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.

The Association of College and Research Libraries has a task force working on information literacy competency standards. A draft has been completed and is being shared with as many organizations in higher education as possible to gather reactions and acceptance. This Project Briefing will summarize the current draft of the information literacy competency standards by explaining them, providing background related to their development and project future use in higher education. The briefing will also serve to obtain reactions from the membership of CNI.

CNI is considering the feasibility of developing a distance education professional development program on assessment. The professional development program would build on the work of CNI's Assessing the Academic Networked Environment project, which included the publication of a manual, a set of institutional projects, and a preconference at a recent ACRL meeting. Increasingly, libraries and computer centers are being asked to justify the costs of developing the network infrastructure, providing computer equipment and facilities, and expanding access to networked information resources. This session will begin with an introduction to the proposed project and then solicit opinions from CNI attendees on specific topics such as their perception of the types of assessment needed on their campus, the usefulness of a professional development program on assessment for their staff, and the benefits and concerns about offering a program in a distance education mode.

The recent IFLA/UNESCO report on its Survey on Digitization & Preservation,  noted "the complete lack of consistency" among survey respondents in how they prepared for and undertook digitization of heritage materials. What are the strategies of some of the next generation of guides to good practice that can contribute to a greater degree of interoperability between digital cultural heritage resources? Robin Dale will talk about Moving Theory into Practice: Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives,  by Anne Kenney and Oya Rieger, soon to be published by RLG. LeeEllen Friedland will present the outline and strategy of the recently funded NINCH project, a "Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials."

BioOne is the result of an innovative collaboration between scientific societies, academe, and the commercial sector and will bring to the Web a uniquely valuable aggregation of the full-texts of high-impact bioscience research journals. It is being developed and offered as a non-profit venture through the combined efforts of: SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium, the University of Kansas, and Allen Press. Included in BioOne will be self-published titles previously available only in printed form by small, specialized scientific societies. The titles will be fully encoded using a standards- based SGML DTD for searching and archival purposes and the database will offer cross-journal searches and inter- journal linking from references. HTML and PDF formats will be provided for convenient common browser viewing and printing.

The collaboration among the public and private organizations creating and developing BioOne is a new model for scientific societies, universities, libraries, and publishers, and represents a new approach to service, design, features, cost, and terms of use for publishers, subscribers and end-users.

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.

One of the great promises of electronic journals is the ability to link from a citation (in a citation database, in the references of another article, etc.) directly to the article itself, allowing the user immediate access to cited material. However, there are a number of difficulties involved in creating a robust system of links in an environment where articles are served from a large number of systems operated by independent organizations. In a series of meetings over the past year various architectural models for citation linking have been explored, and a general model articulated. One of the unsolved problems in the model is how to ensure the user finds the most appropriate copy or copies of an article when it is available from more than one source. In this session we will present for discussion both a general linking model and some alternatives for approaching the "appropriate copy" problem.

The full text journal marketplace is complex, confusing, and changing daily. In this presentation, we will describe some common models for full text delivery, and address the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. We will explore the attributes of distributed vs. aggregated full text vendors, examine the impact of prepackaged vs. customized groupings of content, and look at the way that static vs. live linking affects administration of full text systems. Finally, we will explore trends for future full text delivery.

With these models as a common basis for discussion, we'll provide an overview of the development of Ovid's OpenLinks Toolkit. The OpenLinks Toolkit provides Ovid sites with the tools to define live links from Ovid bibliographic databases to external full text targets using metadata from the citations. We will discuss this project both in terms of technical and marketplace requirements and challenges, and will also place it in context of available and projected full text delivery models.

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.

The presentation describes an extensible model for implementing a user-centered, customizable interface to a library's collection of information resources. This model, called MyLibrary, integrates principles of librarianship (collection, organization, dissemination, and evaluation) with globally networked computing resources creating a dynamic, customer-driven front-end to any library's set of materials. The model supports a framework for libraries to provide enhanced access to local and remote sets of data, information, and knowledge. At the same time, the model does not overwhelm its users with too much information because the users control exactly how much information is displayed to them at any given time. The model is active and not passive; direct human interaction, computer mediated guidance and communication technologies, as well as current awareness services all play indispensable roles in this system.

An understanding of copyright law is becoming increasingly important to academic administrators, librarians, and faculty, yet these groups don't always recognize their need. This session will look at initiatives at two institutions focused on copyright education for faculty. We'll examine needs analysis ("why do it?"), target audiences, resources, and specific strategies we've found that have worked well for us in developing and marketing educational programs.

This panel will discuss The Digital Dilemma,  a newly-released report of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. The Digital Dilemma  discusses the complex labyrinth of technology, law, economics, social science, and public policy that shapes digital intellectual property, with an emphasis on copyright. Acknowledging and describing profound differences in outlook among stakeholders, it illuminates the major policy issues relating to intellectual property in the networked environment, describes the principal differences in opinion on those issues, distinguishes among the more and less tractable issues, and offers recommendations. Specific issues examined include the implications of digital intellectual property for fair use, private use, public access and archiving, technical protection mechanisms, and business models.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open standards activity that supports the development of a cross disciplinary, international standard for resource description on the Web. This session will describe recent developments from the 7th International Dublin Core Workshop, summarize the Dublin Core workplan for the year 2000, and discuss the relationship of the Dublin Core to other metadata initiatives.

Electronic books (e-books) have become a hot topic of discussion during the last year. There are a number of different companies introducing e-book products and systems. However, without open industry-wide standards, e-books may not become the huge success they deserve to be. This project briefing is about the progress we have made over the last year on e-book standards, including the content standards OEB and PDF, the rights language standard DPRL, and the copyright and distribution standard EBX. The session will describe how these standards apply both to the sale of e-books from commercial entities as well as lending of books by libraries.

The National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) is an EDUCAUSE project to create new collegiate learning environments that harness the power of information technology to improve the quality of teaching and learning, contain or reduce costs, and provide greater access to higher education. This briefing will provide an update on current initiatives and will also describe the transition of the Instructional Management Systems Project (IMS) from an NLII initiative to an independent organization.

SOLINET has been a proving ground for various digital library projects. In our current strategic plan, we outline goals for "making the leap" from isolated projects, funded through grant money, to providing a range of ongoing services. These services, focused on training, consulting, and provision of tools and centralized resources, aim to enable libraries to integrate electronic and traditional materials in a true hybrid fashion that will be seamless to the user. The presentation will present a matrix of training modules, consulting areas, and support tools being developed for the construction and maintenance of digital libraries.

Two years into its effort, Internet2 has recently developed a roadmap of what has been done and what work lies ahead in the development of the next-generation of network fabrics and applications. Areas include provision of advanced network services (e.g. Abilene), development of new networking technologies (e.g. QoS and multicast), fostering a national higher-ed middleware infrastructure (e.g. security and directories), promotion of advanced applications (eg HDTV over IP, H.323, teleimmersion) and raising awareness at local, national and international levels. This session will discuss progress and challenges as this "ensemble of innovation" moves along.

There is growing awareness of the need for a second layer of national infrastructure for higher education and research, focused on identifiers, authentication, directories, and authorization. A number of efforts in this area are beginning to produce the building blocks of this middleware infrastructure. This session will review recent developments and next steps in the construction of an information and trust fabric within our community.

In December 1999 CNI convened a workshop to examine the criteria that might be needed in order to ensure that "archival" electronic scholarly journals can actually become part of our society's long-term intellectual record. This session will report on the outcomes of this workshop and current thinking on archivability criteria for electronic journals.

The increasing use of EPrint repositories for the dissemination of scholarly information promises to radically change the way that researchers share information. The foremost example is the LANL repository run by Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is viewed by physicists as the primary source for latest results. Federation of these individual repositories will provide the foundation for seamless access to scholarly information across a variety of disciplines. This briefing session will present the results of a workshop held in October from which agreement on federation mechanisms was reached among some of the leaders in the EPrint field. The session will also present important technical and policy issues for institutions wishing to create and manage an EPrint repository and discuss funding opportunities for those institutions.

Standards Committee AT of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has been charged to develop a standard that will support circulation activities among independent library systems. Circulation activities include patron and item inquiry, and update transactions such as hold/reserve, check-out, renew, and check-in. The standard is designed to support direct consortial borrowing, self-service circulation, access to electronic resources, and will provide an interface between circulation and interlibrary loan systems.

The Committee has developed a draft document that describes the principles and guidelines to be used in the development of the standard. This presentation will provide an overview of the principles and guidelines and seek comments and responses from participants.

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.

In October, 1999 Arizona State University hosted the first interdisciplinary national conference on preservation and access for electronic records produced by colleges and universities. University registrars, attorneys, policy developers and academic administrators met with archivists, librarians, technology professionals and records managers to share and compare perspectives on what should be saved and how it should be saved. Electronic mail, electronic courseware, enterprise-level information system design, distributed computing and preservation of web based records were discussed in the contexts of selection, preservation, accessibility and privacy for students and staff. The conference generated national press coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education  and at office.com. A brief overview of the conference issues will be followed by substantial discussion of how to expand this dialogue, establish best practices and communicate them to university administrators.

This briefing will report on the development and usage of a digital library with over 100,000 titles available.

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 Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act or UCITA, a proposed "uniform law," will be considered by many state legislatures in the months ahead. The goal of UCITA is to harmonize the law regarding computer information transactions. UCITA is very broad in scope and is applicable to everything from copyrighted expression to patents to online databases. Because colleges, universities, libraries, and businesses rely upon computer technologies, UCITA will, if passed in a state, affect every facet of operations from payroll processing to terms and conditions for licensing of online databases. This highly controversial proposal has been significantly critiqued and/or opposed by many in the commercial and not-for-profit sectors including insurance companies, consumer groups, the Association of Computing Machinery, the Federal Trade Commission, the library community, 25 attorney generals, and more. Supporters of UCITA include large software companies such as Microsoft and associations such as the Association of American Publishers. A brief review of key concerns with UCITA will be provided followed by a discussion of the implications of the proposed law for the library and education communities.

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.

In their book, Unleashing the Killer App,  Downes and Mui discuss the "Law of the Diminishing Firm" as the expression of the work of economist Ronald Coase in the Internet era. This session will explore these ideas in the context of higher education and connect them to the growing focus on "virtual universities."