The IMS Project is developing and promoting open specifications for facilitating online activities such as locating and using educational content, tracking learner progress, reporting learner performance, and exchanging student records between administrat ive systems. The goal of the IMS project is the widespread adoption of specifications that will allow distributed learning environments and content from multiple authors to work together. To this end, the project is producing a technical specification a nd proof-of-concept prototype. The project is funded by a group of academic, commercial, and government organizations, sponsored by Educom.

Authenticating users as eligible recipients of services and resources delivered via Web browsers has become a critical strategic necessity for many enterprises. Colleges and universities face especially challenging technical problems that are not easily s olved by available technical solutions. Universities in consortia environments, which may collaboratively share resources as diverse as faculty, students, library collections, and computing infrastructure, work under even greater technical constraints, s ince they possess different means of identifying and authenticating valid users internally.

The North Carolina Giganet Initiative (NCGNI), part of the Internet2 Project, working with the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) and North Carolina State University, have developed the Web Realm Authentication Protocol (WRAP) specifically to addr ess the needs of wide-area network partners in consortia environments. WRAP provides for flexible authentication that utilizes existing authentication mechanisms for on-campus users to authenticate users from extra-campus IP domains. In consortia enviro nments, users are authenticated by the mechanism used by their home campus before permitted access to restricted resources provided by consortia arrangements.

The WRAP authentication protocol has been implemented at North Carolina State University for access to the NCSU Libraries' electronic reserves systems and its Web-accessible licensed digital resources. After assessment of its performance, the protocol wi ll be extended to library resources provided by the libraries of TRLN, and eventually will be used for access to student records, grades, and other resources restricted by both IP and by user profile.

In today's emerging electronic information environment, it is important that every university and other institutions prepare and disseminate policies concerning the use, creation and exchange of electronic information. Electronic information policies, th ough requiring unique elements, ought to be an extension of existing information policies. These policies should describe roles and responsibilities of users and providers, and should address appropriate behaviors, not only on campus systems, but also on the WWW and the Internet generally. The session is designed as a guide for universities and other institutions that are developing, reviewing, or revising electronic information policies.

The institutions participating in CNI's Assessing the Academic Networked Environment project used a variety of methodologies to explore assessment issues on their campuses. Project leaders will give an overview of the initiative, and two team leaders wil l report on their campus efforts. At the University of Washington, assessment activities focused on the impact of the UWired program, a teaching and learning initiative, networked information seeking and using behavior among faculty and students, and use of electronic library/information resources. At Gettysburg, the efforts resulted in the development of an automated data collection tool for electronic reserves that is incorporated into a campus information system. The session closes with recommendatio ns and suggestions for implementing a regular program for assessing networked information services and resources.

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) is undertaking a broad-based study of the existing Z39.50 implementations in the member university libraries in order to improve the efficacy of the CIC Virtual Electronic Library -- a project linking the 1 3 online library systems of the CIC member university libraries. The study will result in a report that will document the Z39.50 situation in each of the CIC research libraries, an articulation, analysis, and description of the most significant problems, a checklist that technical staff can use in defining local attribute sets, and will include a recommendation about how the CIC libraries can generally improve the existing Z39.50-based services to their users. The report and recommendations will be avai lable after May, 1998, and will be extensible to any group of libraries undertaking a linked system project based on Z39.50. The briefing will provide information on the project; describe methodologies employed in the study; and offer some preliminary observations.

"Accessing Information for Research" is a one-hour credit class that originated in Washington State University's distance education program. Taught primarily over the Internet using web modules and e-mail, the course content addresses database searching as well as such issues as understanding the publication cycle and disciplinary thinking. The course aims to teach students advanced methods of gathering materials for research by focusing on a single research project and pursuing it for the entire semest er. "Accessing Information for Research" is positioned to become an extremely important part of the General Education curriculum at WSU. A workshop this summer will orient new faculty and librarians to the course, which is predicted to grow rapidly in t he fall. Future development includes experimenting with streaming video over the web to develop a way to deliver more powerful content.

The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) collects, preserves, and encourages re-use of digital resources which result from or support research and teaching in the humanities. In the course of its work on extensively distributed mixed media and inter-disciplinary collections, the AHDS is forced to address issues of common concern to those interested in aspects of our digital cultural and scholarly heritage. Those issues, the AHDS has attempted to address through a mixture of research, broad consultation, and practical application. In all cases it adopts internationally agreed standards and best practices where they exist and uses its own research and development efforts to progress the identification of consensus where it is lacking. The session introduces the AHDS and focuses on three areas in which it is currently active, and into which it seeks input from and collaboration with the widest possible community:

• developing policy guidelines for those involved in the creation or preservation of digital resources
• integrating access to distributed mixed media and inter disciplinary collections using Dublin Core metadata for resource discovery and tools based upon the Z39.50 network application profile
• developing collections and services through formal consultation with user communities

This session will discuss the final report of a 7 university/7 museum cooperative project to explore the distribution of digital images and associated metadata. Panelists will discuss highlights from the final report including distribution issues, use, a nd impact. Major observations from instructors and technical staff will be covered, as will important lessons for future projects.

In addition, this session will provide preliminary reports from a Mellon-sponsored study examining the costs, infrastructure, and efforts needed to implement this project. This study identifies major cost centers and compares what it took to distribute t hese digital images to the efforts involved in the operation of traditional slide libraries.

In this session, an overview of the current projects and plans of the Digital Library Federation will be provided. Special attention will be given to the current status of the Making of America project, which focuses on the means of linking Encoded Archi val Descriptions (EAD) with digitized source material of Americana from the Gilded Age. Status reports will also be provided on DLF initiatives with the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and Columbia's Center for Research on Information Access (CRIA) to help advance the state of campus authorization systems and thereby contribute to the CNI program on Authentication, Authorization and Access Management.