Tim Berners-Lee presenting the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration.
Tim: I’m a “fan of open source and all good things.”
Purpose of the awards is to highlight those who were part of the open source community and involved in moving it forward. Awards limited to Mellon constituencies that contribute to open source development
10 awards given, two levels of recognition – seven at $50,000, three at $100,000. Press release lists recipients of the 2007 awards.
CNI Director Clifford Lynch – New Initiatives in Program Planning
Four Foci of CNI:
advocacy and policy
content
organizations
technology and related infrastructure components
Higher-ed tech networks have gone through a “major technology refresh” in the past few years. Putting switch bandwith in place. What this means for the next gen of netword based aplications (data mining, etc.) that are bandwidth intensive.
Net Neutrality – very important. Must rely on net to provide access on an equitable basis or the goal of providing access to diverse content will falter. Should be paying close attention to net neutrality. “Wireless world”… Speaking to a group of info science grad students and asked about Carter Phone decision… none had. It was the key legal decision that opened phone equipment to other developers. Mobile carriers are having trouble with this idea – mobile networks may be opened to whatever equipment is available.
Raw Hardware – Growing recognition that research computing is a mechanism for converting mass amount of electricity to massive amounts of heat. Electricity is getting very expensive. Google, etc. locating massive computation centers near cheap hydroelectric power.
Cyberinfrastructure – Datanet call for proposals, large scale proposals involving networks and data curation. Due January 7th. Digital Humanities Centers – how might these be structured?
Teaching and Learning Environments and Platforms – We’re at an interesting crossroads. Development of platform technology – Second Life, Sokai, spectrum from immersive learning evironments to traditional learning platforms. Steady and growing investment in content. Open sourceware and open educaiton. Write content that we can expect to be reusable in the long term. We shoudl stabilize interfaces to ensure reusability of content. Are we at one of these points, or is the underlying technology too immature?
Special Collections Material – ARL Hidden Collections conference. Important for all great libraries with hidden collections to make these collections visible through descriptive and digitization strategies. Opportunity to learn with our colleagues in archives and museums. Much of this content is digital narratives and history. Challeged to structure tools and practices to provide content. Large-scale digitization of collections will raise interesting new issues – debtes around repatriation of cultural materials. Role of surrogates in educational use. Impossible to make a surrogate to satisfy all uses, but technology is good enough to satisfy many uses.
ARL Website – recognizing the “celebrating collections” website that highlights digital collections of its member libraries.
Digitization – projects moving forward apace. Making major progress here, but running into substantial challenges. Continued need to integrate these with finding tools and bibliographic apparatuses. Computation on large corpora of literature. As google digitizes on their corpora of literature, they can compute on it, but we can’t. Qusetion of data mining in license agreements, how me manage assets in digital form. This is not solely a retrospective progblem. What kinds of authorial practice and markup can we apply? Resurgence of appliance e-book readers and resurgence of press hype around apapliance e-book readers. This idea stirs up many feelings in the public including “violently luddite ones.”
Repositories. Ongoing challenge of accessioning collections of individuals or small organizations which are often now in digital form. These collections are now often sold instead of donated.
Eletronic Theses and Dissertations – CNI as place where discussions of EDTs were first framed. Time to take a broader look – where are we with ETDs?
info-mational 
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