CNI, in partnership with member organizations from the Task Force, is undertaking a program to advance both infrastructure and policy formulation in the areas of authentication, authorization and access management with the goal of facilitating resource sh aring and use of licensed networked information resources. The CNI program is cast within a framework of facilitating electronic commerce in content among organizations. The objective of the program is first to establish a common taxonomy of best practi ces and de facto standards that can be used to facilitate both the negotiation of contracts and the actual implementation of access arrangements, and then to move to proof of concept testbeds that actually validate the technical approaches in practice. A s its first step, a white paper summarizing architectural models for inter-organizational access management, and outlining technical and standards issues involved in each model, as well as discussing privacy, accountability, and management issues implicit in each model and the extent to which they are addressed by technical or contractual provisions, has been developed. The white paper's conclusions will be presented in this session and there will be a discussion of the second stage of the program in which we will seek to begin work on establishing one or more implementation testbeds.

A number of new and recurring institutional liability concerns are being raised by a range of legislation currently under discussion in Congress. Making institutions liable for the actions of their users in the networked environment has important policy and planning implications for all of us, and is a particularly troubling trend in a wide range of legislative initiatives. Whether or not the institution is an Internet service provider, the language of some of the proposed legislation could create grave conflicts between following the law and respecting the privacy of our constituents. After an overview of current legislation and issues, attendees will be asked to discuss their concerns from their institutional perspectives.

Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), and in particular Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), have long been regarded as part of the fabric of the World Wide Web. This presentation looks at the larger scope of identifying resources in the whole picture of Int ernet information activities (general publishing mechanisms, services, etc). This includes a detailed presentation of Uniform Resource Names (URNs) and their role in developing commercial-grade information applications.

For the next round of the Digital Libraries Initiative, the sponsors of this award have expanded beyond NSF, DARPA and NASA to include the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. This recognizes that the humanities have a significant contribution to make to the development of the nation's national digital infrastructure and provides a major opportunity for the humanities to present projects that demonstrate their unique challenges on a larger scale than before.

Speakers will address the growing awareness of the importance of including the humanities in such research and demonstration projects as well as approaches that are being taken and recommended.

CNI's New Learning Communities project, co-sponsored by ACRL, AAHE, and Educom and funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Education, focused on recognition for early innovators in the use of information technology and electronic information resources in higher education. In addition, the project sought to increase the ranks of those prepared to develop collaborative teaching and learning projects in higher education. In this session, the leaders of the initiative will describe some of the innovative projects developed by the participating institutions, how collaborative development of courses often led to collaborative learning, and the kinds of support and infrastructure that are needed for success.

This presentation will cover an overview of the principles of Unicode support within a library automation system. The session will provide a review of the Unicode standard, without being overly technical. Discussion will focus on the viewing capabilitie s enabled with Unicode support within a library system and what customers can expect from vendors who support Unicode in their library systems.

This spring marks the five year anniversary of the NAILDD Project. NAILDD was formed to seek the involvement of private sector vendors to promote technology developments in three areas identified by the library community. This update will summarize the current status of the implementation of the international standard for ILL communication - ISO 10160/1 - and review progress made toward the project's other goals: management software and improvements in billing/payment. While seeking technical improvem ents, the NAILDD Project has just completed a two-year study of the performance of ILL/DD operations in 119 North American research and college libraries. Highlights of the findings will be shared, especially those that relate to the Project's technical priorities.

Records managers will need to devote resources immediately to ensuring that state and federal web-based electronic records are managed and preserved as are other official records of government. Findings from a one year study completed by Co-principal investigators Charles R. McClure and J. Timothy Sprehe, and funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) include the following:

• Policy for electronic records management (ERM) of websites at the Federal and state level is confusing, ambiguous, and contradictory.
• The "state of the art" for ERM of state and Federal websites is rapidly changing and evolving; there are new practices and techniques being developed by selected Federal agencies are developing new practices.
• At the Federal level, until there are better guidelines and policy, individual agencies will have to develop their own policy and "best practices" for ERM of websites.
• For a number of states, issues related to ERM of websites are only now being recognized as to their importance and impact.

Friends of the Georgian National Archives has designed a project with the Central Historical Archive (CHA) in Tbilisi, Georgia, to create a tri-lingual archival guide (Georgian, Russian, and English) for the archive. It is an IREX-sponsored pilot project that is scheduled to begin in July, 1998, and run for six months. This Project Briefing discusses the archive, the nature of our collaboration with the CHA, and factors about the current situation in Georgia that have affected the design of the project. It then examines the technological difficulties associated with creating a guide using three alphabets and the software we plan to use. We conclude with a discussion of the ramifications of this pilot project for linking other archives in Georgia and Trancaucasia at large, including Armenia and Azerbaijan.