2016-04-05: CNI Spring 2016 Trip Report

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The CNI Spring 2016 Members Meeting was held in San Antonio, TX, April 4-5, 2016.  As usual, the presentations were excellent but with six or more simultaneous sessions you are forced to make hard choices about what to catch up on.

This year Martin Halbert and Katherine Skinner arranged the "Digital Preservation of Federal Information Summit", convening 30+ people to discuss "...the topic of preservation and access to at-risk digital government information."  It was quite the collaborative exercise, and I know Martin produced some summary slides that I will link here when they are posted.  There were only a few presentations (and they were done in Pecha Kucha format) for this Summit, and I was fortunate enough to give one for Herbert and I entitled "Why We Need Multiple Archives".  The answer is probably pretty obvious for the crowd that Martin assembled, but we often run into people that don't understand the role of archives beyond that of the (obviously excellent) Internet Archive.




Victoria Stodden gave the opening keynote, "Defining the Scholarly Record for Computational Research", in which she talked about the "Reproducible Research Standard", ResarchCompendia.org, and computational infrastructure within the context of legal and social norms.  CNI will eventually put the videos up, in the mean time I would encourage you to see her SC15 talk that touches on similar themes.  (2016-04-25 edit: the video of her keynote is now available)

The next session I attended was Jason Varghese (NYPL) presenting "Microservices Architecture: Building Scalable (Library) Software Solutions." He's clearly doing cool stuff, but I would have appreciated a more detailed discussion of the APIs they've implemented, but I guess that can be found at: http://api.repo.nypl.org/.

The next session was "Scaling Maker Spaces Across the Web: Weaving Maker Space Communities Together to Support Distributed, Networked Collaboration in Knowledge Creation", by Rick Luce and Carl Grant, both at Oklahoma University.  They talked about their experiences setting up a makerspace (complete with 3D printing and VR capabilities) in the library, both a small satellite for their on campus library (the "edge") and their much larger facility in the research park two miles away (the "hub").  I urge you to peruse the links -- this was truly impressive stuff & Rick consistently does exciting things with libraries.

I skipped the final session of the day in order to get my slides for Tuesday morning arranged.  I had originally thought I had a 30 minute slot, but in reality I had 15 minutes and many slides needed tossing.  There was an evening reception and they we had dinner at one of the many restaurants on the famed River Walk.

Tuesday began with split sessions, and I was in the session that Martin Halbert arranged, "National Web Archiving Programs in the U.S.", along with Jefferson Bailey and Mark Phillips.  Jefferson gave a brief overview of the "Systems Interoperability and Collaborative Development for Web Archiving" project, Mark reviewed End of Term (EOT) web archiving, and Martin recapped the "Digital Preservation of Federal Information Summit" from the previous days.  I presented a brief status about our work using Storytelling interfaces for summarizing collections in Archive-It:




Unfortunately, with the simultaneous sessions I had to miss "DBpedia Archive using Memento, Triple Pattern Fragments, and HDT", presented by Herbert Van de Sompel and Miel Vander Sande.  Their video is now available (2016-05-02 edit).

The next session I attended was about organization identifiers, and featured Geoffery Bilder (Crossref), Patricia Cruse (DataCite), and (via facetime) Laure Haak (ORCID).  They are in the early stages of collaborating for org ids, and while I learned a lot, I would have appreciated a more thorough review of existing org id efforts and how they fall short of their goals.  Part They did share their requirements document and invited contributions.  "Challenges Presented by Organizational IDs" by Karen Smith-Yoshimura (OCLC), from CNI Spring 2015, provides some of the background that I did not have.

The after lunch session that I attended on Tuesday was "Rebuilding the Getty Provenance Index as Linked Data".  I knew almost nothing about the art world going into this, so now I know more about the linked data challenges of porting Getty's legacy databases that await Rob Sanderson when he joins Getty later this month.

The closing keynote, "Activist Stewardship: The Imperative of Risk in Collecting Cultural Heritage", was handled by a trio from UCLA: Todd Grappone, Elizabeth McAulay, Heather Briston (who was pinch hitting for Sharon Farb).  They presented about the Digital Ephemera Project, and in general the role of archivists in collecting materials that will get you (the library) or the contributor in trouble.  Some examples included the internal and external pressures about UCLA's Scientology collection and contributors regarding the Green Movement collection.  Cliff Lynch gave a good introduction to this session and promised a wrap for it as well, but the session ran a bit long and that did not happen.  Rather than try to further summarize, I'll link the video when it comes out.  I did appreciate that Memento got a mention in the presentation regarding finding archived images embedded in tweets that had otherwise been deleted!


If you want a mostly different path through the various simultaneous sessions, I encourage you to read Dale Askey's excellent conference notes.

I'll update this post as additional slides and videos are uploaded.  Thanks to everyone @ CNI for yet another excellent meeting!

--Michael

2016-04-25 edit: The video of the "The Role of Next Generation Libraries in Enhancing Multidisciplinary Research" Panel (which I missed while @ CNI) is now available.

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