CNI Spring 2026 Membership Meeting

Open at Scale: Exploring the Value and Impact of the BTAA's Open Publishing Agreement Model
Maurice York and Jeffrey Spies (Big Ten Academic Alliance)
 
From 2021 to 2024, the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) paved the way for a dramatic increase in open access publishing by Big Ten authors—from 38% to more than 86% open in library-negotiated agreements. This was accomplished by innovating the Open Publishing Agreement (OPA) model, a strategy centered on the author experience: no fees, no caps, and no hassle. This values-based approach has delivered significant benefits for author rights, widespread author adoption, and measurable increases in research impact. This presentation will describe the current effort to explore the network of data from Big Ten publications—citations, authors, disciplines, and institutions—to further analyze the impact of these agreements: lowering barriers, expanding opportunities for authors, expediting knowledge sharing, and advancing research. Utilizing network visualizations, the BTAA is examining indicators of impact, such as shifts in citation patterns and global engagement that are directly evident from this initiative. The presenters will also discuss their strategic negotiation approach, including practical elements they are developing, such as the assessment rubric, license agreement terms, and evidence metrics.

https://btaa.org/library/open-scholarship/strategy

Advancing Open Monograph Opportunities at UC: New Pathways for the Future
Lidia Uziel (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Miranda Bennett (California Digital Library, University of California)

In January 2026, the University of California (UC) Libraries released Advancing Open Monograph Opportunities at UC, a report that articulates a values-driven framework for advancing open access monograph publishing. In this session, speakers will present the report and share how its recommendations are being translated into practice through coordinated pilots across the UC system.

While journal-based open access (OA) models have matured, monographs (particularly in the arts, humanities, and social sciences) pose distinct challenges shaped by disciplinary norms, funding structures, and the publishing economics of long-form scholarship. The report responds to this complexity by advancing a model-agnostic, portfolio-based approach that recognizes the diversity of publishing traditions and avoids reliance on any single funding mechanism.

Four strategic directions anchor the framework: targeted investment in book processing charge-based initiatives aligned with institutional research and teaching priorities; expanded support for Diamond OA and free-to-read models that remove both author- and reader-facing fees while advancing bibliodiversity and multilingual scholarship; strengthened partnerships with university presses as trusted stewards of peer-reviewed work; and sustained investment in open, community-owned infrastructure that ensures discoverability, metadata quality, preservation, and long-term sustainability. These strategies are guided by shared scholarly values, including equity, fiscal responsibility, transparency, and community stewardship.

The session will include highlights and lessons learned from UC's implementation of this framework through systemwide pilots that open UC-authored monographs at no cost to authors, combine frontlist and backlist approaches, and provide predictable, scalable support for university presses. Together, the framework and pilots demonstrate how a large research university system is aligning values with action, offering practical insights for institutions seeking sustainable futures for open monograph publishing.

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9r22k58w
https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2026/01/advancing-open-monograph-opportunities-at-uc-new-pathways-for-the-future/
https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2026/01/open-access-for-uc-authored-monographs/

Thousands of institutions have adopted the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to provide access to digitized collections, yet the content served through these APIs, including hundreds of thousands of maps, remains largely undiscoverable by location and difficult to use across institutional boundaries. Allmaps is an open source ecosystem that enables anyone to curate, georeference, and explore these resources without requiring GIS expertise or specialized infrastructure. In 2025, following the termination of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the IIIF Consortium formalized a tiered partnership with Allmaps to sustain its development. This is intended to be the first in a broader effort to help institutions realize the collective value of the content their shared infrastructure makes accessible via IIIF. This briefing will present the strategic rationale for this new consortial model from both the IIIF Consortium and Yale University Library, an early Allmaps Innovator. The session will explore how the partnership delivers tangible benefits to the community, from lowering barriers to georeferencing and cross-collection map discovery, to providing institutions with crowdsourcing tools, integration services, and governance participation without requiring specialized GIS infrastructure. Discussion will focus on how consortial organizations can move beyond standards-setting to actively steward and unlock the value of the content communities have collectively invested in digitizing.

https://allmaps.org/iiif-partnership

The injustices embedded in the collecting and descriptive practices of libraries, museums, and archives are now widely recognized and have prompted many cultural institutions to pursue inclusive and reparative initiatives, such as harmful language statements and content warnings. Remediating outdated and offensive language in metadata is, however, a far more daunting task, especially at scale. While resources like the Inclusive Metadata Toolkit support informed reparative decision-making, identifying problematic terms remains a tedious and emotionally taxing process dependent on individual keyword searching. Consequently, many institutions either lack the time and resources to engage in this work or are constrained by the sheer volume of potentially harmful language present in metadata records. With the support of an internal library seed grant program, the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah  developed the Marriott Reparative Metadata Assessment Tool (MaRMAT), an open source, schema-agnostic, Python-based application for bulk metadata assessment. MaRMAT assesses tabular metadata against pre-curated and custom lexicons, generating a report flagging potentially harmful terminology by field, category, and context. By making large-scale assessment more accessible, MaRMAT empowers cultural heritage organizations to circumvent individual bias and advance equity in digital collections. MaRMAT's successful development also demonstrates the impact of small seed grant programs.

https://www.marmatproject.org/
https://github.com/marriott-library/MaRMAT

Emerging international frameworks for disclosing artificial intelligence (AI) use are impacting how scholarship, libraries, universities, and publishers approach transparency. This session introduces the AI Transparency Declaration, the AI Disclosure (AID) Framework, and the broader landscape of Enacting AI disclosure in scholarly publishing through brief project presentations and an interactive conversation with the audience.

Sergio Santamarina (National University José Clemente Paz) will provide brief recorded comments and be available for questions via Zoom.


https://codeberg.org/ssantamarina/AI-Transparency-Declaration
https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/26548/34482
https://openanthroresearch.org/index.php/oarr/preprint/view/435

The ARL/CNI AI Scenarios: AI-Influenced Futures was designed to guide readers through envisioning possible futures, ten years out, in which artificial intelligence (AI) has reshaped the landscape of research, higher education, and research libraries. In 2025, teams at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) libraries and the University of Delaware (UD) Library, Museums and Press deployed the scenarios to facilitate strategic planning conversations about AI in their institutions' libraries. These two institutions differ in significant ways, from their private/public status to their current centralized/distributed methods of supporting AI at the university. Yet, both planning processes leveraging the AI Scenarios surfaced similar strategic priorities, including the necessity for cross-institutional partnerships, staff upskilling, and cultural shifts within libraries around the knowledge, use, and implementation of AI. In both meetings, participants recognized various tensions, such as the value of openness versus embargoing of digitized collections, particularly as unique library materials hold unique value for large language model training.

This session will share how the JHU and UD teams ran internal strategic planning sessions using the AI Scenarios, detail the strategic themes that emerged during these discussions, and share how each is prioritizing and implementing findings at their institutions. During this session, the presenters will invite attendees to reflect on their own experiences in strategic planning, implementation, and navigation of organizational culture change in the context of AI. Attendees will have learned how the AI Scenarios were facilitated and analyzed at two very different institutions, providing the attendees with a strategy to either engage in the scenarios at their own institution or to learn from the unified findings from these two institutions.

From Strategy to Action: Building a Comprehensive GenAI Program in an Academic Library 
Jason Casden, Amanda Henley, and Rolando Rodriguez (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Over the past two years, the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill Library has developed and implemented a roadmap for supporting generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) needs on campus. These internal planning efforts positioned the Library to partner with campus-wide AI and IT leadership to design and deploy GenAI spaces, services, and tools. This project briefing will share the experience of establishing a GenAI portfolio across three themes: staff readiness, internal research, and public-facing services. Presenters will discuss the development of multiple individual projects, including launching the Library AI Studio, developing a GenAI instruction program, establishing a GenAI fellowship for undergraduates, incorporating GenAI into library workflows, and creating PromptLab—a sandbox environment where all UNC affiliates can safely explore and compare multiple large language models. The project-based strategy included both top-down directives from library leadership and bottom-up initiatives such as staff-led pilots. Attendees will leave with concrete examples of ways to respond quickly and strategically to campus needs emerging from this transformative technology.

https://library.unc.edu/ai/
https://library.unc.edu/ai/library-ai-studio/
https://library.unc.edu/ai/generative-ai-research/
https://library.unc.edu/ai/library-ai-studio/promptlab/

Building AI Readiness: A Multi-Pronged Approach at the University of Toronto Libraries 
Jacqueline Whyte Appleby (University of Toronto/Scholars Portal, Ontario Council of University Libraries) and Jess Whyte (University of Toronto)

Academic libraries stand at an inflection point with artificial intelligence (AI)—neither early enough to wait and see, nor late enough to rely on established best practices, which are still emerging and contested. The University of Toronto Libraries has developed a practical, multi-pronged strategy for building organizational AI readiness in this ambiguous middle ground in partnership with Scholars Portal, a shared infrastructure provider and digital preservation platform for Canadian academic libraries based at the University of Toronto. This presentation will discuss two complementary initiatives—one focused on collection readiness and one on Model Context Protocol development—that allowed the Library to explore infrastructure development, staff capacity building, and modes of user engagement in this space.

Scoring AI for Accessibility: A Rubric-Based Framework
Sarah Cogley and Stacy Snyder (University at Buffalo, SUNY)

This briefing explores a comprehensive evaluation of generative AI tools for creating alternative text and long descriptions for digital collections at the University at Buffalo Libraries. Prompted by the need to address extensive accessibility remediation as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act Title II regulations, the project team analyzed outputs from three AI tools using a rubric designed to assess three criteria: factual accuracy and correctness, relevance and task completion, and clarity and communication quality. Findings showed limitations of current AI technologies, such as hallucination, omission of key visual elements, and cultural insensitivity. The briefing will discuss challenges, such as how to evaluate tools that are emerging and dynamic, establishing guidelines and best practices for accessible metadata in digital collections that contain diverse content and format types, and how to integrate AI in digital collections workflows in a scalable and sustainable way. The presenters will highlight lessons applicable across institutions, including the importance of cross-unit collaboration with colleagues in user experience and accessibility, and will share the rubric, workflows, and project documentation.

Using Artificial Intelligence to Extract and Understand Cultural Heritage Materials
Paul Gallagher (Western Michigan University)

Much of our cultural legacy is hidden. Despite decades of effort to convert paper documents to electronic form, many issues still impact users' ability to discover content. Traditional optical character recognition only works so well; handwritten documents need manual transcription; and digital content platforms don't always provide researchers with meaningful ways to interact with historic content. In this presentation, learn how one library is working with emerging artificial intelligence (AI) models to extract text from heavily degraded documents and historic handwriting, using modern "vibe-based" application development to present cultural legacy items in a new way. Learn what tools are available, how they are best used, and how declining technical barriers will make this more accessible to information professionals. Gain a deeper understanding of powerful uses of AI beyond chat models, and how these approaches may benefit your own organization. Drawing on lessons from a recent project, this session is designed for librarians, archivists, and digital humanities practitioners interested in practical applications of AI for cultural heritage materials—regardless of technical background.