The CNI Interviews Podcast

This episode explores an effort to create a public-interest corpus for AI training using digitized materials from research libraries, archives, and special collections. Dan Cohen, dean of the Libraries at Northeastern University, and Thomas Padilla, public interest artificial intelligence strategist for Authors Alliance, outline their goal to expand AI’s access to high-value, long-form academic content, typically absent from commercial models.

Audiovisual medium is only about one hundred and thirty years old, yet it has become the mainstay of our interaction with content today. How do academic libraries and higher education institutions become effective stewards for a medium prone to erosion, playback obsolescence, and manipulation?

Washington University launched the Digital Intelligence and Innovation Accelerator to drive digital transformation and support researchers. The university libraries have played a central role in connecting people and projects—including building a research chatbot, expanding access to open educational resources, and developing a campus-wide research profile system.

Can libraries lead the way in advancing AI literacy in a rapidly evolving landscape? Leo Lo, dean and professor for the College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences at the University of New Mexico, discusses his own approach, which is grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration, pedagogy, and ethics.

Alison Hitchens, associate university librarian, collections, technology, scholarly communication for the University of Waterloo, helped organize a gathering of researchers, librarians, and IT professionals to discuss research data management strategies. In this interview, she talks about bringing various departments together to talk across disciplines and the benefits these conversations deliver.

Judith Conklin, CIO of the Library of Congress, discusses embedding digital strategies into the Library's new strategic plan to increase accessibility and innovation. She highlights efforts to digitize the Library's collections, explore the use of artificial intelligence, and maintain strong cybersecurity.You can also watch the episode on YouTube.

Cliff Lynch, executive director for the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) discusses the evolving impact of AI on scientific research and education.

In this conversation, Mark Laufersweiler, Research Data Specialist, and Tyler Pearson, Director of Digital Scholarship and Data Services, both from the University of Oklahoma, discuss the National Research Platform (NRP), the Nautilus Project, and the Kubernetes framework. The NRP is an NSF-funded Kubernetes environment managed by the NRP. These tools were implemented at the University Libraries to help with workshops and research. A common framework for software installations will allow researchers and students to focus on the pedagogy instead of setting up work environments.

In 2022, the Office of Science and Technology Policy issued the Nelson Memo, a memorandum on new public access requirements for federally funded research. The memo requires federal agencies to make juried, peer-reviewed publications and their supporting data freely and easily accessible to the public upon publication. Martin Halbert, National Science Foundation Program Director for Public Access at the U.S. National Science Foundation, discusses the memo.