Interview: CNI Executive Director Kate Zwaard

Gerry Bayne: Welcome to the CNI Interviews podcast. I'm Gerry Bayne for EDUCAUSE. The Coalition for Networked Information is a venue for technology leaders in higher education, library administration, digital publishing, and research to share and broaden their knowledge of digital information issues.

On this episode, I'm featuring a conversation I had with Kate Zwaard, the newly appointed Executive Director of CNI. Before joining the organization, Kate spent over a decade at Library of Congress (LC), where she played a leading role in the institution's digital transformation — first as Chief of National Digital Initiatives, later as Director of Digital Strategy, and most recently as Associate Librarian for Discovery & Preservation Services.

In this conversation, we talk about Kate's relationship to CNI and its future under her leadership. how Kate envisions CNI's future under her leadership. Here's our talk.

Gerry Bayne: You've recently stepped into the role of executive director of the coalition for Networked Information. What drew you to this position and what excites you most about CNI in this moment?

Kate Zwaard: Well, I would characterize CNI as the community that raised me. Professionally, I wouldn't be who I am today without that community. And so when Cliff announced his retirement, I was just so thrilled about the idea of potentially leading that organization and helping the community. That's meant so much to me.

Gerry Bayne: CNI has long served as a convener of digital information research and technology. As you look ahead, what do you see as the most important opportunities or challenges we face at that intersection?

Kate Zwaard: I think we're seeing some acute challenges in the AI space, obviously, but we want to navigate carefully together. I feel really excited about libraries being a voice in that conversation, not just for ourselves, but even more broadly. We speak with a human centered voice, with an ethical, centered voice, but also with a voice that's not afraid of change and can look toward the future.

So I think in terms of our experience and expertise, we've got a lot to offer both, you know, in the higher education space and in other domains as well. I think about it, centralization as well, that's a big topic of conversation. And I think it affects centers of computing such as libraries more than other areas. So I think that that's something that we'll want to explore.

Cybersecurity is a perennial issue, and I think CNI can use some help in terms of surfacing some conversations and some best practices there. So there's still a lot to do. I think we're doing it. You know, the history of CNI is so rich and interesting. And it's spanned the entirety of when research computing was new and when networked computing was new to now where it's everyone's native language.

And so we're hitting this moment of real possibility that I'm finding really inspiring and exciting. I think the name is really important. It's a coalition, right. And that has meaning of its own and the networked information. And the network isn't just computing, it's people. It's how we make open source together. We make standards together. We discuss our successes and our failures, and together we can do more than we can do on our own. And to me, that is such a powerful tool.

Gerry Bayne: CNI membership represents a wide range of organizations — libraries, IT units, publishers, government agencies and beyond. How do you plan to engage with and listen to such a diverse community?

Kate Zwaard: The strength of our community is that we believe in the promise of the early web and the interconnectedness of information, and how that could be a powerful tool of humanity. And I think there are values that are core to our membership that really keep us together. I think this is a really great time for me to do a little bit of level setting with membership, to hear from them about what is meaningful to them in this community and in our meetings, what help they need.

It's just such a privilege to be in this job where my only incentives are to be helpful and make community, and so I want to hear from our members — what do they need? What can we help with? But we're doing simple surveys. We're a little sensitive to the fact that there's survey fatigue, right? When you ask people their opinion, you're asking them to do labor on your behalf.

But I want to make sure that I'm giving people all the options that they can have to let us hear from them and their perspectives. The thing that I've been telling people as I talk to them is, if you have so much as a fleeting thought, I want to hear about it. So there's no issue too small to email me about.

Gerry Bayne: Thank you so much, Kate.

Kate Zwaard: This was really, really fun.