This session explores whether there is a need for organized collaboration among institutional and disciplinary Open Archives projects. This would aim to complement, support, and leverage the efforts of the Open Archives Initiative by encouraging more institutions to join the effort.

The Core Integration track of the NSF National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program is developing the key integrating, organizational, and management infrastructure for the national digital library for SMET education. In the first year of the program six pilot projects have been collaborating on this effort. This session will feature a presentation and discussion of various components of this work.

This session will highlight lessons learned from implementations of Blackboard 4 at Princeton and Blackboard 5 at Georgetown. Software features, technical limitations, challenges, and future enhancements will be discussed. Requirements for learning management systems of the future will be reviewed. We will also examine a host of non-technical issues that arise out of running a course management system, such as: who owns courses, when does a course start, when does it end, and even, what is a course?

In July 1999, the not-for-profit Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) offered educational institutional subscriptions to a digital library of art documentation compiled from member museums as a means of supporting the ongoing construction of a digital cultural resource. Now less than two years later, over 900,000 students at colleges and universities in North America have access to the growing AMICO Library; all UK Higher Education institutions also have the opportunity to acquire access through a contract with the JISC.

Collaboration has also been beneficial for AMICO Members. To help in the creation and distribution of The AMICO Library, we negotiated worldwide distribution rights with the Artist Rights Society, have put in place a collaboration with Antenna Audio, and are developing agreements for several new distribution channels to reach public libraries, K-12 schools and small colleges.

How did AMICO Members create a significant digital resource without major outside funding when numerous dot.coms with huge capitalization have failed to produce products at all? Is the AMICO model of a collaboratively created and user-supported subscription resource viable? Under what kinds of circumstances might it work elsewhere? What are the major challenges to long-term sustainability as seen by AMICO today?

The Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS) provides professional reference service to researchers any time, anywhere, through an international, digital network of libraries and related institutions. CDRS uses new technologies to provide the best answers in the best context, by taking advantage not only of the millions of Internet resources, but also of the many more millions of resources that are not online and that are held by libraries. CDRS supports libraries by providing them additional choices for the services they offer their end users. Libraries can assist their users by connecting to the CDRS to send questions that are best answered by the expert staff and collections of CDRS member institutions from around the world. Local, regional, national, and global: the library tradition of value-added service is the CDRS hallmark.

CDRS was launched by the Library of Congress in June 2000, and now includes more than 70 libraries world wide. All types of libraries - academic, public, special and national - are currently members. By networking libraries to obtain information and reference services on behalf of library users (e.g., teachers, students, life-long learners, researchers), CDRS combines the power of local collections and staff strengths with the diversity and availability of libraries and librarians everywhere, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Through CDRS there is always a librarian available to provide to users the experience of trained professionals in providing access to collections and resources both analog and digital. For further information see: <http://www.loc.gov/rr/digiref/>

PubMed Central (PMC) provides free full-text articles of life sciences research and supporting research data. This presentation will review how PMC has developed in the year since it went live, and the approach PMC is taking to long term archiving of journal literature. For more information see: <http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/>

This session will offer an introduction to the Digital South Asia Library (DSAL), a project sponsored by the Center for Research Libraries, the University of Chicago and Columbia University. DSAL is an international effort to bring rare and important resources to the international community of South Asian scholars by exploiting Internet technologies. This talk will focus on some of the issues that have occurred within the arenas of resource selection, digitization and delivery as well as discussing the use of standards, both stable and emerging, to facilitate access for a globally diverse group. DSAL is used, in this case, as a microcosm for investigating many of the issues that arise when creating a digital library.

Consistent with CNI's program theme of "Building Technology, Standards and Infrastructure," the University of Arizona is applying metadata protocols and standards to its networked information environment. Two members of the U of A's Office of Distributed Learning will discuss how they are creating Web accessible resources of instructional material suitable for a variety of grade levels. The metadata initiatives that have been consulted include the Dublin Core set, CIMI, recommendations from the Digital Imaging Group (DIG), and standards for the creation of education-oriented resources from Ariadne, IMS, and IEEE. The initiative includes digital objects created by the library, a highly recognized instructional module in the College of Science, and efforts in the College of Agriculture to manage a disparate array of instructional and research objects. The presenters will address the levels of institutional commitment needed to sustain the initiative, how the Dublin Core and IMS recommendations are being adopted to create the basic metadata structure for campus learning object repositories, and participation in national/international projects.