CNI Spring 2026 Membership Meeting

Get acquainted with CNI and the membership meeting! This optional session will provide a quick rundown of CNI and meeting logistics, introductions all around, and time for your questions. Open to all attendees, so you'll be in good company.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already transformed how people search, read, write, learn, and share information—the very terrain libraries have stewarded for generations. Yet many of the decisions shaping AI policy and adoption on campuses are being made without librarians in the room. In this framing plenary, Rebekah Cummings argues that library values and expertise make librarians essential participants and natural leaders in this critical conversation. Drawing on experiences ranging from a statewide political campaign to co-directing a Summer Institute on Humanities Perspectives on AI, Cummings reflects on her own journey finding a “seat at the table” and shares her conviction that wherever AI touches the information space, librarians must be centered in the conversation. This framing talk will be followed by a panel of library leaders from across the country who are actively shaping campus AI initiatives and demonstrating what it looks like for libraries to lead.

Note: The panel portion and Q&A will not be recorded. 

Access and discovery are at the heart of what academic libraries do.  With the Americans with Disabilities Act Title II’s requirement that public entities’ web and mobile content needs to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standards, libraries and institutions are challenged by the volume of digital content that needs to be remediated and understanding expectations and requirements that impact existing operations in a resource-constrained time. Many libraries are working with partners in legal, disability offices, and IT to explore and find solutions that scale.

This panel will explore these challenges from multiple perspectives and hear about approaches and pathways being pursued at a few institutions. Attendees will be invited to share examples of efforts their organizations are undertaking and their questions to help everyone learn more about this complicated but important area.

In January 2026, the University of Virginia Library conducted the first of many proposed hands-on exercises to test four major large language models' (Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft CoPilot) suitability for the transcription and translation of handwritten documents from the University of Virginia Library's special collections. Thirty-two staff members from multiple disciplines were given standard prompts and rubrics for evaluation, divided into groups, and given an opportunity to select an item to scan and provide to each LLM for transcription, and, if necessary, translation. Time was provided at the end for groups to share their findings and key insights. This initial exercise will be used to calibrate prompts and rubrics for similar events that will be held to continue evaluation of LLMs for processing of collections, and to inform faculty, students, and researchers on the effective use of these tools.

 https://library.virginia.edu/news/2026/gamechanger-can-ai-accurately-transcribe-primary-source-documents

As artificial intelligence (AI) companies increasingly seek access to archival collections for model training, archival organizations face high-stakes decisions with limited precedent and no shared standard. The University of Virginia (UVA) Library has developed the UVA Archival AI Protocol (UVA AAIP), a practical framework grounded in a core rule: irreversible AI models do not get access to archival materials unless item-level provenance and meaningful attribution can be demonstrated, and the institution retains contractually enforceable control to stop further use. The Protocol distinguishes between retrieval-based AI systems—which keep source materials under institutional control and are generally permitted—and general-purpose model training, which absorbs knowledge into model weights irreversibly and is blocked by default. Built on three foundational pillars (provenance and attribution, donor and community responsibilities, and institutional control), the Protocol provides a decision framework for evaluating AI requests, sample contract clauses for deeds of gift and vendor agreements, minimum provenance standards for AI-generated citations, and a phased implementation plan designed for organizations of any size. This briefing addresses both the strategic rationale for the Protocol and the practical realities of putting it into action. Attendees will leave with a freely available adoption kit—including customizable templates, sample clauses, and implementation checklists—that any archival organization or memory institution can use to establish a principled, consistent position before the next AI partnership request arrives.

https://doi.org/10.18130/5dqf-9w86

Building Infrastructure by Investing in People: Seven Years with CollectionBuilder
Evan Williamson, University of Idaho

Introduction to Project VECTOR, Creating Open Engineering Visualizations
Macarena Lange, Colorado State University

Deploying an AI Sandbox: A Libraries-Led Service Pilot for Scalable Research Infrastructure  
Varun Sayapaneni, University of Oklahoma

Facilitating Use of Unencumbered Publications as Data for AI
Nicholas Taylor, Los Alamos National Laboratory

JOLT: A Tool for University of California Authors to Find Journals with Open Access Fee Support
Jade Yonehiro, California Digital Library

Persistent Identifiers for Facilities and Instruments: Supporting FAIR Data Collections
Matthew Mayernik, National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research

Operationalizing Quantum Computing Through the Academic Library
Seth Porter, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

There is always tension between an ideal and the reality on the ground. The ideal of a community and an organization working in partnership to ensure the sustainability of open source software was the impetus for the Lyrasis Organizational Home for Community Supported Technologies. Through the Organizational Home, Lyrasis serves as a fiscal agent and sponsor for open technologies for digital cultural heritage and scholarship. After more than ten years, the Organizational Home has evolved to include five very different community-supported programs: ArchivesSpace, CollectionSpace, DSpace, Fedora, and VIVO. In 2024, an analysis was conducted to assess the model’s effectiveness and identify changes needed to sustain its mission as a program partner, while ensuring the sustainability of these programs and itself. This effort was undertaken in collaboration with the staff and governance of the five programs and with the intention of full transparency into the process. The project briefing will present a review of the process, including its findings and outcomes with the Director of Community Supported Technologies at Lyrasis and Organizational Home program chair. The panel will explore whether Lyrasis met its goals (from the perspective of Lyrasis as well as from the programs) and what lessons might be shared and applied about the challenges and hopes for an open and sustainable technical infrastructure for scholarship and cultural heritage.

https://lyrasis.org/organizational-home/

In response to an increased and very real threat of cyberattack (as the United Kingdom recovers from the impact of the attack at the British Library), the Bodleian Libraries took the difficult decision to switch off 20 at-risk 'Specialist Digital Resources' in December 2024. The vocal comments from users demonstrated significant communities that were originally hidden. What looked on the surface like 'legacy resources' were still vital research tools, and it was important to make them available online again as quickly as possible. To do this, the Libraries had to be agile and creative but also strategic. To prevent similar cyber risks in the future, the Libraries developed infrastructure that was sustainable in the long term while also providing the familiar functionality and access to collections that researchers needed. This presentation will look at the lessons learned through the process—some predictable, some unexpected—now that 13 of the resources are available online again. It will also consider the role of library leaders to set strategic direction while balancing different and at times conflicting user, technological, and security needs.

Higher education institutions and libraries are working to respond to ever-increasing cybersecurity threats and requirements. This panel will share experiences from a variety of libraries about responses to cybersecurity audits or incidents and their impact on operations. They will also discuss collaborations and proactive actions meant to help prepare for and mitigate future threats to our scholarly and archival data and systems.

This session will not be recorded.

Institutional Repositories (IRs) were envisioned in academic libraries as comprehensive platforms capable of supporting open access publishing, research outputs, and digitized special collections within a single system. In practice, however, most IRs and related digital asset management software (DAMS) were not designed around archival principles or data structures, often resulting in duplicative metadata creation, digital materials separated from their archival context, and workflows that could not fully leverage archival efficiencies at scale. Over time, these design limitations have carried significant organizational consequences, contributing not only to miscommunication between digital and archival processes within libraries but also to the development of multiple publicly funded repository platforms with overlapping scopes in New York State and beyond. This presentation examines these systemic challenges and argues that the emergence of IIIF, combined with the IMLS-funded ArcLight Integration Project and the Delivering Archives and Digital Objects Conceptual Model (DadoCM), offers a path forward. By clearly articulating archival requirements and enabling greater interoperability, academic libraries can move toward repository architectures that reduce redundancy, better leverage automation, and more fully realize the broad institutional vision that originally motivated IR development.

PLEASE NOTE: This session is 30 minutes (1-1:30 p.m.)

https://archives.albany.edu/arclight_integration/
https://dadocm.github.io/

The current data renaissance, accelerated by advances in artificial intelligence, is reshaping the landscape of research, scholarship, and innovation. Yet unlocking this potential requires more than scale alone. It calls for a transdisciplinary approach that brings together diverse data and computational infrastructure along with multidisciplinary expertise across institutions.

Despite the rapid expansion of digital data and widespread access to powerful computing, building effective, responsible, and reusable data-driven research workflows remains a persistent challenge. Issues of discovery, access, interoperability, governance, and sustainability continue to limit the full realization of data-driven science.
In this talk, Parashar will explore the critical role of democratizing access to open data and shared cyberinfrastructure in enabling equitable and responsible data use. He will also introduce the vision, architecture, and deployment of the National Data Platform as part of a broader national cyberinfrastructure effort. This initiative aims to catalyze a more open, extensible, and interoperable data ecosystem that supports discovery, collaboration, and long-term stewardship across the research enterprise.