I have long wanted to attend the biannual CNI meetings, as they offer a range of sessions pertinent to scholarly communication and digital scholarship. Thanks to Dean Tim Pyatt’s invitation to be a ZSR representative at this spring’s virtual meeting, I was able to “go.” Spanning two weeks in March, this CNI meeting was a mix of pre-recorded and live sessions. While I wasn’t able to attend as many live sessions as hoped, those I did sent me scrambling for a pen to jot down insights. Here are my highlights.

• Copyright experts are increasingly identifying new needs for baseline copyright teaching, both among students *and* librarians
• Much remains to be seen how COVID emergency remote access allowances, both fair uses and publisher offered, will influence the CDL movement (Controlled Digital Lending)
• We privilege certain forms of knowledge and must actively work to deconstruct discriminatory scholarly practices
  • Who gets published? Who gets heard? Current system is grossly unjust
  • Must ensure the economic stability and inclusion of new and previously shut out voices
• Libraries need to bridge the gap between price-only negotiation to conversations about what libraries and publishers can achieve together
• We often call scholarship an “ecosystem,” but that denotes a system that is both slow and self-evolving–scholarship and publishing will *not* right itself without intentional action
• Iterative small experimentation is how we move forward
  • Where do I have dedicated time, money, and energy? Find alignment there to start chipping away at change
• If we want to have open knowledge we need to examine our systems and shift support to open systems
• Knowledge should be for the future, not just to be monetized for now
• Collection building must be more than just procurement
  • Is there space to have conversations about goals and changes in how we’re collecting?
  • Assess ROI not from monetary standpoint but from stewardship of post-colonial, marginalized scholarship in collections
• As companies grow over time their wants for our data grow
  • We must maintain engagement and vigilance to ensure terms over data access and use don’t change
  • Don’t be afraid to share warnings about bad actors with our peers

If you’d like to watch sessions or read summaries, all are available from the CNI Spring 2021 Meeting website.

Tim, thank you for the opportunity to engage with CNI!