The CNI Interviews Podcast

Interview: CNI Executive Director Kate Zwaard

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 12:30:00 GMT

The incoming leader of CNI shares her vision for advancing the organization’s mission and discusses the opportunities ahead at the intersection of digital information, research, and technology.

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Libraries at Risk: Borrowed Infrastructure and Institutional Resilience

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 13:24:16 GMT

Many libraries today depend on third-party platforms to store, lend, and preserve collections. In this conversation, Brewster Kahle examines how this practice undermines the role of libraries as stewards of knowledge.

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Building The Public Interest Corpus for AI and Computational Research

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 11:30:00 GMT

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.

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Access and Preservation in the Audiovisual Age

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 11:30:00 GMT

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?

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Collaboration Fuels Digital Transformation at Washington University

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 19:30:49 GMT

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.

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Developing AI Literacy for Faculty and Librarians

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 11:30:00 GMT

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.

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Gathering Across Disciplines to Create Sensible Research Data Management Strategies

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 11:00:42 GMT

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.

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Embedding Technology into the New Strategic Plan at the Library of Congress

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 11:36:28 GMT

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.

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AI and Scholarship

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 12:00:43 GMT

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

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Incorporating the National Research Platform at the University of Oklahoma

Mon, 01 May 2023 12:30:24 GMT

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.

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Addressing the Year of Open Science

Mon, 01 May 2023 12:25:27 GMT

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.

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Research Universities Addressing Grand Challenges

Mon, 01 May 2023 12:17:21 GMT

Donald Waters, Senior Scholar for CNI, talks about his project to investigate what scholars need to address societal grand challenges such as climate change, global pandemics, forced migration, racism, and inequality. Waters' project aims to identify what libraries and IT organizations can do to support research in these areas.

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The Role of Libraries in the Digital Age

Mon, 01 May 2023 12:15:46 GMT

Mackenzie Smith, University Librarian and Vice Provost for Digital Scholarship at UC Davis, discusses her career and her efforts to encourage women to get involved in technology. Smith also talks about the challenges of building a technologically sophisticated, flexible, and equitable library and her frustrations with people's complacency and lack of curiosity about libraries.

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Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship

Mon, 01 May 2023 12:07:47 GMT

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) established the Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship in 2021 to improve support and access to and sustainability of digital resources and humanities projects related to social and racial justice. James Shulman, ACLS Vice President, and Maryemma Graham, Founding Director of the Project on the History of Black Writing, Lead of the Black Book Innovation Project, and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Kansas, discuss the findings and recommendations of the Commission's report, which is expected to be released next year.

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Improving the FAIRness of Usage Data

Mon, 01 May 2023 12:04:43 GMT

The OA Book Usage Data Trust and the University of Michigan Press convened a National Science Foundation-supported workshop in April to explore how best to leverage shared cyberinfrastructure to support cross-platform systems integrations and advance Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) usage data. Christina Drummond, Executive Director of the Open Access Book Usage Data Trust, and Charles Watkinson, Associate Librarian for Publishing and Director of the University of Michigan Press, discuss the outcome of the workshop and future plans for this project.

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The Directions in Digital Scholarships Initiative

Mon, 01 May 2023 12:01:18 GMT

Joan Lippincott is Associate Executive Director Emerita at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). In this interview, she discusses the Directions in Digital Scholarships initiative, which explores the current and future state of digital scholarship, data-intensive research, and computational research.

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Empowering the Use of Open-Source Software for Research

Mon, 01 May 2023 12:00:47 GMT

Sayeed Choudhury is Director of the Open Source Programs Office at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. In this conversation, Choudhury discusses his new role—created to raise awareness of and stimulate collaboration among open-source projects across the university—and the impact of this new office on his institution.

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A Conversation with CNI’s Cliff Lynch

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 14:38:14 GMT

In this conversation, Executive Director for the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), Cliff Lynch, talks about issues concerning scholarly communication, digital information technology, and higher education technology.

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Interesting Insights from Carnegie Mellon’s Dean of Libraries

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 09:44:49 GMT

Dean of Libraries at Carnegie Mellon, Keith Webster, discusses CMU cloud lab strategies, and the Artificial Intelligence for Data Discovery and Reuse Symposium, which aims to find innovative solutions to accelerate the dissemination and reuse of scientific data in the data revolution.

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Updates from the San Diego Supercomputer Center

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 09:43:27 GMT

Director Frank Wuerthwein, of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, discusses their goals and strategies, hardware and software investment, as well as the Open Science Grid.

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Ithaka S+R's Report on Big Data Infrastructure at the Crossroads

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 09:42:01 GMT

Ithaka S+R is a nonprofit research organization that helps academic and cultural communities serve the public good and navigate economic, technological, and demographic change. In this conversation, we discuss a report they released on the research practices and support needs of researchers working with big data. The report draws on interviews with over two hundred researchers from dozens of disciplinary backgrounds about their big data practices, with an emphasis on exploring what library leaders can learn about how to align data support with researchers' priorities. The report is titled Big Data Infrastructure at the Crossroads.

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The Big Ten Academic Alliance

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 09:41:32 GMT

The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) is the academic consortium of the universities in the Big Ten Conference. As the Director of Library Initiatives for the BTAA, Maurice York is responsible for coordinating collective action at scale amongst the member research libraries toward their commitment to realizing an interdependent, networked future. In this discussion York talks about some of the plans and strategies of the BTAA in 2022.

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ARL President K. Matthew Dames

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 09:40:56 GMT

In this discussion, Dames talks about shifting strategies for research libraries, his new role as chief librarian at Notre Dame, controlled digital lending, and open scholarship. We also talk about a report put out by ARL, CARL, and Ithaka S+R to identify the strategic priorities of higher education’s senior leadership, and to identify how and what more research libraries can do to advance them. The report is titled Aligning the Research Library to Organizational Strategy.

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