The Language and Literature group began with a brief discussion of the questionnaire responses; these responses presented a predictable inventory of scholarly concerns and complaints (outlined in our summary of the responses). The discussion led to the expression of several general concerns that can serve as a broad context for our thinking about possible digital projects:

Issues of Access and the Digital Divide: the costs and complexity of new technologies can effectively exclude people in both the academy and in society at large; specialists in lagnauge and literature are especially concerned about the implications of this for literacy, broadly defined.

"Legacy paradigms" of scholarship and teaching are widespread, entrenched, beloved, and valuable. We should consider hybrid forms and develop projects in stages, and aim at evolution rather than revolution.

The new media will augment but not supplant face-to-face interactions in the classroom and the conference room.

Individuals at the table then generated a wide-ranging and ambitious list of wishes and hopes for the new digital media, including:

using new media to preserve vanishing heritage languages;

a vision of the 24th century scholar standing on the Holodeck of the Enterprise searching a database of self-publishing scholars with a search engine that displays articles in a hierarchy according to customized criteria of content and review;

the preservation of threatened forms of scholarship, like the monograph, or the creation of new hybrid multimedia forms of scholarship;

an "MLAmazon" for scholars and scholarly materials;

a grassroots action to demand the use of the federal budget surplus to buy all copyrights in the U.S. and give them to the Library of Congress and placing all the materials on the Web.

The group decided to focus discussion on a single project idea with an ambition to create a quick and concrete project proposal: a system of scholarly self-publication supported by scholar controlled review boards to certify and authenticate the publications. But the subsequent discussion quickly revealed the complexities of such a project and the realization that success in such an effort will require concentrated collaboration among the many stake holders, including scholars, librarians, computers scientists, publishers, and bibliographers.

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