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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.