manuals material for learning management systems etc etc etc so we're going to see some commercial digital material digital teaching and learning material we're going to see some OER material libraries have been in the OER space they've tended by and large to stay out of the textbook space they're going to need to go there in the digital world because frankly putting the students at the mercy of individual random contracts what the lawyers like to call contracts of the teaching you know your teacher says get this digital textbook get a key for it you get presented with a 40 page click through thing you're like well and I either drop the course I need that's a required course or I click through and take this and I don't even understand these 40 pages anyway so I click through and it says that all of your clickstream is now the property of the textbook owner the university doesn't get any of it etc etc etc and by the way your access turns off two weeks after final exams which is going to be really really helpful when you are an undergraduate physics major and you'd like to look back at your calculus one text in the second year of physics because you need to refresh your memory on something libraries I think working with others have the expertise to write sensible licenses there to protect the university's interests to protect the interests of the students and those are the kinds of things we need to move to so we are going to be taking a look at this area trying to and there's plenty of subsidiary complication that I don't have time to go into we're going to try and understand some of the state of play and some of the success stories beyond that I just want to note two other programmatic things we're going to be spending time on in the rest of this program year and beyond one is reader privacy particularly there is some very welcome action showing up in this area after a long period of time where people were just sort of ignoring this and hoping it would go away I don't think we can ignore it and hope it goes away and in fact I think there's a lot that we can do both contractually and to at least some extent technically but also in terms of informing our readers about the stakes the last thing I want to mention is a joint initiative that ARL is leading and that ARL and EDUCAUS are working on I'm sorry that ARL is leading and CNI is supporting pretty extensively EDUCAUS is also involved what we're trying to do is identify the you know five or six-ish emerging technologies that are likely to have the highest impact on research libraries we're looking at a five to ten year time horizon and we're interpreting this impact as two ways to two modes of impact one is directly changing what the library does because some form of scholarly communication is different we see new retrieval technologies preservation technologies whatever the other is that it's so profoundly changes either teaching and learning practices or research practices at a pretty large scale in such a way as to necessitate the library changing what it's doing so this can either be a direct or an indirect impact and what we've done right now is we started with some various surveys that have largely come out of EDUCAUS but we've also drawn on some other literature things like the horizon report and then we have been conducting interviews with a range of experts in different areas trying to get their read on which ones are genuinely important which ones are maybe important but not impactful which ones are just you know hype and mirrors and also what have we missed I've conducted a number of those conversations as has Mary Lee Kennedy as has John O'Brien and Susan Grachuk at EDUCAUS and we're now starting to compile the results of that I am hoping that there will be an initial report out I think maybe Februaryish timeframe on that and then we'll take that into a series of invitational workshops that will be attached to the ELI meeting the spring CNI meeting and the spring ARL meeting and then there's more work planned beyond that but I think that at the very least that sort of vetted synthesis that we're hoping to have ready relatively early in the new year should be of great interest to the CNI community and very valuable in strategic planning at your own institutions with that I am going to take a deep breath and note that there's lots more I could talk about we had a fabulous executive roundtable this morning on electronic lab notebooks and I think you're going to find the report on that one we get it out early next year very interesting reading our spring executive roundtable is going to be either about student privacy or about data science as a service we're still arguing about which one to do that for that which one to do next but look forward to the call for that with that I would say it's already been quite a program year we're only about halfway through it the new program plan is in your packet I'd welcome questions on that now or later we will blunder on even though Joan will retire we'll be retiring and we will continue to look for her for good advice thank you for listening and I think I have time to probably take one or two questions at least thank you there are some microphones and it's really hard for me to see whether there are people at them questions we have no takers is this possible oh here comes someone since no one else would talk I'm Michael Seidel from the iSchools and the University of Berlin and I have shared your concern about the Balkanization but I'm also a little less pessimistic I think many of my students don't see themselves as German they see themselves as European going over those borders and increasingly in the academic world I mean we see people interacting from all areas so there's there's certainly some worrisome Balkanization especially in technical areas but the human interaction actually seems better than it used to be do you want to comment on that yeah I mean I think that well two pieces of that I think that the comment about perception of people in EU states other than Britain at least which will leave off as a pathological case that's trying to figure out you know what it wants but in the in most of the rest of Europe I think that there is great truth in that notion that they think of themselves as European and I say that as just you know external observer I mean you you live there you know you you have a far better sense of that than I do but I'd certainly agree with that as an observation I think that that may be a little bit unique to Europe I would also say that you know as I described these dynamics about about Balkanization for example in all of these cases there are countervailing dynamics and that's what makes it so interesting so for example and unintended consequences so here's here's a good example industry is so disturbed about the prospect of state privacy laws potentially all different that they may actually all turn around and gang up on congress to pass a fairly mild federal privacy law that's structured to preempt all the state laws very weird kind of countervailing force when you look at science it does seem fairly clear that a lot of the sensitivity in scientific nationalism is around things that are either close to commercial interests or close to national security interests or both and in many cases now it's hard to you know draw a clean line there the counter force there is the whole movement toward open science which is an enormously global movement and you know when you look at the sort of social network underpinning that move to open science it really is terrifically global and more sort of globalized and inclusive than anything I can recall seeing before it so yes I think I think it's important to recognize that there are there are countervailing trends and even as where you see um balkanization it may be uneven ah another question thank you so much for your talk I feel very energized um and I am really interested in hearing about the direction and the sort of synergy that you're seeing between libraries and the cyber infrastructure facilitator sort of uh developments within research uh research information technology support and and yeah the future sort of direction you see there so just the fact that you're talking about a cyber infrastructure support function um already is a hugely important first step um you know the first discussions of cyber infrastructure were sort of like oh we get some bigger pipes and you know get access to an HPC facility somewhere and we're done and in fact as we're coming to understand cyber infrastructure is a sustained commitment that is at least as much about people and expertise as it is about wires and fiber optic and computational platforms and along with that is this sort of commitment for some kind of sustained rationalized funding um and obviously I think libraries are a natural host for some of that work and a natural partner in other parts of that work and I think different institutions are going to take somewhat different approaches to how they allocate the money for the cyber infrastructure and where they situate it um and how they allocate pieces of it between different organizations. I think that one thing that I keep hearing that's very important and very scary is that you're seeing a lot of things now and we heard this in our lab notebooks conversations this morning that are being funded by provostial intervention with new money but on a five-year basis um and this has a tremendous ability to get things started but then there is this ensuing struggle for how we structurally get that into the institution's budget so that it is genuinely sustainable in the long term and that is I would say you know very characteristic of the cyber infrastructure challenges we're coming to understand it. The final thing I'll say there is that the only thing that's more dangerous than provost showing up with a five-year grant is somebody getting a five-year NSF grant which put which which has much the same effect although often with even less attention to the institutionalization of the activity. Thank you. We're running a little late I don't see any more questions so I think we should take a break and move on to our next session which I think starts at 2.30. Thank you again for joining us.