The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has launched two interrelated and ambitious institutional programs that have the potential to transform higher education on a number of dimensions. The Open Courseware Initiative (OCW) seeks to make MIT course materials available world-wide, without charge, via the Internet. The Dspace Initiative is a project to build a multidisciplinary, durable digital repository that will persistently store and disseminate faculty educational and research material. These are transformative efforts from many perspectives. They speak to the way that the institution and its faculty think about their teaching and research materials, about the way this relates to publication and intellectual property, the relationship between the institution and the world (including developing nations), and what characterizes the unique value of a particular educational institution. This session will enable attendees to follow up with questions and discussion following the plenary presentation.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC) a cost and usage evaluation grant aimed at gaining a better understanding of how electronic resources affect scholarly communication. In particular, we are interested in how electronic resources are affecting academic presses, administrators, information technology personnel, librarians, faculty, and students. In order to address these questions EPIC is conducting both qualitative and quantitative research including one-on-one interviews, focus groups, web-log analysis, and surveys of the involved parties. This session will discuss the overall goals of this evaluation project, the research methodologies used, and findings to date from librarians, faculty and students.

The Internet was built on Open Source software. Recently, there has been renewed interest within the humanities in using open source methods to build tools across communities: collaborative instruments for collaborative work will demonstrate. This session will review the issues involved in developing open source software, and two examples of current work in this area: The Historians' Toolkit, under development at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Virtual Lightbox, an image-based whiteboard for the web, designed to bridge the gap between image-based tools for the desktop and image-based applications for networked environments. The discussion will include issues related to the development and implementation of standards and the kinds of training and support campuses need to provide to support these tools.

The transitory nature of web content is a fact of digital life that affects everyone. How can you find documents posted by publishers who are now defunct? How can you protect archived publications from hazards such as fires, floods, or human error? How can you ensure interested (and authorized) readers will find your published materials? Ensuring continuous access to online scientific journals and other web documents is the focus of a unique collaboration between Sun Microsystems Laboratories' David Rosenthal and Stanford University Library's Vicky Reich. LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) provides a strategy for long-term preservation by systematically caching content in a self- correcting P2P network. This project, midway through the beta testing of the LOCKSS software, enables libraries to maintain high integrity persistent caches of electronic journal content to which they have subscribed. The briefing session will concentrate on lessons learned from the beta test to date and outline steps to take the software to production.

The New York Public Library Research Libraries are currently engaged in a major initiative to digitize 600,000 graphic and pictorial items from their collections. The scope and depth of the project has required a substantial investment in selection processes, user interface development and iterative development. This session will review some of the history and major policy issues facing the program.

The Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS) provides professional reference service to researchers any time and anywhere, through an international, digital network of libraries and related institutions. Now with over 250 members, CDRS is launching the next generation of its co-branded (with OCLC) peer-to-peer service with added features that will make it easier for a library to escalate an information need from one network to another seamlessly. The presentation will include a live demo and feature the many new tools designed to help librarians answer patrons' questions more efficiently and effectively.

This session will provide an update on IMLS, addressing the following topics:

• The proposed new IMLS program on librarian recruitment and education
• The IMLS Framework of Guidance on Building Good Digital Collections
• New funding initiatives within the National Leadership Grant series
• Trends in the current National Leadership Grant applications
• The third annual Web Wise Conference
• The Technology & Digitization Survey Report (due to be published in April)

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) has developed services around the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) to support the community activities of more than 130 members in sharing multilingual, multimedia electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). This involved several years of discussion leading to ETD-MS, a metadata standard built upon the Dublin Core, with crosswalks with MARC. Virginia Tech hosts a union metadata catalog that involves ETD-MS from contributing universities around the world. VTLS supports searching and browsing using Virtua, while Virginia Tech also provides services using experimental systems such as MARIAN and the component digital library scheme ODL (Open Digital Library). This session will provide an overview of these efforts and explore how universities can participate, and will consider broader questions about the Open Archives Initiative and how it can support community sharing efforts.