Attended the CNI Spring Meeting yesterday (briefly) and today (more completely). To be honest, I didn’t find the overall program as interesting as some I’ve attended in the past but that’s not meant as a criticism of CNI or the work they do pulling this event together twice a year. In some ways I think it is the result of how much more efficient communication is becoming thanks to the web (websites, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.). Five years ago, I sometimes heard about a particular project for the first time at the CNI project briefings (e.g., in 1999 at the Phoenix winter meeting I heard a presentation on DSpace). Today, I find that I’ve often heard about a particular project that I find on the program so while it’s no longer all about raising my awareness of what’s happening, it’s still the best place I know for posing a question or two to those actually doing the work on projects of importance.
One project I was quite interested in was the “Building an Interdisciplinary Research Program in an Academic Library” briefing given by James Mullins and Scott Brandt of Purdue. My interest in the issues surrounding the role of the library in digital data collections was piqued by the NSF’s recent “Long Lived Digital Data Collections” report. The presentation showed that Purdue is doing very interesting work in this growth area–although I was surprised to learn during a Q&A exchange that “the data” actually lives on the TeraGrid. This struck me as a bit odd since I had heard the point made during the presentation that faculty were reluctant to give stewardship of their data to the IT group but trusted the library more. I guess I was hoping to hear that the library was doing the IT piece of this as well.
Roy Rosenzweig gave a really entertaining and informative talk to close the event–a look at how the internet and web-based technologies are democratizing history and historiography. A really wide-ranging and thoughtful presentation, he even found a way to work this State of the Union remix into his session (you’ll need QuickTime).