2015-12-24: CNI Fall 2015 Membership Meeting Trip Report

The CNI Fall 2015 Membership Meeting was held in Washington, D.C., December 14-15, 2015.  Like all CNI meetings, the Fall 2015 meeting was excellent and contained many high quality presentations.  Unfortunately, the members' project briefings ran simultaneously, with 7 or 8 different presentations overlapping at any given time.  As a result I missed a great deal. 

Cliff Lynch kicked off the meeting with reflections about public access to federally funded research (e.g., CRS R42983), interoperability (e.g., OAI-ORE, ORCIDs, IIIF), linked data (e.g., Wikipedia notability guidelines for biographies),  privacy & surveillance (e.g., eavesdropping Barbies, Ashley Madison data breach, RFC 7624), and understanding the personalization algorithms that go into presenting (and thus archiving) the view of the web that you experience (e.g., our 2013 D-Lib Magazine article about mobile vs. desktop & GeoIP), and much more.  I'm hesitant to try to further summarize his talk -- watching the video of his talk, as always, is time well spent.

In the next session Herbert and I presented "Achieving Meaningful Interoperability for Web-based Scholarship", which is basically a summary of our recent D-Lib Magazine paper "Reminiscing About 15 Years of Interoperability Efforts". 



2016-01-07 Edit: CNI has now posted the video of our presentation:



See also the excellent summary and commentary from David Rosenthal about the "signposting" proposal.

The next session I split between "Linked Data for Libraries and Archives: LD4L and Europeana" (see the "Linked Data for Libraries" site) and "Is Gold Open Access Sustainable? Update from the UC Pay-It-Forward Project" (slides, video).  The final session of the day included several presentations I would have liked to have seen but didn't.  I understand "Documenting Ferguson: Building A Community Digital Repository" (slides) was good & standing room only.

I missed the opening session on the second day (including the "Update on Funding Opportunities" presentation), but made the presentation from David Rosenthal about emulation.  See the transcript of his talk, as well as his 2015 Emulation and Virtualization as Preservation Strategies report for the AMF.

Unfortunately, David's talk collided with that of Martin & his UCLA colleagues.  Fortunately, CNI has posted the video of their talk, his slides are online, and he has a great interactive site to explore the data.




After lunch I attend Rob's talk "The Future of Linked Data in Libraries: Assessing BibFrame Against Best Practices" (slides).  Rob even referenced my "no free kittens" slogan (tirade?) from our time developing OAI-ORE:




The closing plenary was an excellent talk from Julie Brill, head of the Federal Trade Commission, entitled "Transparency, Trust, and Consumer Protection in a Complex World".  The transcript is worth reading, but the essence of the talk explores the role the FTC would (should?) play in making sure that consumers can be aware of the data that companies track about them and how that data is used to make decisions about the consumers. (2016-01-07 edit: the video of her presentation is now online.)

A mostly complete list of slides is available via the OSF.  CNI recorded many of the presentations and have begun uploading the videos to the CNI Youtube channel.  The CNI Spring 2016 Membership Meeting will be held in San Antonio, TX, April 4-5, 2016.

Given all the simultaneous sessions, your CNI experience was probably different than mine.  Check out these other CNI Fall 2015 trip reports: Dale Askey, Jaap Geraerts, and Tim Pyatt

--Michael

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