At the CNI spring meeting of 2001, Tom Kalil challenged the attendees to consider what might be done with very large amounts of federal government funding - perhaps as much as a billion dollars a year funded through a public trust -- earmarked to support the creation or acquisition of content to support education, scholarship and the public interest. It was clear that our community in the US has given very little thought to the strategies and priorities that might guide such investments. While the near-term prospects for such large scale funding have certainly diminished with the elimination of the federal surplus, the economic downturn and the new financial demands on our nation after 9/11/2001, the question remains relevant. Also, over the past decade, very large personal fortunes have been amassed that may ultimately be turned in part to such purposes as new sources of funding. In addition, in the US we have seen a number of proposals, most notably the Minnow/Grossman "Digital Promise" initiative, suggesting large scale federal investments in digital content for the public interest.

Last summer, there was an international invitational meeting held in London at the Tate to examine a range of national digitalization initiatives for cultural heritage materials. One clear outcome from the 2001 meeting is that there are a number of large scale governmentally funded national programs taking place outside the United States which can offer valuable insights for US-based efforts, and that activities in the US are taking a rather different trajectory, with much more extensive participation and support from the non- governmental sector. A second international meeting took place in Washington DC in March, followed by an invitational CNI workshop to discuss potential US strategies and issues. This session will present some of the thinking emerging from these meetings.

The University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) exists to provide an institutional venue for the electronic publication and distribution of scholarly content. This presentation will outline the policy issues that led to the creation of SPO, and then describe SPO's organization and methods for building sustainable models and methods that bridge the gap between academic self-publishing and large-scale, aggregated commercial publishing. The presentation will conclude by suggesting several areas for cooperation and collaboration in building alternative venues for scholarly publishing. Among the issues addressed in the talk will be:

• Support for the traditional constructs of journal and monographic publication in an online environment.
• Publishing scholarly work expressly designed for electronic delivery.
• Developing services that are responsive to the needs of both producers and users.
• Fostering a better economic model for campus publishing.
• Supporting local control of intellectual assets.
• Creating highly functional scholarly resources.

The California Digital Library (CDL) has taken a different approach to scholarly communication initiative and these will be described and contrasted with the Michigan Strategy.

Funded under DLI2 as a collaborative research project to explore the full range of issues involved in making spoken word resources available and useful over the web, the National Gallery of the Spoken Word (NGSW) has made substantial progress on a number of fronts. This session will discuss implementation of OAIS and adaptation of METS in designing a large-scale interoperable open-source multimedia digital archive. Strategies for searching audio resources will be updated and tools for linking audio to text and interfaces for effective delivery of aural resources will be demonstrated.

Knowing when and how to get started with digital certificates can be confusing. PKI-Lite has emerged to leverage existing campus practices to make the technology more accessible. This panel clarifies what PKI-Lite is and how Dartmouth College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are using digital certificates and what they are planning to do with them in the future.

This session will provide an overview of the programs funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) on behalf of the education community in the UK. The discussion will focus on how funded activities -- both planned and already underway -- will contribute to transforming the processes of learning, teaching and research by providing solutions to issues of resource discovery, access, delivery, and re-use of digital resources. The cross-searching of distributed resources, integration of digital resources within learning, and institutional environments will be discussed. The session will be illustrated with examples of funded projects active in the area to give an idea of the depth and breadth of development activity underway.

Two new initiatives are advancing the cause of easy access to scientific information through digital libraries. One project analyzes the need for information about natural resources in the Pacific Northwest, while another provides users affiliated with the Naval Research Laboratory with access to scientific journals, databases, and technical reports.

Building on its land-grant mission, the Oregon State University Libraries plans to create a natural resources digital library to inform decision-making and environmental stewardship in the Pacific Northwest. A needs assessment was commissioned to answer two fundamental questions:

• Would better access to existing natural resources information through a digital library help users make informed decisions about natural resources policy and practice?
• Will users be able to understand the accessed information? Interviews with citizens, policy makers, and scientists showed that potential users want to quickly find, retrieve, integrate, and synthesize well-organized and geo-referenced information in a wide variety of formats, especially in three high-priority natural resource thematic areas: watersheds, land and water use, and forestry.

The Ruth H. Hooker Research Library has made significant progress in providing its distributed user community at the Naval Research Laboratory with a single point-of-access to information needed to support scientific research. End users at the Navy's primary corporate research facility currently enjoy continuous access to databases, reference tools, technical reports, and journals via the Web whether in the office, at home or on travel. Locally mounted and remote databases and publications are available to researchers through a Web-based Information System and Gateway known as InfoWeb. A key InfoWeb component is the TORPEDO Ultra digital repository consisting of thousands of agency publications and a growing number of licensed journals. In support of its goal to provide users with a unified approach to retrieving journal content regardless of location, the Library has developed a strategy to link users to journals that reside on publisher Web sites through a TORPEDO Ultra browse or search.

The result of a Mellon Foundation grant for "Librarianship and Teaching with New Media," the Media Cloisters at Vassar College, is a state-of-the-art multimedia center located in the Vassar College Library. In keeping with the Vassar tradition of teaching by the seminar method and nurturing a community of scholars, the Cloisters provides a place where faculty, students, librarians, and instructional technology specialists can come together to work on curricular projects that utilize a wide range of technologies. The Cloisters also provides a setting for discussion of pedagogical issues related to the use of technology in teaching.

One key to the success of the Cloisters, and also one of its challenges, is its use of a model of collaborative management. The Cloisters is run by three co-curators -- an educational technologist, a multimedia consultant, and a librarian -- and a faculty director. In addition, a cadre of students with technical and graphic design expertise help faculty with the technical aspects of developing instructional resources. This session will describe both the vision and mission of the Cloisters and some of the experiences we have had in implementing that vision.