The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides for criminal penalties for circumventing without authorization technological measures for access to a copyrighted work. Yet, the Act also says that fair use rights--legal but non- authorized use--are still in force. Congress recognized the contradiction and directed the Library of Congress to undertake a rule-making to see if certain circumventions should be exempted from the ban. To prepare for a rule- making OITP, under the auspices of the Shared Legal Capability, is conducting a study looking at technological measures and their effects on users, particularly in libraries. We will discuss our findings to date, describe the issues and conflicts, and seek advice and input from the CNI community.

Last January OCLC initiated a research project to explore creating a catalog of digital resources. Since then 150 partner libraries have joined the project. The CORC project is exploring the technology, workflow, and metadata standards necessary to build a high quality database of all types of digital resources. OCLC is also doing a web measurement project. These initiatives will be described in this session.

Instructional technology, built around the Internet and the Web, has opened up new opportunities for higher education learning. One such opportunity for institutions that are heavily invested in research is the potential to better integrate their research data into instruction. This lets researchers become more involved with instruction, while also teaching students how to use scientific and cultural data. It also rescues valuable data sets from decay.

At the University of Arizona (UA), educators are engaged in a program that puts this strategy into practice, the Southwest Project. The Southwest Project has helped the University of Arizona change our educational model from "faculty-centered" to "learner-centered" by marshaling the resources of a faculty steeped in research and harnessing the rich scientific, physical, and cultural data they create to student learning.

This session will

• describe the principles of "learner-centered" instruction
• discuss the challenges of putting large data sets on line, and making them useful in a distributed environment
• demonstrate modules from successful pilot projects in which the enabling technologies are used to drawing undergraduates into the teaching and research experience
• report on the assessment data gathered from the 1998/99 implementation, and
• highlight successful collaborations with internal and external partners.

The Southwest Project's Web site is located at <http://www.library.arizona.edu/swp/>

The Nordunet2 program is intended to encourage projects which make advanced use of the network. Cooperation between Nordic countries is encouraged, and so is cooperation with industry. Four main areas are identified: Distance education and life long learning, Telemedicine, Digital Libraries and Infraservices. The last area will probably focus mainly on QoS, Directory services and security.

Two projects will be described in this briefing. The University of Iowa Libraries has established the Scholarly Digital Recourses Center (SDRC) to foster creation and use of multi-media digitized collections and resources of interest to the University of Iowa community in partnership with faculty. The SDRC serves as a dynamic virtual center of expertise for building digital collections, electronic publishing, and creation of unique research and teaching materials.

Since 1996 the University of Iowa Libraries has been a national leader using QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality) for research and development. The Information Commons, located in the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, is the only library-based facility in the country producing virtual reality anatomical objects with this technology. A presentation on how QTVR has been used will be given by demonstrating several applications of this technology.

Over the past two years, four librarians at the Pullman and Vancouver campuses of Washington State University (WSU) have spearheaded usability testing of the Libraries' WebPac and Web sites. They wanted to make more informed decisions about how to design their WebPac, how to organize their Web sites and what information should be available on their libraries' sites. Since the Libraries had limited staff time and budget to spend on usability testing, the librarians working on this project sorted through various testing methodologies to find ones that were simple, time efficient and would involve little cost. They decided to use a combination of five methods: task-based testing, card sorting, category membership expectation, an online user survey and a short print survey. This session will cover the planning and development of the usability testing projects, an analysis of what worked and what did not and the implementation of test results.