I attended the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) conference in Washington DC 2016. Stayed at Capital Hilton which was quite near the White House. Weather wise: Freezing cold but no snow. Flight in was good with no delays.
Before the conference started, I had the chance to discover DC. But due to time constraint, I only managed to walk to the White House and the nearby streets. It was not like in 2010 ALA conference where I had the chance to visit the mall and the nearby Library of Congress. One incident which I won’t forget is the hotel evacuation due to a fire incident sometime during 4 am. It was freezing cold. Had to stand with the others in the streets, watching the Fire Brigade or Battalion in action. However, the hotel informed us that we could wait in the nearby hotel lobbies or chill@Starbucks.
Back to the conference stuff. There was a bunch of interesting project briefings given by various universities. The ones that I attended were:
- Research Software Preservation/Sharing
- Cost of Open Access: Pay it Forward
- Scholars@Cornell: Visualizing Scholarly Record
- Expanding Research Data Services
- The Future of Finding at Oxford
- Institutional Learning Analytics
Below are some of the CNI conference videos:
The Cost of Open Access to Journals: Pay It Forward Project Findings from CNI Video Channel on Vimeo.
Makerspaces, Virtual Reality, The Internet of Things at alia Stories from CNI Video Channel on Vimeo.
In the nutshell: It was my maiden conference for CNI. I found it useful as there was a lot of takeaways as well as insights topics new to me. Given my interests in Web Discovery and Virtual Reference, there were several briefings that caught my attention. One of which was “The Future of Finding at Oxford”. They have published their report online. It’s very comprehensive, outlining their aims, objectives, project methodology and related matters. (I am still reading this).
I also googled for previous CNI briefings in Youtube and discovered an interesting talk on Virtual Reference:
One more thing: I should have listened to my wife on bringing just a few clothes for the conference (I was there for about 4.5 days). The custom officers were looking at my ‘huge’ luggage and decided to take at look at it. Out came the Nescafe coffee bottle, sugar sticks, 4 sweaters, biscuits and so forth. Before clearing me, the officer commented that I should be well insulated during my stay there 🙂
Rain D Librarian 