Join Janet Murray for further discussion of the issues she raised in her opening plenary presentation.

The SURA Video Development Initiative (ViDe) is a partnership among universities in the Southeast to develop and implement highly functional, scalable and standards-based video-on-demand and video conferencing systems for use in the higher education and research environment. Sponsored by the Southeastern Universitites Research Association (SURA), SURA ViDe is directing its efforts towards the selection and implementation of standards-based video systems to ensure a robust, widely available digital video platform, supporting both commodity Internet and Internet2 applications, in the SURA region. This project briefing will present the goals of the initiative, the progress made to date and likely next steps, and a discussion of the role such collaborations might have in enabling the sharing of multimedia resources, the development of distance learning applications, and the promotion of collaborative research.

This briefing provides an overview of EDUCAUSE's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) and its emphasis on adapting new technology to reduce costs, increase access, and enhance quality. It will describe progress to date including efforts to define academic productivity, reengineer instruction, create tools for distributed learning, and stimulate a market for collegiate instructional software.

The briefing will also cover a particular NLII project, the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) project, a cooperative of academic, commercial and government organizations which is designing the Internet architecture for learning. These technical standards will facilitate the growth and viability of learning on the Internet through assuring interoperability of instructional systems and learning content.

Librarians and publishers face a world of possible solutions to the question of how to give researchers access to authoritative content. The next generation of bibliographic reference resources will (1) be multi- disciplinary in scope, (2) index heterogeneous sources of content, and (3) support access to digital as well as non-digital resources. This session reviews the limitations of the current approaches to developing digital collections and suggests that the next generation of digital libraries will integrate holdings information, document delivery, electronic, secondary, and primary documents into a single, thematically unified multi-disciplinary resource, accessible via the web.

The CORC project is a major research effort at OCLC to explore the cooperative development and maintenance of a database of Internet accessible resources. OCLC is also developing technologies to automatically create portal pages which integrate Internet resources with their local collections. These tools will enable each library to specify selection criteria for the creation of the pages so that the pages will meet the unique needs of their patrons. This project will eventually involve the participation of over 100 libraries. Volunteers are being solicited.

The Making of America II (MoA II) is a project that is investigating best practices and community standards for creating and encoding digital objects from archives (e.g., photographs, diaries, correspondence, etc.). As of July 1st, the MoA II entered the production phase with funding provided by the NEH. Since the last CNI meeting, the project has completed the Moa II White Paper, which was commissioned by the Digital Library Federation during the planning phase of this effort.

In addition, the first meeting of the Moa II collaborators was held at New York Public Library in late September, 1998. In this meeting, the participants reviewed digitization management software that was developed to capture Moa II metadata. This metadata, recorded during the image and text conversion workflow, will be stored in a database from which programs will run to automatically create fully encoded Moa II objects. The participants also discussed the first draft of the SGML DTD that will be used as a transfer encoding syntax for Moa II objects. Finally, the participants also discussed the features MoA II testbed tools would need to support, as well as the project evaluation.

This CNI Project Briefing will explore the progress made to date in more detail. The MoA II White Paper and further information on the project can be found at: <http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/moa2/>

The NDLTD project at Virgina Tech is entering its third year of funding by FIPSE. At this time over 1200 ETDs have been submitted by Virginia Tech students, many of whom have attended our ETD training workshops or used our ETD project WEB pages <http://www.ndltd.org/>. The Virginia Tech ETD team has made presentations to numerous institutions and conferences, and several institutions have made visits to Blacksburg. Interest in the ETD project continues to grow with over 40 US and international institutions now having joined the project. Several of these institutions have vigorous pilot projects and are accepting ETDs from their students. Even so, three issues continue to concern students and faculty and to deter prospective NDLTD members. These are plagiarism, relations with publishers, and long term archiving of electronic documents. Accomodations or solutions to these issues are among the next steps for widespread acceptance of ETDs by universities. Discussion will focus on these topics and others of interest to the audience.