The session will provide a comprehensive update of the recent developments regarding the SFX framework and the SFX software.

The current status of the Ex Libris SFX software  <www.sfxit.com> will be discussed. As part of this topic, a report on the experiences of the Los Alamos Research Library in beta-testing the SFX server will be given. The Los Alamos Research Library recenly moved SFX into production.

There will be an update on the ongoing process of standardizing the OpenURL <www.sfxit.com/OpenURL/> as the interoperability mechanism between information resources that allow open linking and service components such as the SFX server that deliver localized service links. An overview of current support of OpenURL in the information industry will be given.

The session will accord special attention to the collaboration between the SFX community and the DOI community. Part of this collaboration for which an elaborate experiment is underway is about the integration of the SFX framework and the DOI framework, as a means to enable localized resolution of DOI's. Another part of the collaboration is related to the interest that was recently expressed by the DOI community to use OpenURL as the general purpose syntax to transport DOI's on a URL.

Questia is a unique, online research service for undergraduate students. The company's holistic environment helps students perform more thorough academic research and write better papers. The service consists of a collection of full-text books and journal articles, with an emphasis in the humanities and social sciences, combined with powerful research tools.

The presentation will provide a summary of Questia's background and what the service has to offer students. It will examine ways in which the business model is unique and how the technology incorporated is revolutionary. The collection development and management process will specifically be explored, from the initial selection of titles to the technical integration of text into the service. The presentation will also review specific service components with a particular emphasis on research tools made available to users on the site. In closing, Questia will welcome a lively discussion with audience members concerning the service's impact on teaching, learning, and libraries.

This session will describe the significant progress in Internet2 middleware  <http://www.internet2.edu/middleware/> experiments and the   activities underway to further development of PKI for higher education and research. These projects will provide benefits to inter-institutional and intra-institutional security and directory management. Come learn about EduPerson, the proposed higher education object class for directories, the Directory of Directories for higher education, and the Shibboleth effort to facilitate inter-institutional web access as well as recent PKI discoveries.

On September 30, 1999, the New York State (NYS) Office for Technology issued Technology Policy 99-3 nbsp;<www.oft.state.ny.us> that mandated all official NYS web pages to provide universal accessibility to persons with disabilities. Websites would be required to satisfy level "A" priority one checkpoints of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The State University of New York (SUNY), New York States' public higher education system, is comprised of 64 campuses and is required to comply with this policy. Discussion will include: what universal access is and how New York State and SUNY are taking the lead in providing an accessible web infrastructure; what efforts were undertaken at the SUNY System level; strategies that make sense; the advantages and problems with compliance; and, a look at federal efforts and recent rulings on accessibility.

Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are a new genre of documents providing an enriched medium for graduate students to present their research. ETDs help improve graduate education, accelerate access to university research, promote sharing and collaboration, and enlarge readership. NDLTD is a federation of more than one hundred members-including institutional members such as CNI and UNESCO. It is an initiative that promotes and supports ETD activities worldwide. The growing number of ETD projects and initiatives around the world evidences increasing global interest in ETDs.

NDLTD has partnered with VTLS Inc., to develop a global union catalog of ETDs. VTLS is uniquely equipped for this activity due to the comprehensive support of Unicode in its Virtua ILS - Integrated Library System. Unicode encoding allows data to be entered into a single database in any language, including non-Roman languages like Arabic, Chinese, English, Greek, Hebrew, and Russian. This new service will help further globalization of ETDs in the future.

Pacific Bell and UCLA are collaborating on an Initiative to promote 21st Century Literacies. This session reports on the kick-off Summit held in October, and initial plans for this $1 million project. Activities will focus on information literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, and cultural literacy. Sub-projects include building model curriculum for users, designing guidelines and best practices for information systems designers, and prototyping adaptive information systems (where the same back-end body of information is delivered to users in different ways, depending upon their profile). See  <http://www.newliteracies.gseis.ucla.edu/>

The Chemistry Preprint Server (CPS) is a major new initiative for the chemistry community, hosted by ChemWeb.com. It is a freely available and permanent web archive and a distribution medium for research articles in the chemical field. The CPS was developed by closely following the Los Alamos archives, which cover physics and related disciplines. Submission to the CPS is free and open to all, and can include fully prepared articles or works in progress. This session will review this ChemWeb experiment in effective scientific communication, and focus on how the CPS was developed, how it can be utilised by scientists, the response from the chemical community and the scope for future development.

IMS defines and delivers interoperable, XML-based specifications for exchanging learning content and information about learners among learning system components. IMS members are implementing and adopting these specifications to make learning easier and cheaper to deliver anywhere and anytime, as well as to create new mechanisms, new contexts, and new products for education and training. IMS Working Groups have set aggressive timetables for developing, testing, revising and releasing specifications. Specifications for Content Packaging, Question and Test Interoperability, Enterprise Data Exchange, and Meta-data have been released. Specifications for Content Management and for Learner Information Packaging are nearing completion. Working Groups which will gather requirements and develop specifications for Instructional Design and for Accessibility by Disabled Learners are being formed. The specifications already produced are becoming worldwide de facto standards for defining acquisition requirements and for delivering learning products and services. This presentation will be a real time snapshot of IMS' current activities to develop and facilitate the use of specifications.