CNI Spring 2019

The CNI Spring Membership meeting was in St. Louis this year.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick delivered the opening plenary on topics covered in her book, Generous Thinking. The premise of the book is that we need a paradigm shift, that we need to re-orient the work of the university to focus more on building community.   She contends that universities need to remember the concept of being a public good, that we should restore that as an orientation for all of our work.  We should do the work of the university in public, resisting privatization and turning away from proprietary systems in favor of collectively publicly oriented systems.   She talked about Humanities Commons as an example of this idea of community supported infrastructures – open source, open access, open infrastructures.  Mentioned “beprexit” and how bePress was seen as a “good” player in the library application product space until Elsevier’s recent acquisition.   She talked about what happens when we have success in community supported infrastructure, using arXiv as an example and calling it a “catastrophic success” because it has grown so much (and changed the landscape of scholarly communication in physics-related fields) that it outgrew its infrastructure.  We in libraries are unaccustomed to deep cross-institutional work and coalition – at which point she mentioned Samvera and the collective challenges our community faces about resourcing and sustainability.
We need to plan for demonstrating how the thing supports itself, past the initial funding and energy in developing something like Samvera.  These challenges are tied to the economic concerns that non-profits face, but it’s not merely economic – challenges exists in domains of green standards or tech standards.  Ultimately the most challenging aspect is social sustainability.  These open products need ways to support “groupness” not just a commitment to the product.  We need strong community.   She talked a bit about the intricacies of defining community in productive way that is not just lip service or a way to absolve public support of a thing.   A call to community can be a way to form solidarity, another term that needs to be well-defined.   Fitzpatrick referenced the work of Elinor Ostrum, a 2009 Noble Laureate in Economics (the only female thus honored) and described Ostrum’s idea of common pool resources – “groundbreaking research demonstrating that ordinary people are capable of creating rules and institutions that allow for the sustainable and equitable management of shared resources.”

Fitzpatrick does not think privatization is the answer, but that it is a real threat to higher ed. She thinks universities need to stop competing with each other, but as it is currently structured, higher ed promote competitiveness to uphold prestige.

Other mentions:   Brett Bobley and the Twitter thread on paper machines ;  Chris Long and Hu Metrics: https://humetricshss.org/author/cplong/

I hope the slides and video of this talk will be posted soon – it was thought-provoking and inspirational.  The closing plenary by Michael L. Nelson was equally so – on the topic of authenticity and integrity in web archives and how that will be threatened in the coming years. Our perception that webarchives are exact snapshots is challenged by his description of how sites (and JavaScript) work, muddying the authenticity of historic sites.  He sprinkled some welcome humor into this seriously depressing topic.

I also attended 2 presentations on aspects of digital preservation, including OCFL, our UO colleagues’ presentation on SLAs for the Digital Scholarship Center,  an interactive talk on privacy an update on Islandora (just curious) and Evviva’s panel on

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