The Libraries of the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Emory University have received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to implement a suite of OAI-based metadata harvesting services, search services, and tools designed to facilitate discovery and retrieval of scholarly information. Two distinct metadata search services are being developed utilizing shared infrastructure components and software tools that will be made available under an Open Source Initiative license.

The University of Michigan search service, called OAIster (http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/), is under development by the Digital Library Production Service (http://www.umdl.umich.edu/.) It is intended to be global in scope, providing cross-repository searching of metadata describing publicly available digital objects. The Michigan service is relatively "lightweight" (e.g., without duplication or thesauri) and is being designed to answer the pressing need for opening the "hidden web" information resources of the scholarly community. The University of Illinois has developed a vertical, domain-specific portal designed to search metadata describing manuscript archives and digital cultural heritage information resources (http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/) Metadata describing non-digital resources and resources of restricted availability is included along with metadata describing publicly available digital objects. At Emory University, two grant projects -- AmericaSouth.org and MetaArchive.org -- have been collaboratively conjoined and are being carried forward in cooperation with partner institutions SOLINET and ASERL.

In December 2000, Congress passed legislation establishing the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in the Library of Congress (LC). The legislation calls for LC to lead a national planning effort for the long-term preservation of digital content and to work collaboratively with representatives of other federal, research, library and business organizations. Over the last 15 months, LC has conducted an extensive planning process, intended to identify the concerns of the various stakeholder communities, outline a research program in collaboration with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other concerned agencies, and sketch a conceptual framework within which technical, organizing and legal issues might be addressed. In addition, the Library is holding a series of scenario planning workshops this spring, which are designed to identify possible future scenarios and implementation strategies for the long term preservation of digital content. A plan will be submitted to Congress later this year.

Given the very wide range of content areas affected by this mandate, LC is initially focusing on digital formats in which its collections are strong or where the digital materials, which exist exclusively or primarily in digital form, are aligned with LC¹s traditional mission: Web sites, electronic journals, electronic books, digitally recorded sound, digital television and digital moving images (e.g., "film"). To date, the planning process has proved most instructive. Meetings with representatives from many of the content and entertainment industries, non-profit foundations and professional associations, major research libraries, cultural heritage institutions, and individual scholars have raised important issues and pointed to several areas of shared concern on where cooperative arrangements might be forged.

This session will discuss LC's progress to date.

This session will present the preliminary results of a workshop on Research Issues in Digital Archiving, sponsored by the NSF Digital Government Program, the NSF Information and Intelligent Systems Division, and the Library of Congress. The workshop, held immediately preceding the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting, included 50 participants from government agencies, universities and industry who discussed research issues and developed priorities for research on digital archiving and long-term preservation. This session will present preliminary results and recommendations from the workshop.

Portals to the World is an electronic resource created by Library of Congress subject experts. It contains links to Internet materials that provide authoritative, in-depth information about the nations and areas of the world. These links are arranged first by country or area, and then by a wide range of categories. Staff specialists use current Library of Congress selection criteria to choose useful links, and then enhance these links by providing annotations. The staff also has the option to forward the links to catalogers for inclusion in the Library's OPAC. The project is intended to be of interest to both scholars and the general public and, when completed, will include all nations of the world. This session will describe the design concept, the prototype pages, the selection criteria, the subject categories, as well as the current status and future direction of this project.

The Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University has developed a system for managing and presenting digitized images for classroom use. This image management system is a pilot project, currently used for three Art History classes. The interface is entirely web- based, allowing instructors to select and organize images without locally loaded software. The key feature that supports the use of the system for classroom use involves its "Virtual Slide Trays"; Instructors can search the database of images and place selected images into slide trays they create and name, usually corresponding to each class session. Art History classes rely on a dual projection environment, presenting comparative images in addition to the work of primary interest. The system supports this dual-projection requirement, giving the instructor the ability to select whether each image in the slide tray will be presented on the left or right screen. Students can access the slide trays for exam study and class preparation, with access controlled through the university's course management environment. This session will include an opportunity to provide feedback feedback on the classroom presentation features.

This session presents the most recent developments at UMI Dissertation Publishing, including access, reformatting, usage and digital preservation.