There is growing awareness of the need for a second layer of national infrastructure for higher education and research, focused on identifiers, authentication, directories, and authorization. A number of efforts in this area are beginning to produce the building blocks of this middleware infrastructure. This session will review recent developments and next steps in the construction of an information and trust fabric within our community.

Electronic books (e-books) have become a hot topic of discussion during the last year. There are a number of different companies introducing e-book products and systems. However, without open industry-wide standards, e-books may not become the huge success they deserve to be. This project briefing is about the progress we have made over the last year on e-book standards, including the content standards OEB and PDF, the rights language standard DPRL, and the copyright and distribution standard EBX. The session will describe how these standards apply both to the sale of e-books from commercial entities as well as lending of books by libraries.

BioOne is the result of an innovative collaboration between scientific societies, academe, and the commercial sector and will bring to the Web a uniquely valuable aggregation of the full-texts of high-impact bioscience research journals. It is being developed and offered as a non-profit venture through the combined efforts of: SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium, the University of Kansas, and Allen Press. Included in BioOne will be self-published titles previously available only in printed form by small, specialized scientific societies. The titles will be fully encoded using a standards- based SGML DTD for searching and archival purposes and the database will offer cross-journal searches and inter- journal linking from references. HTML and PDF formats will be provided for convenient common browser viewing and printing.

The collaboration among the public and private organizations creating and developing BioOne is a new model for scientific societies, universities, libraries, and publishers, and represents a new approach to service, design, features, cost, and terms of use for publishers, subscribers and end-users.

The Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act or UCITA, a proposed "uniform law," will be considered by many state legislatures in the months ahead. The goal of UCITA is to harmonize the law regarding computer information transactions. UCITA is very broad in scope and is applicable to everything from copyrighted expression to patents to online databases. Because colleges, universities, libraries, and businesses rely upon computer technologies, UCITA will, if passed in a state, affect every facet of operations from payroll processing to terms and conditions for licensing of online databases. This highly controversial proposal has been significantly critiqued and/or opposed by many in the commercial and not-for-profit sectors including insurance companies, consumer groups, the Association of Computing Machinery, the Federal Trade Commission, the library community, 25 attorney generals, and more. Supporters of UCITA include large software companies such as Microsoft and associations such as the Association of American Publishers. A brief review of key concerns with UCITA will be provided followed by a discussion of the implications of the proposed law for the library and education communities.

One of the great promises of electronic journals is the ability to link from a citation (in a citation database, in the references of another article, etc.) directly to the article itself, allowing the user immediate access to cited material. However, there are a number of difficulties involved in creating a robust system of links in an environment where articles are served from a large number of systems operated by independent organizations. In a series of meetings over the past year various architectural models for citation linking have been explored, and a general model articulated. One of the unsolved problems in the model is how to ensure the user finds the most appropriate copy or copies of an article when it is available from more than one source. In this session we will present for discussion both a general linking model and some alternatives for approaching the "appropriate copy" problem.

Over the past two years, four librarians at the Pullman and Vancouver campuses of Washington State University (WSU) have spearheaded usability testing of the Libraries' WebPac and Web sites. They wanted to make more informed decisions about how to design their WebPac, how to organize their Web sites and what information should be available on their libraries' sites. Since the Libraries had limited staff time and budget to spend on usability testing, the librarians working on this project sorted through various testing methodologies to find ones that were simple, time efficient and would involve little cost. They decided to use a combination of five methods: task-based testing, card sorting, category membership expectation, an online user survey and a short print survey. This session will cover the planning and development of the usability testing projects, an analysis of what worked and what did not and the implementation of test results.