About CNI Conversations:
As part of an ongoing effort to explore additional ways to connect with our members, CNI launched a new program in September 2009, CNI Conversations, in which participants from member institutions and organizations take part in discussions on current topics with CNI Director Clifford Lynch and others; currently the events take place in audio-conference format.

Real-time participation in upcoming CNI Conversations events requires pre-registration. Registration is open only to those at member institutions and organizations. Dates for upcoming events were recently sent to the CNI representatives at our member institutions; if you are interested in participating in a future session of CNI Conversations, please contact one of your organization’s CNI representatives. We plan to continue to make audio or other records of these exchanges generally available after the event.

For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at Joan@cni.org.

The publication is dedicated to the memory of Jim Gray and explores his intellectual legacy in Earth and Environment, Health and Well Being, Scientific Infrastructure, and Scholarly Communication. Many of the chapters are by authors well-known within the CNI community, particularly in the Scholarly Communications section, which includes contributions by Timo Hanny, Paul Ginsparg, Herbert Van de Somple and Carl Lagoze; Cliff Lynch also contributed a chapter for this section.

The CNI community is urged to look beyond the Scholarly Communications section; there are a number of important chapters on broader developments in e-science that will likely be of interest. There’s also a short interview wtih Tony Hey about the book at
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/fourthparadigm-101609.aspx

(Disclosure: CNI Director Clifford Lynch serves on the Microsoft Research External Advisory Board.)

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Statistics and Measurement Program is offering a five day workshop entitled METS: The Basics and Beyond to be held in partnership with Nancy J. Hoebelheinrich and Rick Beaubien of the METS Editorial Board. This workshop is aimed at people who work in digital and physical libraries and would like to gain knowledge and skills for organizing the many and disparate component parts of individual digital resources.

Although continuous, this hands-on workshop consists of three modules, any of which may be taken independently:   

• The first module (Monday) offers a thorough introduction to METS including an overview of all of its high level features.
• The second module (Tuesday and Wednesday) delves deeply into the heart of METS: the flexible mechanisms it provides for encoding, organizing and representing digital content of various kinds and for different purposes.
• The third and final module (Thursday and Friday) explores strategies for implementing METS in a production environment, and reviews existing tools that can facilitate implementation.

For further details, including expanded module descriptions, instructor bios, and information on lodging, please go to: http://www.arl.org/stats/statsevents/METS-workshop.shtml

For more information, contact: 
David Green
Association of Research Libraries 
202-296-2296
david@arl.org

Note in particular the set of presentations on Data Integrity.  Each segment of the workshop included extensive discussion, and one point mentioned only in passing in the LC notes worth highlighting for the CNI community was a developing initiative within the US Federal Government and the High Performance Computing community addressing Resilient Computing — the design of systems that continue to function in useful ways even in the face of extensive component failures. Thusfar, much of the thinking in this area has focused on computational systems rather than storage systems (see, for example, the frightening report “Towards Exascale Resilience” at
http://jointlab.ncsa.illinois.edu/pubs/Toward_Exascale_Resilience.pdf
and additional materials hosted at
http://institutes.lanl.gov/resilience/).
These ideas are likely to be very important in future thinking about how to design digital preservation systems that minimize and constrain loss, rather than pursuing perfectly lossless systems, which are likely to be both technologically and economically unachievable at very large scale, as some of the presentations at the LC Symposium suggest.  CNI Director Clifford Lynch expanded a little bit on these ideas in the October 6, 2009 CNI Conversations (the audio file of this session is available at
http://www.cni.org/cni_conversations/).

The aim of the event is to examine the issues, challenges and priorities associated with integrating text mining technologies in applications to support scholarly communication and repository initiatives.

The audience is expected to consist of researchers, information management professionals, librarians, text miners, repository providers, publishers, policy makers and JISC service representatives.

More information at
http://www.nactem.ac.uk/tm-ukoln.php

The Paul Evan Peters Award recognizes the most notable and lasting international achievements related to high performance networks and the creation and use of information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity.  Past winners have been Daniel E. Atkins (2008), inaugural director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure; Paul Ginsparg (2006), founder of arXiv, an e-print archive for articles in the sciences; Brewster Kahle (2004), founder and chairman of the board of the Internet Archive; “father of the Internet” Vinton Cerf (2002); and Tim Berners-Lee (2000), inventor of the World Wide Web.  All recipients embody the rare combination of strategic vision, technical innovation, and humanitarian outlook that the award seeks to promote.

Award winners are recommended by a committee of representatives of the Association of Research Libraries, the Coalition for Networked Information, and EDUCAUSE, and selected by the chief executives of the three organizations.

Guidelines for submitting a nomination are detailed below.

GUIDELINES:

Nominees for the award should meet one or more of the following qualifications.

He or she has:

1. Demonstrated a positive and lasting impact on scholarly communications through the implementation and/or use of advanced telecommunications networks.
2. Addressed a specific problem fundamental to scholarship, research, and intellectual productivity and provided an innovative solution using high performance network technology.
3. Helped increase awareness of the role of scholarly information and communication through dissemination of effective techniques using computing and information technologies.
4. Made a career-long contribution to the advancement of scholarly information and communications through the implementation and/or use of high performance communications networks.

ONE-TO-TWO-PAGE LETTERS OF NOMINATION SHOULD BE SENT VIA EMAIL TO:
Joan K. Lippincott
joan@cni.org

OR

Paul Evan Peters Award Nomination
c/o Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information
21 Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC  20036-1109
fax: 202-982-0884

DEADLINE:  OCTOBER 12, 2009

Recipients of this award will receive a commemorative award and will be asked to present a major address at a CNI membership meeting.  This award is offered jointly by the Association of Research Libraries, the Coalition for Networked Information, and EDUCAUSE.  It honors Paul Evan Peters, founding director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), who guided CNI until his untimely death in 1996 and who was recognized as one of the 100 most influential people in 20th century librarianship in the American Libraries listing of December 1999.  The award program has been endowed by the Association of Research Libraries, EDUCAUSE, Microsoft Corporation, and Xerox Corporation.

For more information see the award website at:
http://www.educause.edu/PaulEvanPetersAward/852

For further information about how to book, speakers, travel information and hotels, please visit: www.neeoconference.eu.