The Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) is an Internet-based, distributed system for quality agricultural information and resources managed by an alliance of collaborating institutions. Currently, there are more than 34 partners, with the potential for an additional 10 by the end of the year. Each AgNIC partner offers expert informational coverage of a "narrow slice" of agriculture (e.g., cranberries, maple syrup, turf grass, animal welfare, etc.). From its beginning in late 1995 until the spring of 1997, the initial five partners concentrated on discovering how to work together and building the alliance while relying upon a very simple technical architecture to serve their needs. In the spring of 1999, the growing alliance (21 members) voted to move to an architecture that allowed structured access to the distributed resources using an appropriate software and metadata. ROADS, an open source software package, was accepted as the testbed application for this next phase.

ROADS, developed under the auspices of the British Electronic Library Programme, is using a "subject- specific gateways" concept to investigate methods for cross-searching and interoperability. The alliance members, working collaboratively, began in mid-1999 to create a system that would result in the advanced functionality it desired. The National Agricultural Library and Cornell University's Mann Library are working to implement a ROADS system with searching, browsing, thesaurus support, Dublin Core input, and query routing between servers (Whois++ protocol). The technical application of these functions is of equal importance with the logistical and administrative requirements that will be necessary to make this distributed system operational. The development of an applied thesaurus and the application of the Dublin Core metadata standards for resource management and discovery are as much technical issues as administrative ones which require a great deal of community consensus. The AgNIC community, with its many agriculturally focused members, is an ideal environment for the practical development of this innovative distributed information system. This presentation will include a brief summary of the organizational development of AgNIC, an overview of the basic structure and business model, and an update on creating the distributed architecture.

The Library of Congress has the mission to collect and preserve the world's intellectual output for future generations. For this purpose it has a special national responsibility and a privileged legal position, and is supported by public funding. This talk will discuss the Library's plans for preserving one category of material -- open access information on the web. This is seen as a community activity to which many partners will each contribute. What are the challenges? What can we each contribute?

ARL is in the process of engaging interested member libraries in a study aiming at describing usage measures for electronic resources as part of the ARL New Measures Initiative. This effort emerged from an informal meeting of a small group of ARL directors at the December 1999 CNI meeting and continued with a day and a half project planning session in Scottsdale, AZ, at the end of February. Input received from the participants of the Scottsdale retreat is incorporated in the design of a revised prospectus by Charles McClure and Jeff Shim from the Information Management Use and Policy Institute of the School of Information Studies at Florida State University. An update of the questions and framework defining this study will be provided by Sherrie Schmidt and Rush Miller and more input will be sought by participants attending this project briefing session. For more information, please see   <http://www.arl.org/stats/newmeas/e-usage.html>.  

What is an authentic digital object? What are the core attributes that, if missing, would render the object something other than what it purports to be? In January of this year, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) convened a group to discuss the essential elements that define a digital object and guarantee its integrity. Participants included members from diverse communities with an interest in the authenticity of electronic information – scholars, computer scientists, librarians, archivists, publishers, digital asset managers, and foundation officials.

Position papers were commissioned from five experts and served as the basis of the discussion. The papers focused on authenticity, but in considering this central issue, other questions arose, such as:

• If all information – textual, numeric, audio, and visual – exists as a bitstream, what does that imply for the concept of format and its role as an attribute essential to the object?
• Does the concept of an original have meaning in the digital environment?
• What role does provenance play in establishing the authenticity of a digital object?
• What implications for authenticity, if any, are there in the fact that digital objects are contingent on software, hardware, network, and other dependencies?

In the fall of 1998 the Association of Research Libraries' (ARL) Office of Leadership and Management Services (OLMS) identified distance learning as one of six strategic priorities for 1999-2000. In an effort to identify potential partners with whom it might work to develop such a capability, ARL approached its member library community. Library Affairs at Southern Illinois University Carbondale expressed a strong interest in collaboration on the project. Their Instructional Support Services department's experience in the design, development and delivery of distance education for faculty on the Carbondale campus and for community college instructors throughout southern Illinois made an ideal partnership for the ARL initiative.

The ARL Online Lyceum, a web-based learning environment integrating the innovative use of technology and time-tested OLMS program content, is the outgrowth of this partnership. This briefing will describe the partnership and illustrate how this collaborative effort to design distance education materials via a distance worked to innovate ARL OLMS programs and SIUC/ISS instructional development methods.

The Collaborative Digital Reference Service provides professional reference service to users anytime anywhere, through an international, digital network of all types of libraries. Through this service, users can have access to library experts who draw on both digital and non - digtal resources in supplying answers to inquiries. The Library of Congress and its partner libraries, some twelve academic and public libraries will initiate a series of pilots over the next six months to test incrementally features of the service including response time, interoperability, scope, and size.

It's one thing to deliver a few classes via the web. It's another thing entirely to scale this across the institution. This session will present a second generation scaleable Web-based course delivery system that integrates with other enterprise systems. This system will be discussed in the context of the Instructional Management System standards from two perspectives: (1) the development of software from instructor-based course tools to institution-wide mission-critical systems; and (2) the progression of teaching and learning technologies from highly decentralized approaches to the adoption of packaged software. Comparisons of Blackboard CourseInfo Standard Edition and CourseInfo Enterprise Edition will be made to illustrate concepts. Examples of enterprise integration will be provided from successful implementations at Florida State University and Georgetown University.

Providing easy access to digital collections of high- quality cultural heritage images that can be reliably used by scholars, teachers and others, has been a highly touted recent goal within the cultural community. The Getty's ground-breaking Museum Educational Site Licensing project highlighted many of the issues to be solved, from the management of intellectual property, to the implementation of interoperable information and technical standards, the formulation of best practices and the development of optimum distribution strategies. Now, several organizational models have emerged and this session will highlight three of them: an open, museum licensing consortium now in business, and two recently announced initiatives/research projects from major research library groups.

How are these projects succeeding in solving the challenges identified a few years ago in developing sustainable cultural collections? How have those challenges been freshly identified and what new strategies are being developed to address them? What choices will we have in deploying quality cultural images and multimedia in research and teaching? What are some of the new issues that these initiatives are uncovering that we need to understand? Panelists will address these and related questions in their reports and in discussion with the audience.

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), a not-for- profit association of over 30 museums founded in 1997, is distributing a growing library of multimedia (now documenting over 50,000 works of art) under educational license to universities, schools, and public libraries. The Academic Image Cooperative (a project of the Digital Library Federation) is exploring potentially viable cooperative collection development strategies focusing on art historical images. The Cultural Materials Initiative, recently announced by the Research Libraries Group (RLG), will provide shared access to high-quality digital representations of cultural materials from the collections of its members, and aims to develop best practices and address institutional intellectual property issues.

Since 1993 the U.S. Copyright Office has been developing CORDS (Copyright Office Electronic Registration, Recordation and Deposit System), a fully automated system for electronic copyright registration and deposit. The CORDS system allows the U.S. Copyright Office to accept applications for copyright registration and deposits online. It is a major step forward in the application of advanced technology for providing an efficient and innovative copyright registration and deposit mechanism, and also provides an effective way for the Library of Congress to acquire new electronic publications for its national digital library collections. Copyright claims are filed electronically by test partners through CORDS by sending applications and deposits in digital form and charging fees to active Deposit Accounts with the Copyright Office. The CORDS system facilitates full electronic processing, both front-end preparation by claimants and back-end processing by the Copyright Office.

In January 1999 the U.S. Copyright Office and the Library of Congress signed a CORDS Cooperative Agreement with UMI Company (now, Bell & Howell Information & Learning) that initiated fully electronic copyright registration and deposit of dissertations over the Internet through CORDS to the U.S. Copyright Office. In addition, the agreement designates UMI s ProQuest Digital Dissertations as the Librarys official off-site repository for a collection of more than 150,000 dissertations and theses converted to digital form since 1997, as well as those to be produced in the future. The agreement marks the first time that the Library has designated an official off-site repository for digital collections deposited with the Library of Congress. For the Library of Congress, this is a major step that represents an innovative method for expanding its collection of digital research tools and for improving access, while reducing costs.

The Librarys comprehensive dissertation collections are one of its most heavily used resources by researchers and other users at the Library of Congress. Providing access to these in digital form through ProQuest Digital Dissertations in the Librarys reading rooms gives researchers faster and easier access, more flexibility and greatly expanded searching capabilities for their varied research purposes.

The Digital Library Federation - a consortium of libraries and other organizations committed to joint exploration of their digital library research and development agenda, has recently undergone a comprehensive and extensively consultative review of activities and of the needs and interests of the digital library community. The process has resulted in a substantially revised program for the DLF which is given its first public presentation at the Spring 2000 CNI Task Force meeting. The talk will briefly review the organization and activities of the DLF since its establishment and outline its aims and objectives as its moves forward into the new millennium.

As a follow-on to his plenary session, Gregory Crane will answer questions and discuss topics raised in his presentation. Participants can informally interact with Crane and learn more about his projects and ideas.

Institutions of higher education increasingly need to share resources over the network in a controlled manner. A common set of attributes for person information and a common definition of the kind of situations in which those attributes are appropriately used would make that sharing substantially easier. The edu-Person 0.9 project brings together directory and resource experts to define an initial set of such attributes and practices. With the support of Internet2 and EDUCAUSE and in cooperation with standards-promotion bodies such as the Post-secondary Electronic Standards Council, this effort is well underway. This briefing will introduce the work of the project staff and describe how to connect with and participate in the ongoing work in this area.

In some states, legislatures or executive agencies are proposing to tie state funding for computing resources or services to the implementation of filtering software on publicly available computer terminals. The concern by some in state government is that publicly funded equipment could be used by individuals (including minors) to access pornography on the Internet.

This issue is shaping up as a major public policy debate around the country. The real challenge is how to manage this dialogue to improve understanding on both sides of the issue and to reaffirm the importance of library services in the community. The question is not whether or not to filter but how to use this occasion to open a dialogue. Libraries and other educational institutions must weigh in with their values and perspectives to ensure that the principles of access, choice, and community involvement are recognized. This session will describe experiences in the State of Arizona and invite discussion of the issues and strategies by CNI participants.

Columbia University has recently announced the creation of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC), a partnership of the university press, the libraries, and the Academic Information Systems. EPIC's mission is to create innovative models of digital scholarly communication through the use of creative editorial, technology, and evaluation systems, efficient organizational and staffing models, and cost-effective business plans designed to achieve long term sustainability for the resulting publications. EPIC will explore, in a research and production environment, strategies for digital content development, use of technology, issues of intellectual property and copyright management, development of business plans, and evaluation of use. In this session we will describe the issues we confronted in developing the center, editorial and technical staffing challenges, integration of different organizational cultures and operational models, and the issues that lie ahead as we develop our current projects, Columbia Earthscape and Gutenberg-e.

IMLS supports digitization of library and museum resources as well as research to improve the management, preservation and interoperability of digital libraries. IMLS is one of four federal agencies (with the National Science Foundation, National Park Service and Smithsonian Institution) directed by the President to work together to establish a Digital Library for Education. This year, IMLS has

• Created new funding opportunities for digitization and technology development in museums;
• Sponsored a national conference highlighting significant digital library projects and issues; and,
• Begun planning for a survey of digitization activities in libraries and museums.

This session presents preliminary findings from a study funded by four federal agencies to assess the success of their websites on a range of performance measures. One aspect of the study is an analysis of various federal information policies (e.g., privacy, access, security, records management, paperwork reduction, etc.) and how these policies affect the overall success of their websites. "Success" is defined largely in terms of the degree to which users can obtain the information and services they need from the website in a timely and accurate manner. Recommendations will be made as to how the federal information policy system might be improved to increase the quality and impact of federal websites.

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.

This presentation will provide an update on Internet2 activities, covering organization status, applications efforts, networking engineering, and international partnerships. The focus will be on applications highlights, which include the increased use of high quality digital video, for both real-time and on- demand applications; outreach to discipline-specific groups, such as the new health sciences initiative; the growing interest by the arts community in high performance networks; and an overview of the demos underway this week. The engineering update will provide the latest news on the Abilene network, including its addition of new services, and relationships with network peers both in the U.S. and internationally.

This non-technical session will provide an overview of national trends in PKI 9Public Key Infrastructure for authentication and access management) as it relates to higher education. National-level projects by EDUCAUSE, Internet2 and others will be discussed, as well as recent developments among Federal agencies.

Julie Nye will discuss why this standard is needed by the library community, Pat Stevens will describe the approach taken by the committee, work to date, and timeline for completion, Mark Needleman will discuss what is required from librarians and vendors to bring the standard to reality in products from vendors and implementations in libraries.

The goals of the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative are improving the quality of teaching and learning, containing or reducing rising costs, and providing greater access to higher education by harnessing the power of information technology. As key players in this effort, faculty are one of the NLII's areas of attention this year. NLII staff have been working with members to develop a white paper on best practices in faculty engagement and support, and this session will discuss the findings to date. (See   <http://www.educause.edu/nlii/meetings/seattle2000/>   for a draft of the white paper.)

As more and more of our intellectual heritage finds its way into electronic form, libraries must take responsibility for capturing those documents that will form the foundation of tomorrow's scholarship. MIT hosts an astounding array of intellectual talent and the MIT Libraries wants to make sure that the contributions they make to their fields today is not lost tomorrow. Developing a digital archive of the electronic output of our talented faculty, students, and researchers is a critical extension of the MIT Libraries' role.

In this briefing we will share our plans for building this digital archive, including deliverables, research areas, and timeline. We seek thoughtful critique of our plans so that what we develop can serve as a model for other academic libraries.

This session will be a continuation of a discussion from the last Task Force meeting in which we examined the criteria that might be needed in order to ensure that "archival" electronic scholarly journals can actually become part of our society's long-term intellectual record. This session will report on the outcomes of a workshop CNI held on this topic in December, 1999 and will include current thinking on archivability criteria for electronic journals.

In recognition of the significant benefits of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology, the University of Pittsburgh became one of the first higher education institutions in the U.S. to outsource its PKI needs to VeriSign, Inc. The VeriSign partnership enabled the University to begin offering PKI services within weeks. Thousands of students, faculty, and staff at the University have received co-branded digital certificates as a result of this arrangement, permitting access to the University's online computer reseller, the e-Store. A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solution was identified, chosen, and implemented at a time when PKI was just gaining industry acceptance and adoption. The implementation of a PKI solution posed many challenges to University IT staff and users, but provides a stable foundation upon which to develop advanced technology services. The presentation will focus on lessons learned, PKI decision-making process, and future plans for this technology.

PubMed Central is a Web-based repository established at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide barrier-free access to primary research reports in the life sciences. Proposed last spring by Dr. Harold Varmus and his colleagues, PubMed Central began accepting and distributing reports early this year. The system serves as a host for scientific publishers, professional societies, and other groups to archive, organize, and distribute at no cost peer- reviewed reports from journals, as well as reports that have been screened but not formally peer-reviewed. Several journals have expressed an interest in participating in PubMed Central. Many organizations have also expressed support for PubMed Central and some are also interested in submitting their journals. NCBI has been involved in the development of the project and is working with publishers and other organizations to establish efficient data flows and to make the content available as soon as possible.

The Research Libraries Group has made electronic access to cultural materials a priority in the opening years of the 21st century. In a collaborative, international effort, RLG will be working with an alliance of its member institutions to build an extensive integrated information resource containing digital representations and textual descriptions of cultural materials drawn from the collections of its members. Participants in RLG's initiative will develop best practices and conditions for creating electronic surrogates of cultural materials, address institutional intellectual property mandates, contribute to a substantial collective resource of unique or rare cultural materials, and ensure that the resulting service is international, representative, and self-sustaining. This session will describe the factors that gave rise to this initiative and describe how RLG is planning to address the technical, organizational, rights-management and economic challenges.

The NISO/DLF workshops on reference linking from citations to journal literature revealed the Harvard problem or appropriate copy problem. When linking from a citation to the article represented by the citation, one needs to take into account the fact that multiple instances of that article may exist. Delivery of the appropriate instance depends on the context of the user. But -- as pointed out at the very beginning of the SFX research effort -- this problem is not limited to linking from citations to full-text. It is equally relevant for other types of so-called extended services that link a record from whichever scholarly information resource to related information. For instance, when an institution subscribes to an abstracting and indexing database run by an intermediate, its users should be able to link from records in that A&I database to corresponding records in the version of the citation databases to which the institution subscribes. Or, the link-to-holdings feature, pointing at the user's OPAC system, that is very commonly used for A&I databases, should also be available for citations in journal articles. All kinds of linkages between electronic scholarly information resources should take into account the context of the user. In general, this is not the case for actual linking solutions. Therefore those can be named "closed". The SFX research has looked into ways to enable context- sensitive delivery of extended linking services. The project briefing will give an overview of the main and generic findings. It will also show how the SFX framework can "open" closed linking frameworks, such as CrossRef, in a straightforward way. It will touch on the capabilities of the specific SFX server that dynamically delivers context-sensitive services.

ETDs have been a part of the graduate student experience at Virginia Tech since 1997 and over 2000 ETDs have been submitted. WVU has required ETDs since 1998 and has over 400 ETDs in its archive. In addition over 80 Universities around the world have joined NDLTD to work together to advance the ETD project. Recent joiners include Cal Tech, MIT and the University of Texas. Two workshops have been held to allow NDLTD members and other to exchange information about starting ETDs projects and a third ETD workshop will be held March 16-18 at the University of South Florida. Journal publishers have also begun to set policies more friendly to ETDs. Still, some faculty and students, particularly those who are highly entrepreneurial, continue to express their concerns about sharing research done by their graduate students through ETDs.

Research and education depend increasingly on electronic media and networks. In Europe and elsewhere, networking services for research institutes, universities and schools are provided by (national) research and education networks. These networking organizations collaborate at the European level, creating a high-quality international information infrastructure. TERENA, the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association, is the organization in which the research and education networking organizations from countries in and around Europe collaborate. One of the pillars of TERENA's activities is the Technical Programme, in which new technologies and services are developed, tested and promoted. The presentation will describe the European research networking community, give an overview of TERENA's activities and then focus on the Technical Programme. Some key topics are: searching and indexing; storage, caching and replication; streaming media; video-conferencing; security and incident handling; Quality of Service. We will discuss in particular current American-European collaboration in these fields and opportunities for new joint activities.

Over the years, literally thousands of articles and other publications have dealt with journals and distribution of article separates. However, few have presented hard data concerning authorship, readership, publishing, and library and other services. This project briefing presents quantitative evidence (much of it from proprietary studies) based on: (1) over 13,500 survey responses from scientists, and hundreds of personal and focus group interviews; (2) over 100 in-depth cost studies of publishers, libraries and other services; (3) a journal characteristic tracking study from 1960 forward; and (4) an historical review of nearly 700 relevant publications. These data reveal realities which can help readers, authors, librarians, publishers and communications R&D specialists better understand what to expect in the future from electronic publishing and digital text databases.

The Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act or UCITA, a proposed "uniform law," is under consideration by many states. 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.

Since UCITA will be considered by state legislatures, CIOs and librarians need to understand both its broad implications and specific provisions of particular concern to higher education. The experience of members of the higher education community in opposing UCITA in the Maryland State legislature will be presented as an example of how the issues are being considered at the state level. In addition, the presenters will discuss the serious and detrimental effects of the proposed legislation on the education community.

Founded in 1823, the Library of Virginia is located in Richmond and serves as the archival repository for state and local governmental records and as the reference library at the seat of government. Since its inception in 1995, the Library's Digital Library Program (DLP) has generated digital images of more than 700,000 original document pages, 1,100 maps, 18,000 photographs, 1.6 million catalog card images, and created 20 new bibliographic databases with more than 300,000 MARC records, and 50 electronic card indexes and two finding aids. In 1998, the Library initiated the Virginia Digital Library Program (VDLP) to provide consulting, funding, and implementation services for local Virginia libraries to digitize and provide access to significant local collections. During Phase I, the VDLP provided the opportunity for nineteen (19) local digital library projects at fifteen (15) libraries to be developed and completed, which include local newspaper indexes, maps, indexes to cemetery interment records, indexes to diaries and journals, ancestor charts, and numerous local photograph collections. This session will provide an update on the Library's progress and generate discussion regarding emerging issues, technologies and standards relating to large-scale indexing and digitization projects.

The W3C (Web Consortium) was established in 1994 to develop common protocols for the web, promote its evolution, and improve interoperability. There are about 400 members worldwide, and though most share interests in common with the library and information community, very few members have strong ties to the library world.

The W3C is therefore somewhat of an enigma to our community, but most W3C activities are at least of general interest to libraries and some are of compelling interest: W3C is developing specifications in certain domains where the library community has much at stake, as well as decades of experience -- perhaps substantially more experience than the W3C at large -- and where we could provide significant contribution. These domains include character sets, identifiers, and metadata. Other W3C activities (proposed and/or former activities) include HTTP, HTML, XML, style sheets, graphics, digital signatures, privacy, intellectual property rights, and web accessibility (web-usability for people with disabilities).

This session will first provide a short briefing on the W3C and its activities; then, panelists from organizations with strong ties to the library community and which are W3C members will describe their interests in the W3C, and what, from their perspective, is the library and information community's interest in the W3C. We hope that the session will provoke thought and discussion of whether the library community's interests are properly represented in the W3C, and how our community might better influence W3C's direction and decision-making process.

The web has reinvented itself several times. It is about to do it again, with web portals. You've seen web portals on the web because everyone is calling anything new they put on the web a portal. While some sites such as Excite and Net Center are at least real portals, they are horizontal portals. The portals that will change the way universities and corporations deal with their data, applications, and web sites are vertical portals. If we build our portals right we will change the web from institution-centric to user- centric. This session will describe what a portal is, why you must have one, what the components of portals are, and technical issues related to portals.

This session will be a discussion of policy issues related to portals in the higher education environment. We'll discuss build or buy, single portal vs many, and the challenges of making this happen on your campus. Attendees will be invited to share their experiences, issues, and concerns about portals or plans for portals at their home institutions.