CNI Spring 2025 Membership Meeting

ARL Executive Director Andrew K. Pace will begin the opening plenary with a 20–25-minute update, including a Q&A portion, on the CNI leadership transition.

The 2025 Paul Evan Peters Award recipients will look back over their two decades with the LOCKSS Program. Reich will focus on the Program’s initial goals and how they evolved as the landscape of academic communication changed, and Rosenthal will discuss the Program’s technology, how it developed, and how this history reveals a set of seductive, persistent but impractical ideas.

Presentation Slides & Notes: https://blog.dshr.org/2025/04/paul-evan-peters-award-lecture.html

Authors Alliance and the Northeastern University Library (NUL) are working with a diverse set of stakeholders to develop an actionable startup plan for a public interest training corpus for artificial intelligence. "Developing The Public Interest Corpus" is advanced through a series of iterative planning workshops and other related meetings with librarians, disciplinary researchers, publishers, technologists, authors, and more. This presentation provides an update on the effort to date, synthesizing takeaways from the first project workshop held at NUL in February. The workshop included discussion of the project’s: (1) principles and goals, (2) target audiences, training data needs, and potential partners (3) legal and policy challenges, and (4) business model, sustainability, and governance.

https://publicinterestcorpus.org/

Flickr is huge; it contains billions of images. It's a unique visual history collection, and the Flickr Foundation believes it is time to figure out how to preserve it for future viewers to enjoy. But, it is simply too big for any contemporary archive to take on, so the Foundation developed Data Lifeboat, a simple packaging service to bundle up slivers of Flickr for preservation elsewhere. A Data Lifeboat is designed to contain images and metadata and to jettison the more standard web archive for a format that is content- and context-focussed.  

https://www.flickr.org/programs/content-mobility/data-lifeboat/

Neural network artificial intelligence (AI) technologies capable of working with both images and text offer promising tools for improving access to library collections at scale. In particular, libraries increasingly must address the obligation to generate succinct "alt-text" descriptions of digital images, which often entails remediation tasks in the tens of thousands of items. AI approaches are appealing given their ability to automate complex tasks involving natural language, but there are plentiful reasons to look beyond simply pasting library materials into ChatGPT. Stanford University's experiments have found that both fine-tuning of locally hosted models and "conditioning" of the captions by incorporating available metadata into the model's instructions ("prompt engineering") show promise for producing useful descriptive text for images. They've also found that tailoring approaches to specific collections and keeping human reviewers in the loop are keys to making the alt-text as accurate as possible while gaining efficiency at scale. Beyond accessibility compliance, vision language models can also enable free-text "evocative" search in multiple languages, object detection, and other tools for improving discovery within image collections.

https://web.stanford.edu/~pleonard/cni2025/

This session will not be recorded; it is designed to provide attendees with a platform to openly engage in discussions about pressing issues affecting the field. All topics, whether widespread or specific concerns, can be addressed freely by participants. The session will begin with a focus on data access and infrastructure in the current US environment.

The growing interest in open scholarship initiatives and policies by governments, funding agencies, academic advocacy organizations, and publishers is driving an increased emphasis on the proper management, dissemination, and recognition of research outputs beyond the primary article, such as datasets and software. A proper understanding of the ecosystem of scholarly objects across various organizational scales (e.g., within an institution vs. within a department) requires a holistic approach to identify the entire corpus of scholarly outputs and to characterize the various ways in which they are connected. The session presents work being conducted at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) to develop scripted processes for gathering information about research datasets and open source software published by members of the campus community. These outputs have historically been under-recognized and more difficult to track than articles published by university-affiliated researchers. A primary motivation of this work is to identify connections between different types of research outputs in order to acquire a more comprehensive view of the research ecosystem at our institution. This presentation discusses the integration of a wide range of digital repository and platform APIs in a scalable process that can be used for on-demand discovery and analysis of these objects. The methodology can be applied across systems of varying architecture, specificity, and connectivity that are used for publishing research outputs. The session will also highlight how the data informs the strategies developed by the UT Libraries and UT Open Source Program Office for providing research data and software services to the university community.

*The presenters will also host a breakfast discussion table on this topic (Tuesday, April 8, 7:45–9:00 am)

https://github.com/utlibraries/research-data-discovery
https://github.com/UT-OSPO/institutional-innovation-grapher

When OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5, Northwestern University Libraries immediately saw the potential for a new kind of search-and-discovery tool. The team pivoted to develop a chat-based, retrieval-augmented generation proof of concept that allowed end users to ask questions in natural language and receive generated answers along with semantic search results. The proof of concept made it clear that large language models (LLMs) and semantic search drastically changed what was possible in search and discovery systems. The team presented its early findings widely and held workshops with the library community to share knowledge and start the conversation. Taking cues from the startup world, Northwestern prioritized moving to production and began reimagining how chat-based search would work within a digital collections context. The result is an integrated search and discovery system that leverages the power of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and semantic search providing users with a new way to explore and understand the collections. In August 2024, Northwestern was awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant to expand on the work, generalize the tools, and ultimately release an installable cloud-based solution for experimentation. This presentation will cover the technical and design considerations of integrating semantic search and LLMs into digital collections, the challenges faced when developing solutions in a rapidly changing environment, and the lessons learned moving to production. It will also include a demonstration of the latest version of the production system which uses an agent-based approach and introspection to answer complex multi-faceted queries. Future plans for the tool and how the team plans to continue to leverage generative AI and semantic search to improve the user experience will also be discussed.

https://dc.library.northwestern.edu
https://github.com/nulib/dc-nextjs
https://github.com/nulib/dc-api-v2/
https://www.library.northwestern.edu/about/news/library-news/2024/grant-supports-northwestern-libraries-launch-of-generative-ai-based-chat-search.html

The panel will discuss safeguarding the world's most-important audiovisual data, featuring perspectives from David Rowntree, former archivist of the International Criminal Court in the Hague who tried to organize the Yugoslavia and Rwanda war crimes interviews; Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, which has been creating a collection of the January 6th insurrection and other material the government is now deleting; and Peter B. Kaufman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Learning (whose video work is now supported by the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web).  

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262538169/the-moving-image/

The intensity and frequency of attacks on information systems and services seems to be growing without bounds. This is happening across all sectors of society.

The effects of these attacks, as well as our experience with other recent events such as the COVID pandemic, have given us a new understanding of the critical roles that archives, repositories, and scholarly communications systems play as part of the essential cyberinfrastructure for the research and higher education community (and indeed far beyond this community).

The conversation will explore these questions:

• The nature of the evolving threat landscape is complex and contains numerous actors with varying motivations. This includes ransomware, denial of service attacks, strategic compromise, and aggressive harvesting, among others. How might we better understand this landscape?
• Approaches to understanding, documenting, and communicating the costs, impacts, and implications of breaches, including to the broad public.
• What collective actions might help our community become more resilient and secure? For example, is there a need or a role for an Information Sharing and Analysis Center type organization? What might be done to facilitate bilateral or multilateral backup and disaster recovery arrangements? How can funding be generated to help improve security and resilience? What should be prioritized?

The closing plenary will include significant time for audience engagement and discussion.