In the UK, the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) is a managed environment for accessing a portfolio of quality assured information resources on the Internet, which are available from many sources. These resources include scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images and other kinds of vector and numeric data, as well as moving picture and sound collections. These collections and services are designed to meet the varied needs of more than 500 institutions in the UK's community college and university sectors. Local, regional, and national energy is harnessed to provide end users with a high quality service environment informed by leading-edge technical developments. For more information, please visit  <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/dner_vision.html>

Increasingly scholarly journals are published electronically. What will it take to keep them accessible electronically in perpetuity? Can the property rights of publishers, the access responsibilities of libraries, and the reliability assurances that scholars need be reconciled in agreements to create archives of electronic journals? What institutional and collaborative models will be needed to ensure the preservation of globally published and networked electronic information? Papers in this session examine issues arising from digital preservation initiatives being undertaken in the US and the UK. Don Waters (The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and Dale Flecker (Harvard University) will introduce issues arising from a process that is now underway to plan the development of e-journal repositories and involving seven major libraries including the New York Public Library and the university libraries of Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Pennsylvania, Stanford, and Yale. Neil Beagrie (Joint Information Systems Committee UK) will discuss current and future preservation programmes in the UK and its national initiatives for licensing and archiving of electronic journals.

This back-to-back session provides an opportunity to learn about and compare current initiatives in the UK and the US, discuss future directions, and consider how to address the challenges of digital preservation of electronic publications.

"Biblioteca Universalis" is an outgrowth of one of the initiatives begun by leaders of the G-7 countries in 1994 to develop the Information Society. The project comprises national libraries from 13 nations who have committed to work collaboratively to (1) create a free digital library with coherent content (choosing as its first theme "exchanges between people"), and (2) facilitate access by developing interoperability protocols.

Middle States, in the context of a larger interregional emphasis on student learning, is revising its standards for accreditation to emphasize student learning outcomes in curricula and in assessment. Information literacy is one of several outcomes specified in the new standards, having a central position in discussions about all educational programs. These standards specify "fundamental" elements which demonstrate that institutions have met the standards, and they also suggest "supplemental" evidence that institutions might consider (but which are not required). To implement the standards, a new level of collaboration between faculty and librarians may be necessary, and there are at least nine questions for faculty and librarians to consider. Meanwhile, based on six planning meetings held throughout the region and a survey of chief academic officers, the Commission is preparing several initiatives to support the efforts of each institution to promote campus-wide dialogues on learning outcomes.

The Internet2 Health Science initiative includes clinical practice, medical and related biological research, education and health awareness in the public. To this end, the following areas will be emphasized:

• Facilitate and coordinate the creation and enhancement of health applications whose development and deployment have been hampered or prevented by the traditional Internet technology.
• Facilitate and coordinate the development of general application tools to take advantage of Internet2 advanced network services. These tools are most likely to arise in the process of developing specific applications across a range of application areas, but their ultimate value will be to seed the long-term distributed development of applications to support healthcare and the life sciences.
• Under the auspices of the Internet2 Applications Group, collaborate with other professional associations in the health sciences and Internet community to develop guidelines for safe and effective use of the Internet.
• Leverage and influence Internet2 resources to apply solutions to the medical domain.
• Inform the health science community of these developments through collaborative application demonstrations at the regional, national, and international level.

Do you "own" that CD or eBook? What are your rights to "fair use" or to share that item under the doctrine of "first sale"? Can you interlibrary loan licensed materials? While it is clear that you don't own the property rights known as "copyright" for electronic resources that you do not author, it is increasingly the case that the transaction is deemed a "license" and not a "sale"; therefore, what you are "buying" is a license to use the electronic resource according to the license terms. The consequences for libraries and educational institutions of this apparent distinction is enormous. IT professionals who negotiate site licenses and librarians responsible for acquisitions of electronic resources are keenly aware of this shifting paradigm and the business model being advanced by the publisher and vendor community. Users who click "I Accept" or "I Agree" to "shrinkwrap" or "clickthrough" license agreements are less aware - and seemingly less concerned - of the legal implications of their transaction.

The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) is a proposed model state law that affirms this new business model and creates a new legal framework for e-commerce and transactions in computer information - including software, electronic books and journals, and networked databases. Is this the right business model for nonprofit libraries and educational institutions? Does information really need to be "licensed"? What does UCITA or existing copyright and contract law have to say about the differences between licensing and buying information? What are policy implications for colleges and universities? This panel will describe the law with respect to acquisition of networked information, emerging business models, and other policy issues.

Networked information retrieval via Z39.50 offers strategic opportunities for improved access to information. Numerous initiatives base their Virtual Catalogs and Virtual Libraries on Z39.50. Interoperability problems continue to constrain effective cross-catalog searching. This briefing session discusses recent efforts within the international and national Z39.50 communities to respond to interoperability challenges through the development of various Z39.50 profiles. The Bath Profile provides international Z39.50 specifications for library applications and resource discovery. A NISO standards effort will result in a companion national Z39.50 profile. In addition, the session reports on a research and demonstration project funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services to establish a Z39.50 interoperability testbed. Developing a rigorous interoperability assessment methodology and associated metrics will allow vendors and consumers alike to demonstrate and assess Z39.50 interoperability. The goal of this project is to improve Z39.50 interoperability for library applications.

In December 1998, the University of Maryland (UM)'s College of Arts and Humanities, Libraries, and Office of Information Technology were awarded a $410,000 matching grant from the United States National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to develop MITH (the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) in order to foster faculty development and coordination of advanced technological resources and humanities applications of technology beyond early adopters into the university mainstream and out to the wider educational community. This briefing will begin with Charles Lowry (Dean of the Libraries) who will discuss the Libraries' role in the MITH partnership; Martha Nell Smith (MITH's Director) will focus on shaping MITH in the first two years, specifically on the diversity of fellows' projects and MITH's fostering the unique projects of the individual fellows; and Katie King (MITH Fellow Spring 2000, Associate Professor of Women's Studies, UM) will discuss her experiences and project as a resident fellow.

MITH provides an umbrella organization for the conception, production, maintenance, and enhancement of electronic resources indispensable for realizing UM's twenty-first century teaching, research, and outreach missions. As a laboratory for the humanities, MITH offers a center for sharing information, tools (hardware and software), and opportunities for synergistic development, creating a dynamic field for diffusion of innovation in humanities technology available to the world-wide community as ideas and projects of individual scholars influence one another in the production of new knowledge. The goals, then, of MITH are threefold: (1) to generate and foster the development of innovative projects that respond to the traditional interests of the humanities while nurturing emerging modes of scholarship and learning; (2) to guarantee aggressive outreach of these new technological approaches not only to the faculty members and students of UM, but also to the state educational community in grades K-16; and (3) in support of goals one and two, to provide advanced technological resources for the creation, deployment, and dissemination of technology-based scholarship and instruction.