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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.