The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative 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 Open Archives program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials.

During the past year, participants in the OAI have been defining and experimenting with an interoperability architecture based on metadata harvesting. The goal of this architecture 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. This briefing will provide a brief overview of that interoperability architecture, an update on the status of implementations, and plans for the future.

Come and learn about the plans for and progress on the Internet2 Shibboleth Project The project team, working closely with IBM, is defining an architecture for a standards based web access control infrastructure that will span institutional boundaries. Information will be provided on project goals and timelines, the architectural model that Shibboleth is using, issues for campuses, the relationship to portals, the relationship to commercial products, and suggestions on how sites can begin to prepare for Shibboleth. <http://middleware.internet2.edu/shibboleth/>

Since last year's Spring Task Force meeting, the Internet2 community has launched several new programs. This presentation will introduce CNI attendees to the End-to-End Performance Initiative  (www.internet2.edu/e2e/), which is addressing the gap between the potential and reality of delivering advanced networking to faculty desktops; the Arts & Humanities Initiative  (http://apps.internet2.edu/html/arts.html), which is facilitating awareness and use of Internet2 networks in new and very interesting domains; the Internet2 Commons, which is promoting development and use of collaboration technologies; and Internet2's extended outreach activities, which are expanding access to the Abilene network beyond the core group of research universities to include K-20 schools, libraries, and museums  (http://www.ucaid.edu/abilene/html/faq-sponsored.html). Also included are updates on other efforts, including providing live and archived C-SPAN content across Internet2 networks  (http://cspan.icair.org/), the initiation of new content-based projects, and recent discussions by those interested in exploiting Internet2 capabilities for teaching and learning.

Since the end of the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU), NINCH has organized, with its member organizations, "copyright & fair use" town meetings around the nation. These events inform mixed audiences (faculty, curators, librarians, archivists, students, artists, administrators and others) on the basics of copyright law and its implementation, assist with practical solutions to current problems, and explore new strategies in using and managing intellectual property. Complementing these continuing town meetings, NINCH is now preparing a conference to create an "Action Agenda" of non-legislative issues where the community can achieve practical results. This panel will report on the highlights of two series of town meetings, outline plans for the Action Agenda conferences and solicit input on the agenda for the conferences. For more information, see http://www.ninch.org

Several years ago the University of Arizona began addressing the myriad issues affecting higher education. Issues such as moving from being "faculty centered" to "learner centered," implementing educational technologies into a new general education curriculum, greatly expanding online instructional modules and online courses, and developing productivity tools, strategies for spreading innovation, and "on-ramps" for faculty new to using technology were among the most important. One program instituted in 1997 was the New Learning Environments/Instructional Computing Grants Program, which has been funded yearly at $500,000 or more. The New Learning Environments Grants support innovative uses of technology in teaching and new priorities are announced each fall. The briefing will review the program's mechanics, successes, and impact on transforming instruction and faculty participation in innovative teaching and learning at the University of Arizona.

This session will provide a brief update on the field testing and development of a set of statistics and measures to describe electronic information services and resources for ARL libraries. The session will concentrate, primarily, on the work done to date in developing a model and possible indicators to link ARL library activities to larger institutional outcomes. The model and possible indicators will be presented. Attendees will have an opportunity to discuss and assess the usefulness of the model and the possible indicators. Members of the study team are especially interested in potential indicators of institutional outcomes used in other academic settings. Next steps for project activities will also be presented.

The New Books Project of the Library of Congress will add functionality for both readers and publishers to the Cataloging In Publication (CIP) program. Publishers will be able to submit additional elements to CIP, such as the image of the book jacket, author information, and book jacket blurb. LC will automatically create a New Books record from the information provided and post it on the New Books website along with a link to the catalog record and a link to enable readers to request a copy of the book at their local library. Simultaneously, the publisher would receive CIP data or a Library of Congress control number.

ONIX International is a new standard for describing books and other publications under development by EDItEUR, Book Industry Communication and the Book Industry Study Group. In addition to bibliographic and trade information, ONIX also contains elements for promotional and evaluative information, such as book jacket blurbs, author biographies, reviews, and graphics. Though originally intended as a mechanism for distributing electronic information about books from publishers to booksellers, ONIX has potential uses for libraries as well, such as supplying data for provisional (acquisitions level) records, enriching catalog records, and feeding into the CIP stream. ONIX for serials is currently under development.

The University of Michigan Library has been developing production-quality digital library access systems for a number of years, focusing primarily on structured data and associated image resources. With introduction of its Digital Library eXtension Service, Michigan has intensified its development efforts and given increased attention to generalization and extensibility. Through DLXS, Michigan distributes and supports an inexpensive commercial search engine. It also offers at no cost through Open Source licensing several "class" based suites of middleware. Each provides a high level of functionality for image-based and text-based digital library collections. John Price Wilkin will provide an overview of DLXS offerings and functionality, along with a discussion of future directions for DLXS.