LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is a digital preservation system designed to preserve access to immutable web published content. LOCKSS allows individual libraries to safeguard their communities' access to HTTP delivered content. The system ensures that hyperlinks continue to resolve and appropriate content is delivered, even when in the Internet the links don't work and the content is no longer available from the publisher's web site. Libraries running LOCKSS cooperate to detect and repair preservation failures. LOCKSS will be distributed free; it is open source software. It is designed to run on very cheap hardware and to require almost no technical administration. LOCKSS is funded by the Mellon Foundation, NSF, Stanford University, and Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Significant progress has been made on the various Internet2 middleware activities. This session will provide updates on the release of eduPerson v 1.0, on the policy and technology efforts focused on PKI for higher education including work with the federal government, and on progress made on the Directories of Directories and Shibboleth projects. <http://middleware.internet2.edu/>

The BYTES (Books You Teach Every Semester) Project, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and managed at Yale University Library on behalf of the NorthEast Research Libraries Consortium (NERL), is being completed. The pilot project seeks to answer a series of fundamental, policy-shaping questions related to the potential digitization of books, journals, and other reading materials that support study and teaching of history and literature in the English language. The participating institutions include Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, New York University, Syracuse University, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Yale University. One of the project managers will conduct a briefing on the goals of the project, the data gathering methodologies and analysis framework, the principal findings, and the most salient implications for research institutions and e-book content providers.

During the fall of 2000, with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR retained a professional research firm to conduct an anonymous survey of faculty at institutions of higher education in the United States. More than 4,000 faculty completed and returned the survey, which included questions about a wide range of issues related to electronic resources and information technology. The speaker will summarize the initial findings from this survey and discuss faculty's responses to questions pertaining to the importance of electronic resources and how they are used, the role of the library today and in the future, and the importance of archiving. The speaker will also address some of the ways in which these responses differed based on the academic field and age of the respondent.

Libraries need to take an active role in defining the global structure of collections of digital information and to develop new economic models for the long-term support of these collections. We need to step back from seeing information as a commodity and explore altruistic economic models akin to interlibrary loan to support new modes of scholarly communication. A "circle of gifts" is one such altruistic funding concept to be explored in this session. This cooperative publishing model calls for libraries to sponsor, through their existing serials budgets, the distributed archiving and access of scholarly knowledge and resources in a system of free exchange. The goal is to increase the scholarly and public quality of research through integrative, open standards with global and equitable access. Examples of prototypes will be drawn from the work of Electronic Tools for Ancient Near Eastern Archives (ETANA) and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), while the potential for further research library - scholarly association collaborations will be discussed with participants. For details on the "knowledge exchange" model, see   <http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume3/number6/>.

102 institutions throughout the world have committed to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) by joining the NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations). Virginia Tech began requiring all graduate students to submit ETDs in 1997 and now has over 3000. West Virginia University, University of Texas at Austin, and others also require ETDs. Hear about activities at the NDLTD member institutions and a report from the 4th international ETD conference held at Cal Tech March 22-24. Share your questions, concerns, and comments at this information session.

With support from the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education, U.S. Department of Education, the Association of Research Libraries and Texas A&M University are conducting a large-scale user based assessment effort trying to define and measure library service quality across multiple academic and research libraries. The project, LibQUAL+, is measuring library users' perceptions of their libraries' service quality and identifying gaps between desired, perceived, and minimum-acceptable levels of service. The LibQUAL+ survey instrument is adapted from an instrument called SERVQUAL, which is grounded in the "GAP Theory of Service Quality" and was developed by the marketing research team of A. Parasuraman, V.A. Zeithaml, and L.L. Berry.

New technology and the use of the Internet make it possible for project participants to survey their users with minimal local effort. LibQUAL+ uses a scaleable Web interface and protocol for reaching library users and asking them about their service expectations. Issues of user self-reliance and its relation to service quality are being explored with implications in assessing digital and virtual library services. Forty-five institutions are participating in the spring 2001 phase, and results from the data analysis will help individual libraries identify where service needs improvement in the eyes of their users. They will also be able to compare their service quality with that of peer institutions in an effort to develop an understanding of best practices in the area of managing user perceptions and expectations. One of the goals of the project is for ARL to establish a service quality assessment program, and it is expected that the methodology and protocols used in this study can be extended to other assessment activities. For more information, see <www.arl.org/libqual/> .

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has developed a framework for assigning permanence ratings to our Web resources. The purpose of the ratings is to indicate to users and other libraries whether the location, availability, or content of specific resources are subject to change and to communicate NLM's commitment to archive resources that have been rated "permanently available." The second half of the briefing will introduce a proposal for a new persistent identifier known as the ARK (Archival Resource Key). The ARK design holds that persistence is purely about service and not about syntax, and that a truly persistent name needs to bind together an object, its metadata, and a provider's commitment promise.
For more information see:
Report of the Working Group on Permanence of NLM Electronic Publications (in pdf format) <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/reports/permanence.pdf>

Margaret M. Byrnes, "Defining NLM's Commitment to the Permanence of Electronic Information" <http://www.arl.org/newsltr/212/nlm.html>

Margaret M. Byrnes, "Assigning Permanence Levels to NLM's Electronic Publications" <http://www.rlg.org/events/pres-2000/byrnes.html>