 Well, I think it's about time to get started. There's still a bunch of seats over here if anybody's looking for one. Okay. Well, welcome to the fall 2022 CNI membership meeting. And welcome to what I hope is not the first in-person meeting of the scale you've been to. I know some of you were with us last year, but it's great to see you all. It really is. I trust that everybody has had easy travel. One never knows. I'd like to particularly welcome our international participants. International travel is very interesting these days, and I think I'll just leave it at that neutral word. We have quite a number of new attendees with us. We did a first-time attendees session this morning, and it was very well attended. So I'd like to particularly welcome those folks and to those who are long-time attendees. I hope you'll have an opportunity to meet some of this wonderful new group of attendees who are joining us for the first time. I'd like to also extend a special welcome to the ARL leadership fellows and LCDP fellows. We have a number of them with us, and I'm really delighted that you were able to be with us today. I don't know whether we have any clear fellows with us. They have been an important part of this meeting over the years, and that program continues to move forward. I would like to just extend, just in case, a welcome to all present or past clear fellows who are with us. While we're welcoming folks, I should also welcome a couple of new members. We have with us a new member, Cal State San Bernardino, and we have from the UK the University of Leeds as a new member. They're doing some very interesting work there. We also have two rejoins, the University of South Florida and West Virginia University, and we are glad to see both of them back with us. Just a couple of quick logistical things while I'm thinking of it. There is no mask mandate, at least at present, in the city of Washington, DC, at least not that I know of. You are very welcome to do whatever is comfortable for you, and we have tried to do a number of things, not filling rooms more than we have to, putting out sanitizer and also making some to-go lunches available for people who are more comfortable with that. I think that all I will say in this area is that people are in really different places, and I think I would just ask everybody to respect where everybody else is on these things. As far as schedule changes, if schedule changes take place, we will note them on the board opposite the registration desk. We will also update SCED as appropriate for those of you who are using the online schedule. I note that we have printed schedules available for people who like printed schedules and like to write notes on them, and we also have electronic scheduling via the SCED app for people who are happier with that, so we have a bit of something for everybody there. All of the sessions, to the best of my knowledge at least, are being recorded unless something goes wrong, and we will make those recordings available after the meeting, a few weeks after the meeting, through our usual channels. We will put out an announcement about that on CNI Announce when they're ready. Hopefully that will help you as you make choices among parallel sessions, because I think you can expect with some confidence that whichever sessions you chose not to go to, you will have recordings available from. I want to note that we are trying an experiment at this meeting. We have taken the hour before the reception, and we are doing a plenary series of lightning talks. The idea here is that there are lots of things we get proposals in for that, at least in my view, and given the time constraints of the meeting, really don't need 30 or 45 minutes. So what we're using these lightning talks for is updates for the community. Somebody announcing an initiative, announcing a report, announcing a project, providing a quick update on a project. These are not intended typically to be the end of the conversation, but rather an invitation to start a conversation. And these have strategically been positioned right before the reception. So I would urge you, if you hear things that capture your interest during the lightning talks later this afternoon, to follow up with those people, either at the reception in person or through email later. And we will be asking you as part of the meeting evaluation later how you thought that went and whether we should be continuing with these. But I'm hopeful that this will fill another need for a certain kind of communication in much of the same way as the quarterly collection of prerecorded project briefings that we're now making available is filling a need for something that we used to do pre-pandemic in person as part of this ridiculous series of eight or nine parallel breakout sessions in each slot. And after some consideration, we really decided that there was a set of these that work better as asynchronous project briefings would follow up as needed. So that's where we are on that. I want to do two things in the time we have together in the next 45 minutes or so. I want to just make some very selective observations about some things that are going on in the world that I think we want to keep an eye on or that I think are particularly strategic for one reason or another. A few of these I will just mention in passing. A few of them I will talk about at a little more length. After I do a bit of that, I want to move on and talk a bit about CNI and CNI's strategy going forward about some of the things we're doing and about how we're approaching the world as we move into our 2022-2023 program year. I intend to finish in enough time. I hope that we will have at least 10 minutes or so for questions. And if we need to, we can always run a little bit into the break. So that's the strategy for the rest of the session. So let me start with the landscape and a few of the things that have been happening in the last six months. And I really just want to start with the kind of ongoing weirdness of the world in general. You know, we seem to be trying to move past this pandemic that, you know, we seem to have declared it's not a pandemic anymore, but it's still there. And everybody's trying to figure out how to adapt their behaviors individually, organizationally as a society to deal with that. We have a rather significant war going on in Europe, but somehow we aren't talking about this very much. I have been to Europe several times in the last year. And they don't really mention it a lot, even though it's a very real issue. And even more than here, it is dramatically starting to affect their economy, their energy security, and other things. It also is a fascinating and sort of horrible case study of how these kind of conflicts are going to play out in the current information age. While all of this has been going on and we've been in pandemic mode, there's been all this progress kind of quietly with technology and technology adoption. I don't know whether it sort of happened when we weren't looking or what. One of the things that I've been really noticing, for example, is the extent to which facial recognition is being adopted for various kinds of security operations. If you've boarded a plane recently, for example, often that's being done now just based on your face. When did that happen? It happened sometime during the pandemic when not a lot of people were traveling. The technology there is surprisingly sophisticated. We tend to think of face recognition as, oh, well, we have a camera watching everybody coming out of the subway or something. And we have a database of people we're hunting for. That's a hard facial recognition problem. What you're seeing now is a lot of much more easy, much more constrained facial recognition kind of issues. Well, we know the 200 people who are supposed to be on this airplane and we've got records of their faces. So we'll see, can we match you to one of the 200? Which is a very different problem than the sort of endless open-ended search. Again, very striking to see these kinds of things. Against this backdrop, though, let me move on to a few things that are a lot more specific to the areas we're concerned with. And the first place I want to start, as I often do, is with networking and related sorts of questions. One of the things that happened very quietly during the course of the pandemic and kind of got completed in the early part of this year is that Internet2 in the United States did a total technology rebuild. I mean, they basically ripped out everything and put in a whole new generation net over the last couple of years with tremendously enhanced bandwidth capacity. The other thing that's really shocking about this is that they also managed to reduce the energy footprint and the physical footprint of the networking nodes by, you know, like 60%, 70%, amazing numbers. To see that kind of a win in that sort of a technology transition where normally you'd expect to see roughly the same kind of power consumption, just better performance. This was really, I think, something that points to the extent to which you really can get environmental wins if you think carefully about it. The conversation that was going on, just to follow in the networking theme for a minute, before the pandemic about the national research platform and the global research platform, is back. There was a workshop this fall on the global research platform. And there will be a workshop on the developments in the national research platform in San Diego in February of 23. These kinds of very high-speed data transfer and computation-sharing platforms are, I think, going to be quite significant when we look at particularly the demands of some of the scientific work that is coming over the next few years. I had an opportunity to see some of the IEEE Science Conference where they took a careful look at several of the sort of big science projects that are underway and are scheduled to move into new phases or to come online over the next couple of years. The kind of data that these projects are going to generate is something that I think we really have not wrapped our collective heads around. We don't know where we're going to put this. We're not sure how we're going to move it across our networks. The computational demands on this are going to be absolutely enormous. One of the takeaways I see from this is that we're sort of seeing the split between big science, if you will, really big data-intensive science and the sort of more manageable demands of research data management as they are typically being encountered on our campuses. It almost feels like we're going to see a significant technology divergence in how we're going to handle these two problems over the next, let's say, decade, but I would say that remains to be seen. I would just urge you to be very aware of what some of these extremely ambitious observational and experimental scientific platforms are going to be producing over the coming years. Just looking quickly at a few other developments, we talked in the pre-pandemic and early pandemic times about the question of remote access to special collections and about a project called Sorcery and where that might lead. They have continued their work and I am looking forward in the coming year to see sort of the next stage of that effort. So that's one to be keeping an eye on. If nothing else, I would say that our experience with special collections during and after the pandemic shutdown has really emphasized the importance of thinking through some of those efforts. Other programs that we've talked about over the years continue to flourish. One that was particularly striking to me is the SNAC project, Archival Identities and Contexts, Social Networks. You've heard several times about that over the years and I had an opportunity to catch their annual meeting recently which took place virtually. That whole project now has matured and feels to me like it's reaching a pretty robust operational stage. If you've not looked at that, I would say that it is well worth your attention. We saw this fall a series of awards out of the National Science Foundation under a program called FAIROS. These are community research coordination networks in various research disciplines. Those awards really I think have just been made in the past month or two and it's going to take a bit of time to get those projects up and running. There were many, many applications for those and I believe if memory serves, NSF ultimately funded 10 or 12 of those. I think in 2023 and beyond we can look to some significant developments from some of that work and that's an area that we'll be tracking going forward. One of the things that really has hit home to me over the past year is the change in the availability and the use of geospatial data. And many of the arenas that I have seen this in most prominently are outside of the academic research community but I can't help but feel that this is going to be very significant for a number of academic research activities and I think it raises a lot of questions about who's going to preserve and provide access to this. Fundamentally what's happened just in a nutshell is that there are a lot of commercial companies now that have put up small low orbit satellites that are imaging or sensing in various wavelengths and you can now buy essentially commercial coverage of almost any point on the globe from these folks in multiple wavelengths, high resolution. This is the sort of thing that ten years ago mostly was the terrain of nation states and now is a very vibrant commercial activity. Interestingly it has taken on at least as far as I read it the character of sort of an ecosystem in that you're not, it's not merely the platforms that are capturing it, there are other companies that are involved in processing this data. Applying for example image recognition or AI prediction algorithms trying to pick out things, well here's a very interesting case in point. You remember a little while ago the so-called Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 underwater gas pipelines between Russia and Germany just blew up. There were these explosions and everybody said we didn't do it or didn't say anything. And so as far as I know nobody has actually assessed any responsibility for that conclusively to anybody. So it turns out that there are people who have been mining these low altitude satellite data and they've got algorithms for example that will detect shipwakes. Now normally the way you track large ships is they have essentially a transponder on them. So they much like an aircraft and they transpond up to a satellite and there's a you can get a big map of where all the ships are except when you turn the transponder off. So it turns out that there are these interesting shipwakes and they can actually estimate the size and the weight of the ship based on the wakes that apparently had their transponders turned off that were moving around in that area. Now this is not what's striking to me about this is this is not the assessment that some national government's intelligence apparatus made. This is sort of open source data that's available to everybody. I don't know exactly where this is going to lead but it seems to me that this is really starting to change the game potentially for certain kinds of research. Now while we're talking about game changers let's say a word or two about generative artificial intelligence. So some of you who were with us in December 2019 at the Omni Shorum for the fall meeting may recall that in my remarks there I mentioned something called generative adversarial network or GAN to mostly fairly blank looks. This was something that was pretty new at the time at least outside of people working in AI. Now in the last couple of years since then we have seen amazing progress in these areas. You've probably seen some of these image generation systems like Dolly too where you can ask it to do things like you know show me somebody riding a horse on the moon and do it in the style of Rembrandt and it will produce such a thing and it actually is pretty good. I mean as with so many of these AI things it's pretty good. It's occasionally hilariously wrong and it's usually fascinating. You've probably also seen these text generation networks like GPT-3 where you can basically feed it a topic and it will spew out a paper on the topic that actually may or may not be right but certainly at least sounds authoritative and sometimes is even right or defensible. There's a certain amount of hype about this about the debt you know AI is coming for authors now. I'm a little skeptical of that claim although clearly there are going to be some niches for fairly formulaic stuff where this will happen. More to the point I am seeing a lot of discussion about maybe we really need to rethink how we teach high school English or freshman college composition because these kinds of systems are pretty credible for that. Interesting developments I would just say that I don't think we're anywhere near the end of the developments here they are going to be significant. One of the things one of the implications here is that we can produce lots and lots of plausible text and flooded out in various directions and we're going to need to think about that so maybe issues around provenance and authenticity are going to become even more significant. The other thing that I will say in this area that's worth watching is that at least based on my very limited understanding and I underscore very limited here the position that the U.S. Copyright Office has been taking to date is that things produced by AI systems are not copyrightable that these are outputs of computation. They don't have the human creativity that is necessary for the award of copyright. This position is just sort of adding to a growing amount of angst about under what terms can we make use of the outputs of these kind of AI systems. Who can use them in what context. It's worth noting that some of the big image banks will currently not accept images that are produced by these kind of systems because they feel that all the rights issues surrounding them are so ambiguous they just don't want anything to do with them. I think we're going to see some interesting developments on that in the coming couple of years. My sense is that this sort of issue which has long been fodder for science fiction writers is now actually starting to progress to a point where we're genuinely going to have to deal with it for basic kinds of commercial reasons. The next to last development that I want to call out is the so called the OSTP memo that came out towards the end of August the so called Alondra Nelson memo which basically puts a enormously greater emphasis. I mean this memo does a lot of things and I don't want to talk about the open access publishing implications. Those have been well covered by others. But I want to I do want to stress that it places a much greater emphasis on the sharing and making public of research data arising from federally funded work. You can actually I think make a good argument that the new NIH data sharing policy the one that's supposed to go into effect early 2023 the one that at least based on what I'm hearing from colleagues at many campuses is now stirring up quite a bit of attention among researchers who are asking questions about what does this mean for my grant applications going forward. How do I satisfy these requirements very pragmatic kinds of things that those that NIH data sharing policy could be viewed as sort of the prototype and poster child for what the OSTP memo wants every federal research funder to do around data sets. My guess is that as NIH goes through the process of complying with the various things having to do with data sharing they're called for by the OSTP memo. They're probably not going to have to make a whole ton of changes. They're probably going to basically say well yeah that's that's what our current policy says to a first approximation. Now I think this is a wonderful thing. I also think that this is a very scary thing and I can't help but feel like. We have as usual we haven't quite fully considered the question of what happens if we succeed well what we've now done is we have persuaded or we are well down the path of persuading lots of researchers to make lots and lots of data available for sharing that comes out of their research. What we have not told them and what we have not figured out is how long do we need to keep this and what are the criteria for disposing of it and how do we go about disposing of it once we decide that we should dispose of it. We know I think with a very high level of confidence that the magic of technology is unlikely to save us. Storage is not getting cheaper fast enough so that we can you know sort of infinitely retain everything that's being produced particularly not when you start looking at the ever growing data volumes coming out of a lot of this instrumentation. So my reading and this is something that I think CNI is going to convene some kind of discussion around in 2023 is that it is now past time to at least start thinking about issues about deaccession or you know whatever you want to call it getting rid of data about data lifespans CNI as you know tries to look a few years ahead to think about problems before they turn into monsters and this really feels like one where it should be quite timely for us to help to launch a discussion around the issue. I don't think the answers are simple but I think that there's no avoiding the issue. Let me turn to the last kind of environmental scan thing that's very much on my mind. I've been thinking quite a bit over the last six months or so about issues around social media and what how we should be thinking about social media in the context of stewardship of the cultural record. There are some really hard issues here. One of the hardest issues I think is that we're very confused about what our objective is. One way to think about social media is it's a place where creators put things and you can try and preserve pieces of it from the creator point of view. Here are contributions that have been made by an individual or a set of individuals. You can do that in the context of getting the individual to work with you on this in which case it really becomes sort of a special case of personal digital archiving or you can do it by tracking people to the extent that the rules in terms of service of these platforms allow you to do that and copyright issues allow you to do that. On the other hand, you can ask a very different set of questions about social media platforms. If you regard them not as places where people can share their creations but rather as mechanisms for the propagation of news, propaganda, rumor, whatever you prefer, primarily pushing things out rather than communicating, then you can start asking questions about how is this influencing the way sectors of society are thinking? How is it influencing public opinion? Where is that manipulation coming from and what are the pathways it follows? Documenting that, it seems to me, is a very, very different and in many ways more challenging and frankly more alien problem than thinking about stewardship at the personal level. So that is one of the kind of fundamental issues that I've been puzzling over for some time. The other thing I would say about social media broadly is that somewhere along the line, a lot of research communities and perhaps the broader public became obsessed with Twitter and Facebook. In fact, if you look at the data about the size of user populations, the number of hours logged on various platforms and how that shifting over time, it becomes increasingly clear that the pattern is shifting very significantly and that we really need to have some conversations about how we prioritize, how we even recognize shifts in usage patterns and what those should be doing to our stewardship strategies, if anything. Okay, so that's the broad context around this. And then all of a sudden, all of this craziness happens around Twitter and Elon Musk. What a strange situation. All of a sudden, I'm hearing on mass media, I mean, these are not conversations among archivists, stewards of the cultural record. These are like people on talk shows saying, you know, it would really be a shame if this important, you know, repository of recent history went away. I mean, that's just a remarkable statement to hear, but it does kind of open the possibility for public discussion. There are two other things that are very, very interesting about this besides the question of archival integrity and archival responsibilities, if any, and things of that nature. One is privacy. So if you look at Twitter, it has, you know, public messaging and private messaging, essentially. And it's really not clear how much, how private the private messaging is, especially if you don't trust the people who own it anymore, and you start thinking about what would happen if they monetize all those private messages by letting other people sift through them. All of a sudden, I think we're seeing a really interesting public lesson in how much do you trust your service providers to do the right thing? What happens when your service provider changes? If you will, it gets sold or something, and all of a sudden you have all this hostage data that moves to the new management and how comfortable are you with that? I think that this, this, I don't know, you know, nobody knows what's really in all those private direct messages other than there's undoubtedly plenty of, you know, scandal to go around, plenty of embarrassment to go around. But I'm starting to wonder if this may actually trigger some conversations about data privacy that we haven't really seen before. The last thing about this current situation, and I'm really indebted to our friend, Herbert Von Dessampel, for underscoring this in a conversation I had with, I had last week with him, is that for the first time, we're starting to hear at some scale about people wanting to get their data out of one of these platforms and perhaps migrate it from one platform to a new platform. You know, we've talked about that theoretically. Most of these social media platforms have a way where you're supposed to be able to export data. Generally, this is obscure and what you get out of it is not necessarily easy to use. But you are starting now to see people, for example, who are promoting platforms like Mastodon as a, you know, possible path forward and away from Twitter to talk about data migration from one platform to another. That is a very potentially fruitful conversation to have in the context of stewardship, especially if we frame it as stewardship based on individual creators, individual authors, and their contributions to these platforms. So I do wonder, I cannot help but wonder if we're not at a unexpected but potentially pivotable moment here. So those are a few of the things I'm watching. There are lots more, but those are a few that are particularly interesting and that interact with CNI's agenda in various ways. And with that, let me come, let me move over to CNI's agenda. And I guess a few things, I want to say a few things, just in general. We, as just about everybody else did, moved virtual in early 2020 as a result of the pandemic. As is the case with many organizations, particularly smaller ones that do the kind of work that CNI does, we have stayed primarily virtual. We expect that we are going to be operating primarily as a virtual organization with people working remotely for the foreseeable future. And we're gradually making the necessary changes to get us there. That's quite a shift. It's a less difficult shift for us than it is for many other organizations that have ongoing operational face-to-face activities. We only do face-to-face activities that where we bring people together a few times a year like this. And we can easily do that without maintaining a big physical footprint the rest of the year. At the same time, we think that there is something really important in the physical meetings in bringing people together for conversations to network with each other and get to know each other. And so in that sense, while we are operating as a virtual organization primarily, we do not expect our activities to move entirely virtual. In fact, we are bringing them back more and more physically. If you look at what we did in 2021-2022 program year, and remember our program year is July 1 to June 30 of the following year. We actually, in 2021-2022, had what I would call a transitional year. You may recall, I know many of you were with us in December, 2021, where we were one of the first organizations, not the first, but one of the first to bring everybody back together in person. We did a spring meeting in San Diego in the spring of 2022. At the same time, in a fit of necessary insanity, we also did a pair of virtual meetings, spaced about a week away from the in-person meetings. That, I believe, was a very necessary transitional phase to go through. It was also thoroughly unsustainable. You will note that we are not doing a virtual meeting. We didn't just finish one. We're not doing one next week. We're not doing one in conjunction with the spring meeting. We are back to in-person events. Having said that, we are also continuing to work through what makes sense to leave digital, to leave virtual, and how much of that we should make use of. So just as a few examples, we are now doing pre-recorded quarterly project briefings, and we put out an addition of roughly 10 of these every quarter we call for contributions. These supplement the breakout sessions that we offer in the in-person meetings. Those make sense, we believe, to do asynchronously and virtually for a bunch of reasons that we can get into. The executive roundtables that we used to convene in-person either on Sunday afternoon or on the Monday morning of the first day of our meetings. Those are virtual now. They are desynchronized from our meeting schedule. There was no reason to synchronize them to our meeting schedule except for the fact that you already had people here in-person and it saved a trip. It makes a lot more sense to do those flexibly and to do those virtually. We have, during the pandemic, started a set of monthly gatherings, and I know many of you who are member reps have participated in one or more of them called hallway conversations where we just bring roughly a dozen max member reps together for an hour with me with no particularly fixed agenda to just talk over issues that are on our mind. Those have, I think, been very useful and seem to be well received. I believe that we will continue to do those as long as there's demand for them and we've already largely filled out the one for January 23. So we will be doing things like that. As I'll describe in a few minutes, we are going to be doing at least a few webinars, topical webinars on things. And we're still, these are synchronous webinars I'm talking about. We're still thinking about what the right proportions are. One of the things we don't want to do is continue in the kind of mode that everybody seemed to be in during the pandemic where you just can't have enough webinars and everybody is just glassy eyed from this endless collection of webinars. If there's one thing that I believe about CNI, it's that we don't want to deluge you with things. We want to try to be very precise and very parsimonious about bringing things to your attention you wouldn't see elsewhere and things that are or that we believe should be important to you. Not to make sure that you have a webinar every week from us whether we've got anything genuinely useful to say or not. We're going to try very hard not to go there. Another thing that I want to mention is that we have been working with our steering committee on a restructuring of this sort of thematic framework that we use to describe our program. Those of you who've been with us for a long time will remember if you go back to the pre-pandemic times that for example, every year up until program year 2019 slash 2020, we produced a document called the program plan. This was actually sort of two documents in one. One was general background on CNI and then the other talked about what we were doing programmatically for the year. And we really organized that along a long a framework that spoke about managing content, about organizational and institutional transformation and then about standards and technology with a sort of an additional one that dealt with public policy and consultation kinds of activities. It became very clear, particularly as we looked at the roles that we found ourselves in during the pandemic as we looked at our evolving set of interests and strengths. And as we also looked at the shifting roles of other organizations that we work closely with and that are in adjacent areas, I'm thinking here of groups like ARL, EDUCAUS, ClearDLF, that some rethinking here was really needed. We are still working through all of the details and I'm very hopeful that when we gather next year in December of 2023 that I'll be sharing a new program plan based on this new organization for the 2023-2024 program year. I'll be sharing some more material on the website in probably January about the restructuring and I would welcome feedback as we get there. I think that one of the things that we really came out of the pandemic with was an understanding that CNI, and this is very different than some other organizations, really if you look at our members, they're bound together by a significant commitment to not just teaching and learning but research and the resources necessary to support research, to support research today and to support future research. That really is something that is quite different when compared to other organizations that really reach across a much broader spectrum of higher education. The other thing I would say that makes CNI a little different is our time horizon. Many organizations stress things that you can take home and use tomorrow and that's not really what we're about. We're about getting you to think about things that you can take back to your institution and say, we really need to talk about this in the context of five-year strategic planning. We need to be aware that this is coming or this is potentially coming and think about how we should be positioning with regard to that. So we've really tried to recognize some of those things and just to give you kind of the top headings for how we're thinking about reorganizing our programmatic themes. One obviously is the changing nature of research practice and its implication. It's about how we're doing scholarship. It includes issues around computationally and data intensive scholarship, infrastructural changes, researchers support and what it means to support researchers in this environment and obviously hand in hand with all of that, how does the system of scholarly communication have to change to reflect these new research practices? A second thrust is shifts in organizational structures in our member institutions and the practices around them. To really give you a quick insight into this, go back to the 1990s when CNI was being characterized as a place to make the needed collaboration between library leadership and CIOs happen. What a simple bipolar world that was. Libraries, CIOs. Now look at what we've got out there. We have research computing, we have chief research officers in the mix, we have presses and publishing programs, we have chief privacy officers, chief information security officers. I'm thrilled to be able to report that among the members of our steering committee this year, along with the traditional CIOs and those sorts of folks, we have our first information security office, chief information security officer. And that is absolutely consistent with the kind of places we need to be going as we speak about privacy and how privacy and ethics around big data and those kinds of questions play out. The third major thrust is preservation and stewardship of the scholarly and cultural record and all of the implications that come with that. And I'm not even going to dip into that one because I could go for an hour. But that is clearly very central to so much of what we do. Now I just want to conclude my remarks by giving you a few heads up about some things that we have launched. A few of them have been announced, a few of them haven't been announced yet and I'm going to just share them anyway. So I think that you've seen the announcement of our senior scholars program. And I'm really excited about this. I think that it's an opportunity to get some of the best minds in our field an opportunity to engage with really critical problems that they care deeply about and that are very resonant with CNI's agenda and objectives. And we couldn't ask for a better inaugural senior scholar than Don Waters who I know is well known to many of you. He is looking at how institutions are organizing to address what I would characterize as deeply multidisciplinary grand challenge problems, climate change, pandemics, those sorts of things. And by deeply multidisciplinary here, it's the point is it's not just several different sciences working together. These are places where the humanities and the social sciences very much come into play alongside the more traditional STEM fields. And figuring out how to do that and then even more germane, what kind of information infrastructure is necessary to make that work is I think an incredibly important problem. We've just had, I think arguably at least a good case study of not doing very well at that in the response to the pandemic. We did spectacularly in some sense from the medical side, from the side of engineering vaccines, but from a sort of a societal response, it was pretty rocky. And I think we're, as we look back over that experience, it's helping to underscore the importance of the sort of work Don's doing. I think he's gonna be, he is planning on a presentation in Denver at the spring CNI to share some of his initial work on that. Okay, next thing we're gonna be doing. Joan Lippincott, our associate director emeritus who many of you know. During her last couple of years at CNI led a effort that was very important to us that focused on digital scholarship centers and how they fit inside institutions, their programs, what was working and what isn't. She is going to revisit digital scholarship centers, fundamentally ask questions like how have they feared over the last five years? How did the pandemic change their practices? Have they successfully become genuinely institutionalized? And I expect that over the first half of 2023, we will see probably a webinar, a report and a session at the Denver Spring CNI meeting reporting on various aspects of that work. I think that that's gonna be just fascinating cause in some sense when we first looked at this they were the new thing that everybody was excited about. And we don't go back and revisit new things that seemed like a great idea at the time near as often as we should to see what we can learn from that. Okay, we have quite a backlog of executive round table reports that we are trying very hard to catch up on. I am reluctant in the absence of major crises to schedule a lot more round tables until we get those reports out. But I expect that the next round table we do at least tentatively will look at some aspects of research support services as institutional competitive advantage. And that will probably happen sometime mid 2023. The last thing I wanna mention that I hope to make some more specific announcement about is that we've heard a steady set of queries about the use of machine learning and related AI technologies in the context of special collections and archives. And certainly one can point at a lot of interesting experiments that people have done. The problem is that most institutions at this point are not necessarily interested in experiments. They're interested in sustainable, transferable, reproducible, scalable kinds of services or practices. And I really am hopeful that we'll be able to provide some insight into what people can expect in that area in the coming couple of years. And I hope to be able to say more about that in early 2023. And there will be more to come. So those are some of the things that we are looking to get done this program year. I think that there's lots to do. There are a lot of exciting questions ahead of us. And I really hope that you will be with us on this journey. There's a lot of challenges. There's a lot of change, but there's also I believe a huge amount of opportunity that's starting to emerge in this landscape as we come out of the pandemic. I have not touched on many, many aspects of this, some of which are a little bit peripheral to CNI's work, but questions of how the diffusion of knowledge will happen in virtual rather than face-to-face settings is a really key issue we're going to be seeing play out and we'll be watching carefully over the next few years. Questions of remote work and how that resolves and all of the follow-on implications of how that resolves are going to be very much an issue. So I think we're in for a really interesting few years and I'm delighted you're here to explore them with us. Thank you very much. And okay, so I only lied a little. We probably have 10 minutes for questions. I would welcome a few questions or comments. There are some microphones I think around there and there or feel free to just yell if you prefer and I'll repeat the question. Yeah. I'd like to have Michael Siegel from the United States of Berlin and the iSchools. I really understand what you mean about the difficulty of having a virtual meeting facing onto a physical one. That's something we've had to do though because we are highly international and we don't have a good solution to moving people around the planet, especially an ecological solution, except by doing that. But the difficulty of that I would underscore as well. It's really hard. I'll just make a couple of comments on that. So from my perspective at least, so-called hybrid meetings where you've got some people in the room and some people out there tend to be just a disaster especially if you're doing anything other than sort of one way lecture presentations. Yeah. I think that you can pull that off in a classroom setting sometimes, especially if you have really good control over the facility but I don't think it meshes with us. Now what we did in 2021-2022 was two completely separate meetings that were designed to be complimentary to each other. Basically the easy way to think about this is it multiplied our workload by about 2.5 times. It turns out to be worse than simply linear because of the various couplings in coordination between the meetings. And just surely in terms of staff burnout, we couldn't do it. There are different organizations that are coming down in different places on this depending on what their goals are, what their memberships are, what their geographic footprints look like. And I wanna stress that we made a call for what I think was best for CNI with our membership and our geographic footprint and our agenda. I think you're gonna see an enormous variation from organization to organization in the right answers there. And there are some where I will say honestly, we haven't resolved what we're gonna do. You may recall we used to every couple of years do a joint meeting with JISC in the UK bringing together US and UK people. And that was always in person. We did that once virtually and for a lot of reasons it didn't go well. And I'm disinclined to do it virtually again. On the other hand, we may end up rethinking that meeting and saying the right way to do that is virtually. I don't know on that one yet. We have a lot of conversations to have. But I think what I would just stress is that we need to be mindful of the workload and the time demands on people because what we were seeing in 2021, 2022 is that it wasn't just our staff getting burnt out. It was also our members who were like, oh, well, you've got two different meetings one in person and one not. And I guess I need to watch all of both of them. Thanks a lot. Yeah, thank you. Cliff Bob Hanisch, National Institute of Standards and Technology. I wanna take you back to your speculations about AI. One of the biggest challenges, as you know, in research data management is metadata creation and curation. Do you see technologies like the BGT-3 and other AI as solving that problem for us? Or do we still have to worry about manual curation at a high level? I am very pessimistic that those kinds of things will solve our data curation, metadata problems, at least in the near to medium term future. What I'm actually more optimistic about is the kind of things like the cloud lab work at Carnegie Mellon that we talked about last December. There, what you're doing is you're generating data in an environment where you sort of automatically pick up a ton of the metadata that you need. And as you well know, the more you can do that right in the workflow that produces the data, the better off you are. I'll also though, I'm struck by just how hard it is. The fair principles are just such a nice slogan and they are so difficult to genuinely achieve. I've been watching with great interest this series of very specific disciplinary workshops that the European community has been convening, trying to understand how one might actually use these in practice in specific sub-disciplines to actually get the kind of reusability and interoperability that is so easy to talk about and hard to do. But I wish I was more optimistic about the use of AI kind of systems in that setting. Just thank you for teeing up what I'll say in my talk in the panel about laboratory information management and metadata capture at the birth of the data. So thank you. I'm 100% with you on that. So maybe I have a bit of a simplistic question, but I was intrigued by the topic for your next executive round table and I just wondered if you were to take the top universities by the herd ranking or something like that and look at how they're using their money to support research, it feels like the solution is always just having lots of money and then you fix the problems and so is that something you would consider to think about those institutions and looking at their resources and then it could be a more active discussion about what are the, like an institution like my own that doesn't have the same level of resources. So that is not a simplistic question at all. That's a really complicated question. I think right now that there's a very poor understanding of even the extent to which investment in research support services genuinely adds value to various, advancing various institutional goals such as increasing the research footprint of an institution, competing for grant funds, things of that nature. There's no good handle on how much is enough here. There's, we don't really understand, I don't think, how to begin to measure this, how to make the case for it, how it should be positioned vis-a-vis the institution as a whole as opposed to specific schools or departments. So I think there are a lot of different questions to ask there and certainly people have argued, I think quite sensibly that changing research practices are creating a bigger and bigger demand for professionalized and institutionalized research support services, but the conversation hasn't happened at a strategic level in the context of institutional goals. That's probably the best way I can explain what I'm after in this round table, at least in the current immature stage of thinking. I think that there is a whole second order problem about what are table stakes in this world, if you will, and how many institutions really can afford those table stakes. I don't know what the right answers are there either, but that is a very significant problem. I think it's going to play out in some surprising ways. Let me just leave that there. Hi, thank you. I'm Gwendolyn Reese. I'm from American University Library, but for the past six years, I've been the chair of the IRB. So I'm asking questions coming from that kind of perspective. I wanted to thank you very much for talking about privacy a little bit, but I'm kind of wondering whether or not some of these issues are kind of on your agenda. Some of the things that give me nightmares, and I just have a lot of nightmares right now, is this combination of the big data and the way in which we're doing data preservation along with AI that is developing. So for instance, so much of what we do in trying to protect human subjects is de-identification of data, but what does it mean in terms of the risk of re-identification when you're trying to foresee AI as it will be in five years? And so I'm just kind of wondering those kinds of things. And then what do you think the general role of us in this kind of community are for talking about and helping people be educated about ethics when it comes to data ethics and AI and so forth. Thank you for your thoughts. Gee, we could do an hour on that really easily. Let me just make a couple of very quick points. So I think that there's one set of questions about educating our communities about privacy and also about ethical use of research data and those kinds of things. Those are somewhat separate problems. I think that there are a lot of really hard problems about good archival practice, personal digital archiving, how public is public and that assortment of issues. I think the re-identification thing is really nasty. I mean, all the indications are that it's getting harder and harder to genuinely de-identify anything and still be left with data that's useful. There are some interesting approaches like creating synthetic data based on the distributions of attributes in real data, which I think bears some consideration, but that de-identification issue is really hard and I think it's just getting more complicated the farther we go. When you look at some individual making a choice about sharing their genomic data, they're not just making a choice for themselves and we've seen that again and again and we don't know how to handle that. Clearly when we get into the big data world, there's this huge disconnect in that, at least as I understand it, a lot of IRBs have taken the position that, oh, if you're just scraping public data off the web, we don't need to get involved. That's public data. At the same time, we have certainly seen what feel to me like profoundly unethical pieces of research using this kind of data and even worse creating data sets that then are put out for reuse and further abuse. We really need to start thinking more seriously about that and I am encouraged that some disciplines are starting to do that. For example, if memory serves, there is at least one major annual conference that deals with sort of social scale web data where they actually are putting papers through an ethical review group that's part of the conference program committee essentially. We may see more of that as well. So I think it's an interesting question, how much of this ends up institutional, how much of it ends up disciplinary, but I think there are huge challenges there. As far as CNI's agenda, we're interested in these things, but we're interested in it, I would say specifically in the contexts of research and appropriate stewardship and use of collections. I could probably do one more question. I think people are ready for a break. Well, thank you, welcome. I hope you have a great meeting.