Week 1: Developing and Managing Networked Information Content Summary Session

Cliff Lynch: Well, thank you for joining us today and we’ll be getting started in about 90 seconds or so. Cliff Lynch: Thanks for joining us. Cliff Lynch: We’ll be getting started in another minute or so. Well, Cliff Lynch: Glad you could join us today. Thanks for coming. We’ll get started in Cliff Lynch: About another 30 seconds or so. Cliff Lynch: Okay. I think it’s about time to get started. Thanks for joining us, and welcome to the CNI fall 2020 virtual member meeting.

I’m Cliff Lynch, the director of see and I and 02:58 - Cliff Lynch: I will be Cliff Lynch: I’ll be running the session. Cliff Lynch: The session is being recorded and there is closed captioning available that you can turn on if you’d like. There’s a chat box and please feel free to use that we’re going to do this a little bit differently than we’ve done other sessions and let me just explain a little bit Cliff Lynch: So, Cliff Lynch: This session is intended to close out the first week of presentations, which took place last week. Cliff Lynch: Through last Friday. Cliff Lynch: The. This is an experiment that we’re running for the Fall Meeting and we’ll see how well it works. Cliff Lynch: The idea. Well, the ideas are twofold to give us a little time to reflect on some of what we heard in the past week together and also to try and provide something that’s a little bit akin to the sort of conversations that I would hear over coffee.

04:16 - Cliff Lynch: When Cliff Lynch: When we met in person at CNI and people came out of the parallel breakout sessions and chatted Cliff Lynch: A little bit with each other about what they found interesting and what they’ve been hearing. And the idea here is to do very much the same kind of thing. So I’ve got a few comments probably 10 minutes, maybe a little bit more reflecting on a few of the themes that Cliff Lynch: I had been drawing out of the presentations and after I run through them. Maybe just offering us a place to start. I’m going to invite others to Cliff Lynch: Share their comments. You don’t need to wait for me to share your comments feel free to put your thoughts in the chat stream in any time we’re not going to be using the Q AMP a box.

05:22 - Cliff Lynch: On after I finished my comments. I’m going to invite further comments from those in attendance to keep in mind as I said that we are recording this session. Cliff Lynch: And I’ll just invite people to to raise hands and I will, I can turn on your audio or if you prefer. I can Cliff Lynch: I can Cliff Lynch: I can Cliff Lynch: Just read questions or comments that you put in the chat. So all I’ll leave that at your option. Now the last thing I want to say by way of introduction is that Cliff Lynch: I blocked, an hour for this because I didn’t know how long it could take. But how long it lasts. It’s really largely up to you.

06:17 - Cliff Lynch: As I say, I have only can maybe 15 minutes of reflections max and this will be true for all of the Monday summary sessions that we will be having Week two will start tomorrow. Cliff Lynch: We start our weeks on Tuesday at sea and i and i did our full virtual meeting and next one day we’ll have a summary of week too. So with that, let me just dive in and Cliff Lynch: Reflect on a few things that really struck me. So one of the issues that I saw surfacing repeatedly and it’s not Cliff Lynch: A new issue for us, but it’s one that I think is taking on increased importance is sustainability of projects. And I think that one of the things we’re seeing here is kind of a Cliff Lynch: New.

I don’t want to say an entirely new aspect to this, but certainly a slightly shifted emphasis, what we’re seeing now is projects that have built up really important relation 07:40 - Cliff Lynch: Resources for scholarly communities, usually with grant funding and which have a multi institutional flavor to them. I mean, the resource may be hosted at a specific institution. Cliff Lynch: It may even move from institution to institution, over time, but it’s the work of a community of scholars Cliff Lynch: From a number of different institutions who’ve come together to build this resource and now people are struggling with models that will allow these multi institutional resources to be sustained and managed Cliff Lynch: Often they seem to be moving away from ideas of Cliff Lynch: How will I characterize this subscription models and more into owner or participant models were a relatively smaller number of institutions. Cliff Lynch: Will put resources into help contribute to the supportive the resource and the resource itself will continue along open access to the community. And so in some sense the Cliff Lynch: participating institutions are backing up the contributions of their scholars or scholars at their institution that rely heavily on the resource.

09:15 - Cliff Lynch: This has lots of interesting dimensions, including governance dimensions which show up in many guises. And I think we will continue to follow developments on this with great interest. Cliff Lynch: I’d also note that we’re seeing governance issues arise in other collaborative settings as well. There are resources that are being constructed that sort of sit in the tradition of non custodial or collaborative kind of facilitating Cliff Lynch: Archives for communities. Cliff Lynch: And here again, there are questions of governance and bringing in the stakeholders in those communities.

I think we saw a couple of particularly interested want interesting 10:17 - Cliff Lynch: Versions of this, the set of issues arise in the presentation on the digital library of the Caribbean out of Cliff Lynch: Miami and also the presentation out of the University of Texas at Austin about the very interesting work that they’re doing with Cliff Lynch: Um, I, I want to call it multi lingual crowdsourcing but that’s not exactly what it is. It really has some elements of that. But it also has elements of a sort of sustained. Cliff Lynch: Community of participation and I note that both of these projects that I just cited have substantial international dimensions. Cliff Lynch: As well as dimensions of Cliff Lynch: I don’t know what to call it on colonial histories and other other things that are implicated in there so that the issues around appropriate governance and appropriate participation. Cliff Lynch: And policy development are very, very real in these in these issues in these projects. Cliff Lynch: I would really invite people to take a close look at that UT Austin project, though I think some of the things they’re doing with multilingual communities in there which I’ve not seen before.

12:00 - Cliff Lynch: And perhaps you know there are other great exemplars of it. Now I just haven’t seen them, but I, I really found that very interesting Cliff Lynch: Know your big theme is Cliff Lynch: Trying to understand and map out Cliff Lynch: What’s in collections. We saw some very interesting work on that around web archive collections, for example. Cliff Lynch: And I think, I think we, we can trace. Other examples of this will be seeing some of these in a more technological context. I think later on.

12:42 - Cliff Lynch: But I think increasingly as we get into these large core fora, the challenge of just understanding what’s in there is very, very real. Cliff Lynch: Another real eye catching presentation that Cliff Lynch: I’d urge people who missed who are interested in this topic to go have a look at the video of Cliff Lynch: Was from Berkeley and it dealt with reproducibility. Cliff Lynch: Enemy specifically computational reproducibility. But he dealt with it through an a pedagogical kind of a setting. In other words, it was about. How do you provide people with an organized framework and platform for Cliff Lynch: Demonstrating reproducibility or investigating reproducibility of a scholarly or scientific resource.

13:48 - Cliff Lynch: And and how do you do this on kind of a shared basis. How do you teach people to do it. And I think it’s a project that Cliff Lynch: Libraries, who are engaged in issues about and and efforts in teaching people how to be effective scholars, things like the carpentry is like good research data management, good good reproducibility discipline may find this quite interesting. Cliff Lynch: But I’ve not seen a lot of emphasis on the sort of pedagogical role of this before and I found that to be very interesting. Cliff Lynch: One of the talks that we saw last Friday that I found to be quite provocative was a collaboration around trying to organize all of the research that the National Science Foundation is doing. Cliff Lynch: With regard to Cliff Lynch: And there’s a lot of it.

15:00 - Cliff Lynch: But how to really connect different P eyes, who and different research projects that are active in different areas is this or is it very real challenge. And we saw a report from the northeast. Cliff Lynch: NSF big data innovation hub on that on Cliff Lynch: The work that they’re doing with a grant from NSF to build a resource for this. And I think this may be a very considerable interest to many institutions and too many of the participants and C and I who are Cliff Lynch: Trying to help researchers in their institution to discover collaborators and resource data sets. Now one of the significant limitations right now is that this this data, this this resource that the that has been built at Columbia by the data hub. Cliff Lynch: Does emphasize NSF funded research.

And of course, there’s a huge amount of research that’s being funded out of the National Institutes of Health, as well as we’re coming out of other organizations like the Department of Energy. Cliff Lynch: And Cliff Lynch: They’ve also been investing and resources and one can hope that going forward. These will become increasingly interlinked. There are also, of course, our efforts to tie in research that’s being funded in other nations and through explicit multinational efforts. Cliff Lynch: I do want to note, by the way, the big, the big data hubs that NSF has funded don’t seem to be that widely known within NSF and they’re doing a lot of interesting work that touches a lot of different areas. And one of the things that I did make a note of as Cliff Lynch: As a result of that session is that we really should bring together a session for the spring meeting that looks at across the data hubs at some of the innovative work they’re doing and showcases that for for our CNI community.

17:35 - Cliff Lynch: The last two things, I’ll just mention or Cliff Lynch: Again, not new, certainly, but just were important reminders for me. Cliff Lynch: One was in these international collaboration, the importance of thinking through and being mindful of the facts on the ground for your collaborating international partners and we seen you know many examples of this before. For example, collaboration to digitize material in foreign countries. Cliff Lynch: Where, you know, the sort of equipment that you could bring in the customs work maintenance kinds of issues. Cliff Lynch: Are all very critical. Cliff Lynch: One of the, one of the good illustrations, we heard was of the dangers of simply assuming that they’ll be decent internet connectivity.

There may be there may not be and one needs to really think through approaches. Cliff Lynch: That are flexible and mindful of those realities on the ground. Cliff Lynch: That’s, you know, that’s the lesson we’ve seen in presentations at CNI many times, but it’s always one that’s that’s easy to forget. Cliff Lynch: The last thing I’ll just say is I was really reminded in a couple of these talks, and just how complicated both technically and in terms of inter institutional arrangements and service interdependencies the whole scholarly communications infrastructure has become Cliff Lynch: It really is an exceedingly complicated ecosystem at this point and I do worry Cliff Lynch: More and more about both the barriers to entry for new entrance that that complexity represents but also I worry a bit about Cliff Lynch: The Cliff Lynch: The potential fragility of some of this. Cliff Lynch: When you have lots of interdependent services, you have to start worrying about which ones are critical, and which ones aren’t and how things do or don’t degrade gracefully. If one of the services stops working for a while.

20:35 - Cliff Lynch: So that’s, that’s, again, something that I think may may be worthy of a bit of careful thinking about going forward. And I told you I’d be brief. Those are some of the reflections that I came away with and you know I’m certainly not going to try and summarize every session. Cliff Lynch: There in those sessions I saw and I saw all of them for this first week. Cliff Lynch: Live. I thought were really, really good. And they covered a tremendous amount of ground. Cliff Lynch: In the coming weeks. I am going to try and get to as many sessions as possible live, but I know at least Cliff Lynch: At least for week two, there are a couple where I have conflicts and I’m going to have to watch the videos I will also note that starting with week two. Cliff Lynch: We will be supplementing the the record the live sessions that will take place.

Starting tomorrow with a group of pre recorded 21:50 - Cliff Lynch: videos as well, which should become available. I believe tonight or tomorrow morning. So with that, I haven’t seen anything in the chat yet and I just open the chat. I do open the Florida comments. If you’d like me to turn your audio on so that you can make some Cliff Lynch: make some observations. Cliff Lynch: Just go ahead and raise your hand and all love turn your audio on and Boaz is some Cliff Lynch: Is asking. She is asking if I can elaborate on my last point about Cliff Lynch: Worries regarding interdependencies and services.

22:38 - Cliff Lynch: Is it particular to network level type of work. How may we afford the risk here. Cliff Lynch: If it’s really, to me, it’s kind of a Nash natural consequence of Cliff Lynch: Services that build on each other and Cliff Lynch: You know, you see, you see things like orchid and cross RAF and increasingly roar. Cliff Lynch: interleaved into things we see various kinds of gas at tears and name authorities and in similar kinds of services. Cliff Lynch: Some of these are Cliff Lynch: Are really two things their standards, you know, if you think of orchid. For example, it’s a it’s a standard identifier. But there’s also a bunch of services attached to work.

It’s 23:44 - Cliff Lynch: That do various kinds of resolution and look up and things like that and Cliff Lynch: Some, some systems just embed work it as an identifier others make calls in real time to those to some of those services. Cliff Lynch: Still others use those services as part of batch processing streams or or non real time processing streams that support the service. I don’t think we have a real great map of those Cliff Lynch: And, you know, in a certain sense, it’s great. It means where we’re seeing common services and we’re not reiterating Cliff Lynch: Or repeating, you know, redundant effort. The other side of it, though, is it does Cliff Lynch: It does mean we need to think about robustness.

24:41 - Cliff Lynch: I know I don’t know whether that got it. What you’re what you’re thinking about Cliff Lynch: Other comments. Anybody want to Cliff Lynch: Want to take the take the floor and reflect on what they’ve been hearing this past week. I know that many of you have been in many of the sessions and certainly there’s been some great conversation at some of the sessions. Cliff Lynch: very surprised. This is usually not quite the shy group. Cliff Lynch: Would anybody like to nominate out of the first week session.

25:53 - Cliff Lynch: Where if you were suggesting someone at your institution or one of your colleagues that Cliff Lynch: That was not able to get to the first week that this is one you really should you really should go back and watch the video of Cliff Lynch: While you’re thinking about that and you’re welcome to put your nominations in the chat. I see there are a couple of comments here. Cliff Lynch: Tara Lynn Fulton says she sees a lot of sessions reporting on work completed, but she worries that Kovac is closing so many of us to be more Cliff Lynch: Institution internally focused at our institutions that we’ll have fewer projects to report on in future and that is a really, really interesting question. Cliff Lynch: And it’s one that I have been trying to get a bit of a handle on and Cliff Lynch: I can answer this in a, in a lot of different ways. Cliff Lynch: So if you look at what happened to the research enterprise, more broadly, what you see is that during the spring and summer. In fact, Cliff Lynch: Paper submissions went way up. Cliff Lynch: I’m.

See, I saw I’ve seen reports from a number of the publishers and from a number of our member institutions that say that submissions to journals and grant proposals are up about 30% 27:40 - Cliff Lynch: From where they were a year before. Now some of that obviously is draining a pipeline. Cliff Lynch: In other words, people couldn’t get to their labs, they couldn’t do their field work. So what they’re doing is they’re writing new proposals and they are writing up data that they’ve already collected Cliff Lynch: And what that says is that as that pipeline empties we may see some reduction in the amount amount of research that’s coming out. Cliff Lynch: I suspect that there is going to be a little bit of that effect for the kind of projects we look at it CNI but I also am seeing a tremendous amount of innovation among our members, the nature of that innovation is a bit different. Cliff Lynch: But I’m not at all persuaded that we’re going to see Cliff Lynch: A great reduction in the level of innovation, at least in the coming year or two.

Now the other thing I would say that’s really interesting to me is that there are some people that are 28:53 - Cliff Lynch: sick, sick, you know, majorly reorienting the focus of their researcher innovation because the areas. They’re formerly working with are Cliff Lynch: Impossible for some reason or another, for example, I think that there are some reasons to believe that certain kinds of international travel are going to be pretty severely constrained for some time to come. Cliff Lynch: Even as we start seeing hopefully the emergence of vaccines that will help us get this pandemic under control. Cliff Lynch: So you’re seeing people Cliff Lynch: Recognize that and do the research that they can do. On the other hand, there’s also a stream of conversations that I’ve been very fortunate to be involved in Cliff Lynch: Over the last few months, growing out of work, like the sorcery project which will have a video report on Cliff Lynch: In one of the upcoming weeks.

I don’t remember off hand which one 30:10 - Cliff Lynch: But more broadly about how we do remote access to archive. Cliff Lynch: Archives and Special Collections have tended to be constructed under the assumption that people are going to come visit that that’s the primary and best way to do it. Cliff Lynch: Well, we’re in a world right now where that’s pretty much impossible in a lot of cases. So we’re trying to Cliff Lynch: There, there’s a group of people who are trying to think through and innovate through, how can we think about remote access to these kinds of things. So that’s, that’s another example in our community of the changing, you know, sort of, Cliff Lynch: Shape of innovation.

30:58 - Cliff Lynch: I don’t know whether that’s helpful, but it’s certainly an area that we’re going to be, you know, tracking quite closely. Cliff Lynch: A Jennifer younger asks, or says she’s intrigued by the move away from subscriptions and towards supporting open access by the collaborative community most interested in making the digital resource available. I think that’s a really interesting Cliff Lynch: Development as well you know there’s been a tendency to Cliff Lynch: Try and do these things sort of large scale subscription models. And there’s a lot of friction to that. Cliff Lynch: And there’s going to be a lot of subscription fatigue. Cliff Lynch: As that those kinds of models scaled up.

So I think we really need to watch what’s going on there. Cliff Lynch: Several folks were quite taken by the digital library of the Caribbean presentation and mentioned that as one that colleagues might find very valuable. Cliff Lynch: Jennifer younger. Another concern is how collaborative open access projects will Cliff Lynch: Be found to be in the direct interest of libraries to financially support and I say, I think, yeah, there’s definitely going to be a limit of how many of them. Cliff Lynch: But I think it’s, it’s an easier case to make if you’ve got people in your own local community who have a strong interest in that project, either as contributors or heavy users, rather than just this is a nice project and we ought to support it. Cliff Lynch: You know, very good kind of case in point.

33:03 - Cliff Lynch: Is the thoughtful kind of Cliff Lynch: Use that was made of Cliff Lynch: Access data. Cliff Lynch: In trying to figure out how to support the pre print archive that started at Los Alamos, and then move to Cornell. Cliff Lynch: Now, what happened was is they ran out of grants support they decided they needed to diversify sources of support beyond Cliff Lynch: Just Cornell underwriting it and so they looked at who were the heavy contributors and who were there really heavy users. Cliff Lynch: And they went round to those folks who, not surprisingly were mostly major physics or mathematics research centers, you know folks like CERN, or the Department of Energy labs or Cliff Lynch: Those sorts of places. And they said, you know, folks, it would really be your community you rely on this resource really heavily, and it would be really appropriate for you to help both bit to underwrite this and Cliff Lynch: They were very successful in getting support now because of the broad, you know, kind of coverage of that I believe they’ve got what 100 or more Cliff Lynch: Supporting institutions, I think some of these other resources that we’re looking at are going to have much smaller supporter basis than that, it’ll be really interesting to see.

34:52 - Cliff Lynch: How many you know what what those sort of sizes look like as the situation gets more stabilized. Cliff Lynch: Somebody was asking about chat going to, we’re chat goes, it looks like it’s going to panelists. Cliff Lynch: Otherwise known as me. Cliff Lynch: Rather than to everybody, but I’m certainly repeating all the interesting ones here. Cliff Lynch: And with that, we don’t have any more in the chat. So are there. Further comments in the chat or with somebody like to would people like to put more comments in the chat or Would someone like to speak or Cliff Lynch: Have have we exhausted, everybody. As I said, I did. I did. I really, this is the first one of these.

We’ve tried 35:48 - Cliff Lynch: I didn’t know how I don’t know how long we need for it, whether it’s naturally sort of a half hour ish thing or an hour ish thing, but I felt that we’d be better off with more rather than less time if we needed it. Cliff Lynch: So I’ll make a last call for comments. Cliff Lynch: Are raised hands. Cliff Lynch: Carolyn Fulton says, Will I address another forum. What I think we will see relative to the outcomes with the election. Cliff Lynch: Um, I will say maybe a little bit about that. But just a very little bit about that at the in my plenary comments on the 14th of December, I think right now. You know, it’s very early days and Cliff Lynch: There are huge problems to be dealt with. Cliff Lynch: I think, I think a lot of what I could say there. Cliff Lynch: Is exceedingly speculative and I not sure I have any great insights on that but Cliff Lynch: You know, I’ll certainly touch on a little of that and Cliff Lynch: There will be plenty of time for questions at that Cliff Lynch: At that point area. And if you want me to speak to some specific issues there. I’m, I’m happy to try and do. So if I have anything sensible to say about them.

37:44 - Cliff Lynch: And with that, I’m not seeing any raised hands or further questions. So I’ll just say thanks for this and I hope this was a little bit helpful and I look forward to seeing you. Cliff Lynch: during the coming week two sessions. Cliff Lynch: Please join us tomorrow and for subsequent days and we’ll do this again next Monday at the same time. So, take care. Have a good evening. Bye bye. .