Librarians at Wesleyan and Carnegie Mellon Universities are experimenting with two innovative ways to meet clients¼ needs for reference assistance. One uses staff members available for extended hours online, and the other uses software to mimic reference interviews and provide answers.

Wesleyan University Library, through a grant from the Davis Educational Foundation, is in the first year of a pilot project to test real-time collaborative reference service on the Internet for a group of liberal arts colleges, including Wesleyan, Connecticut, Smith, Wellesley, and Vassar. The two-year project included installation of a local server in the Wesleyan University Library and hiring staff to provide services to more than one institution during extended hours.

Carnegie Mellon University Libraries' statistics indicate that over 75% of the access to its online resources occurs outside of a library facility. A drawback of this kind of remote access is that users do not have traditional reference librarians to guide them to relevant and reliable material. Carnegie Mellon University Libraries is developing software known as the Automated Reference Assistant (ARA), which will attempt to mimic the reference interview online. It will elicit information about the users' research needs and guide them to pertinent material without human intervention.

A new instructional facility opened in January 2001 at the University of Arizona, combining architectural innovations in both information networks and physical spaces. The Integrated Learning Center (ILC) provides an opportunity for implementing experimental instructional technologies such as the Virtual Adaptive Learning Architecture (VALA) Project. VALA provides a personalized learning environment as well as a repository of reusable learning objects. Both the VALA learning network and the physical space of the ILC are designed to expand and enhance traditional classroom faculty/student contact. This innovation combines the expertise of library information specialists, instructional technologists, tutoring and mentoring services, faculty members, and peer student-to- student support.

Just over a year ago, ARL established a Scholars Portal Working Group with the goal of defining and promoting tools and services for the academic community that provide a single point of access on the Web to find high-quality information resources and, to the greatest extent possible, to deliver the information and services directly to the user's desktop. A User Scenario was developed and an environmental scan conducted to determine the availability of software tools and of opportunities for collaboration to pursue the vision of the group. In addition, ARL conducted a survey to determine the state of portal functionality that is currently deployed or being considered by research libraries. This briefing session will bring the audience up to date on ARL's findings and next steps.

Information on the ARL Scholars Portal initiative is available on the ARL web site <http://www.arl.org/access/scholarsportal/>

This briefing will describe the various components and building blocks being produced to create a regional digital library in the Glasgow area and how these fit into the emerging information strategy for Scotland.

The recent inclusion of seven new generic top-level domains in the Internet Domain Name System provided a basis for proving a number of concepts. One of the purposes underlying the establishment of the .museum TLD was to determine the viability of providing narrowly defined target communities with dedicated domains. A second purpose was to explore the potential of a controlled namespace for enhancing the value of the DNS for the Internet user community.

The protypal impetus that .museum might have towards the future creation of similar TLDs in adjacent communities, for example, .library and .archive, will be discussed from strategic, political and infrastructural perspectives. This will include a review of the activity needed to establish .museum and possible modes for extrapolating from it to enable a less strenuous expansion of the heritage management community's named presence on the Internet. A second discussion will address problems inherent in the conceptualization of a mnemonic device such as the DNS in terms of semantic potential.

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.

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 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.

Gathering the resources and people needed to create complex digital libraries often requires intimate collaboration between two or more institutions. This session offers briefings on two such collaborations: one creating a digital library of historical maps in Washington state and another developing a research portal for Civil Rights documents in Alabama.

The Early Washington Maps online collection (http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/xmaps.html) was built jointly by the Washington State University Libraries and the University of Washington Libraries. The core software package used to support this project, CONTENTdm, enables institutions to develop image, sound, and video collections in a collaborative manner. This session will present additional tools employed to build this digital library and some of the challenges faced by project participants.

The Transforming America Project (http://www.transformingamerica.org/) is a subject specific primary source research portal of Civil Rights collections in the state of Alabama. The project provides a one stop search for primary source Civil Rights documentation by creating a virtual repository of distributed archival finding aids and museum collection guides using hypermedia, XML, and Dublin Core-based descriptive metadata. The collaborative effort includes libraries, archives, and museums throughout the state. Participants include Auburn University Libraries, University of South Alabama, Trenholm State Technical College, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, University of Alabama Libraries, Troy State University-Dothan, Rosa Parks Library and Museum, and the Birmingham Public Library.

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.

In the planning stages for the past two years, the Digital Library @ Duke has moved into an initial implementation phase, including the establishment of a core organizational structure and initial programmatic focus. The DL @ Duke is a good example of focused digital library development. The program at Duke is characterized by top-to-bottom vertical integration with the university planning infrastructure. The university's budgetary commitment distinguishes clearly between ongoing support for baseline capabilities versus dependence on outside funding for research and development. Digital library programs focus on web- mediated library services, on the characteristics of the physical infrastructure supporting those services, and on a user-centered support model that breaks down the distinctions between academic computing support provided by central IT resources and capabilities provided by the digital library program. The library also handles the university's course management system and is exploring ways to integrate the online catalog and course reserve systems. The session will provide participants an opportunity to discuss and debate some of the operating assumptions of digital libraries by engaging the Digital Library @ Duke as a point of departure.

The University of Maryland Libraries have begun using two digital media servers to distribute audio and video programming within the Libraries and on campus. In September 2000, the University acquired a MediaHawk Video Server to replace a VHS videotape distribution system. MediaHawk is a high quality interactive video-on-demand system designed to deliver full screen, television-like quality video to a desktop computer. In May 2001, we completed negotiations with Films for the Humanities and Sciences for digital video distribution rights that will ultimately permit us to offer nearly 1,000 titles to the University community in a fully interactive environment. We are also using the IBM VideoCharger media streamer to distribute high fidelity audio programming to students enrolled in a Rock & Roll Music course on campus. VideoCharger will also be used for video serving on campus. Recently, the Libraries entered into a Premier Partner Agreement with Ex Libris (USA) of Chicago to further the development of their DigiTool digital asset management software as a potential vehicle for the integration of digital initiatives of the Libraries.

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.

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

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 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 government¼s response to the terrorist acts of September 11th presents several difficult challenges for the academic community. Information is being removed from web sites and library collections in an effort to enhance our nation¼s security. A presidential directive is encouraging institutions to identify and stop offering sensitive courses. The USA PATRIOT Act broadly expands government surveillance authority and affects standards for both domestic criminal investigations and foreign intelligence surveillance powers. Questions for the academic community include:

• What is the likely impact on open access and the future of networked information?
• What are the implications for colleges and universities, especially as service providers?
• How should the higher education and the library community respond?

This session will review developments following September 11th and invite discussion of campus experiences, concerns, and strategies.

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.

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 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 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.

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, seven institutions (Cornell, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the New York Public Library, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Yale University) have engaged in a project to create digital archives of electronically published journals. The planning phase of this initiative has raised a number of key issues that must be addressed, including: the types of e-journal archives and their interaction, the economic models for sustaining such archives, the collaborative agreements needed with publishers, the forms of access that archives will provide users, and the technical architecture of the archives. This session will summarize the key findings of the Mellon-funded projects and outline the directions that the Foundation is contemplating to address these issues.

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.

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.

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.

Middleware is a layer of software services that manages electronic personal identity, security, access, and information exchange. Internet2, EDUCAUSE, and the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) entered a three-year Cooperative Agreement with the National Science Foundation and the GRIDS Center under the NSF Middleware Initiative. As the Enterprise and Desktop Integration Technologies (EDIT) Consortium, the partners are working towards integrating middleware into campus enterprise environments for the purpose of advancing productivity for educators and researchers. This session will discuss the status of the project to date and future plans of the Initiative.

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 Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The OAI has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the OAI program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of both the type of content and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials.

Under the auspices of CNI and the Digital Library Federation participants in the OAI have been defining and experimenting with an interoperability architecture based on metadata harvesting. The goal is to provide an easy way for data providers to expose their metadata and for service providers to access that metadata and use it as input to value-added services. As the current phase of the project approaches completion, this session will provide an update -- including information about Version 2 of the metadata harvesting protocol.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Open Knowledge Initiative is defining an open architectural specification to be used for the development of educational related software. As a framework for applications development, the project was motivated by the desire to have a modular and extensible development platform for building both traditional and innovative educational applications. The initial specifications of the first layer of the Common Services architecture for OKI is now being shared with not just the core development partners (see http://web.mit.edu/oki/comm/) but also the general public via the OKI website, (http://web.mit.edu/oki/dsgn/specs.html). This session will provide an update on the project's progress and activities.

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.

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Digital Library Federation and Outsell, Inc. are engaged in a multi-institution study that compares the information-seeking behaviors of more than 3,200 students and faculty across academic disciplines in liberal arts colleges and research/doctoral universities. This session will present preliminary findings and highlights of this research into how student and faculty behaviors and preferences are affecting library use and the demand for information resources.

ZING, Z39.50-International: Next Generation, brings together a number of current initiatives by Z39.50 implementors looking at making Z39.50 a more mainstream protocol and lowering implementation barriers, while preserving the intellectual contributions of Z39.50 that have accumulated over 20 years. This session will focus on one of these efforts, the development of Search and Retrieval for the Web (SRW), a proof-of- concept initiative to enable development of value-added search and retrieve applications such as the scholar's portal, that will integrate access to various networked resources. SRW, building on Z39.50 along with web technologies -- XML, SOAP/RPC, WSDL and HTTP -- recognizes the importance of Z39.50 for business-to-business communication, and focuses on getting information to the user.