Moving into the new millennium, educational, library, and other cultural organizations confront a significant challenge transitioning innovative IT applications and projects into sustainable information services. The session aims to facilitate dialogue and encourage shared experience amongst those who have a stake in this transition. To do so, it describes three different perspectives on the problem and the possible solutions that apply in each case. Each perspective is derived from a distinctive approach to IT innovation.

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK's Higher Education Funding Councils represents a predominantly top-down approach to service innovation. Benefiting from a top-slice or tax on the nation's c.185 higher education institutions, the JISC devotes itself to the development of innovative information services and projects which promise to benefit the community generally in its exploitation of IT.

A second "bottom up" perspective is presented by the US-based Digital Libraries Federation which acts as a facilitating organization stimulating and focusing the efforts of, but ultimately relying upon, members' voluntary contributions.

A third perspective is presented by the National Science Foundation and the European Union. Although mobilizing substantial central funding, both bodies invest in research and development work on enabling technologies whose existence may lever information service developments on local, regional, national, and even international levels.

In order to facilitate comparability and discussion, presentations will address common themes. In particular, the initiatives that are represented will describe their aims and how their organizational and funding models help to fulfill them. They will also identify the organizational, financial, and other challenges they perceive when considering how to ensure that research, development, project, and other investment contributes to the evolution and growth of sustainable information services, and some of the steps they are taking to confront these challenges.

For the last several years, Congress has considered legislation that would provide additional protections to collections of information or databases. Early in the 106th session, four bills were introduced or placed in the Congressional Record for debate and consideration. This indicates a high interest in moving forward on database legislation this year. Which of the four approaches Congress ultimately follows will have a major impact on the research and education community, the database industry, and the economy at large, given its heavy reliance on information. This session will review the different approaches and the implications for the research and education community as well as highlight key concerns of the commercial sectors including the networking and telecommunications communities.

Two complementary technologies, Dienst and CUPID, facilitate serving, navigating, searching and printing digital documents. Dienst is the protocol underlying NCSTRL <http://www.ncstrl.org/>. A new version (5.1) of the Dienst protocol extends the ability to manage metadata and to navigate "structured" documents (for example, the ability to request "chapter 2" of a book, or retrieving a page by its "native" page number). A lightweight implementation of the Dienst 5.1 protocol was built in Perl under Windows NT and uses XML to represent metadata, document structure information, and to communicate with client applications. An application built on Dienst 5.1 features full text searching of historical law journals based on OCR data.

To facilitate production of printed reproductions of digital documents, Dienst 5.1 cooperates with CUPID, a printing architecture specified by the CNI CUPID "Consortium for University Printing and Information Distribution" <http://www.cni.org/docs/ima.ip-workshop/CUPID.html>. We are using CUPID printshop clients to direct documents to local printers, the Cornell Digital Print Shop, Kinko's and a local offset printer. A "Dienst Printshop Client" planned for CUPID will allow users to virtually "print" an electronic document to a Dienst archive for viewing and subsequent printing by remote users.

The UC Berkeley Website Design Project <http://webdesign.sims.berkeley.edu/> is a collaborative effort to create websites of instructional support material that are well-designed, consistent, and will have some degree of portability and longevity. The project also aims to identify important issues in creating and managing course websites, provide public guidelines for good website design, and post reviews of various tools and products. The project involves a collaboration between students and a faculty member from UC Berkeley's School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS), the campuswide Information Systems & Technology's Instructional Technology Program, and faculty from various campus departments. Thirty course websites are currently being supported with an average of 100 students in each course.

The National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) is a cooperative agreement funded by NSF. NLANR's primary goal is to provide technical, engineering, and traffic analysis support of NSF High-Performance Connections sites, and the broad vBNS user community. Its activities focus on three major areas: Applications & Users Services; Network Engineering; and Measurement & Analysis.

Due to the vast array of access systems (CD-ROM, ERL servers, Web access, and LAN servers), and hardware and software platforms deployed in today's information environments, a unified system to measure and assess usage of infobases and applications is very problematic. Accurate usage information has become critical for the decision-makers in information centers, libraries, and academic environments. Rising subscription, technology, and manpower costs, and appropriate evaluation of patron/student/user needs, requirements, and usage patterns all require a dynamic, powerful system to evaluate application usage at increasingly advanced levels. This briefing is intended to generate a discussion of the problems, issues, concerns, manpower requirements, costs, and deployment issues encountered by the IUPUI University Library during the design, research, and prototype phases of this project. Use of a wide variety of today's web based technologies and a MS SQL 7.0 database server will be utilized for this project. One of the core objectives of the project is to reengineer the current manual statistical gathering process, in favor of one that is software driven, dynamic, machine generated, and thus always up-to-date.

Columbia International Affairs Online is in its second year of publication, and is working its way towards becoming self-sufficient through subscription sales. Along the way we have encountered a number of issues relating to editorial development, technology changes, end user and library reactions, and coordination of work flow between the Press and the Academic Computing Center. At this session we will discuss our experience in these areas as the project has evolved, and our expectations for the future of the project as it moves into its next phase.

A unified organization for information services, systems and resources serves the learning community at the University of South Carolina - Columbia. The session will address two successive planning efforts in this organizational unit against the backdrop of campus projects and service improvements over the past six years (for example, an exploding demand for connection to the Internet, development of digital resources, media instruction for faculty, and more convenient student processes.)

The presenters have served as chairs for the division's two internal planning efforts. Middle managers and line personnel have led both planning efforts according to a collaborative model. Reorganization has taken place in an ongoing fashion.

The session will focus on contrasts and points of commonality in the two planning efforts and will feature offshoots to the planning process, the fate of recommendations, and changes in attitudes over time. A key theme will be the amount of progress gained in division unity as reflected by the perspectives of directors, line managers, division staff and client groups. There will be discussion of planning outcomes including the responses and responsiveness of various elements of the unit to newly understood client requirements, to budgetary pressures and to the necessity for change.

Institutions are grappling with questions concerning long-term access to electronic records, the policies that need to be put into place to specify responsibilities for retention of electronic materials, and the institutional mandate to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests that necessitate searching electronic records that may not be structured for easy analysis and may include confidential information. Records managers, archivists, and information technologists each bring a knowledge base to the analysis of these issues and the development of institutional policies and solutions.

CNI developed a specialized version of its Working Together program on developing collaboration skills, aimed at bringing records managers, archivists, and information technologists together to work on common institutional issues. With funding from the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission, institutional teams met in an intensive, two-day workshop to develop a plan to work on an institutional project. This session will provide background on the issues discussed and will highlight one institution's project plans.