Eugene, Oregon
May 13-15, 1998
The convergence of computing, telecommunications, and digital information is having a profound effect on our understanding of how we transform information into knowledge and, as a consequence, on our understanding of the way that research institutions encourage and support learning and scholarship. The 132nd Membership Meeting of the Association of Research Libraries examined this new intersection of technology and scholarship, particularly in light of efforts to expand the capacity and functionality of networks serving the U.S. and Canada. The program sought to achieve four goals:
- To broaden understanding of national and international network development strategies;
- To identify new approaches to the delivery of instructional learning programs through use of the network;
- To identify the needs of the research community for expanded network capacity and functionality; and
- To identify the current and future roles and involvement of the research library community in networking policy and program development.
Program Session I opened with remarks from Douglas E. Van Houweling, President of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID). UCAID is the nonprofit group formed to work on a fast track with universities, the U.S. Government, and industry to establish Internet2, a network with the capacity to support new applications, such as high speed, data-intensive computations, and interactive video for conferences and distance learning. Mr. Van Houweling was followed by Mark Luker, Vice-President of Educom, who described government strategies to develop the Next Generation Internet (NGI), a U.S. Federal Government initiative, and how these relate and compare to networking development strategies in other nations.
An equally impressive panel was assembled in Program Session II to speak about expectations of the future network in supporting instruction and learning programs. Represented on this panel were experts from university and corporate distance education programs as well as a representative from Educom's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative. The potential of the future network has captured the imagination of many and has stimulated projects to demonstrate new ways to conduct research, manipulate data, and to communicate the results. A Federal Relations luncheon Program, sponsored by the Information Policies Committee, then addressed copyright legislation and related initiatives. This was followed by Program Session III, where four highly respected researchers speculated on how the future of research in their disciplines could be affected by the availability of a more robust network.
Concluding the program segments on Thursday was Program Session IV, which focused on the roles of research library leadership in this institutional transformation. Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, led the audience in a discussion of research library applications on the future network and about the research libraries' role in network policy development.
On Friday morning, Program Session V examined the strategies recommended for reform of the overall system of scholarly communication in order to better manage intellectual property. Two participants from a recent Pew Higher Education Roundtable on the topic presented their views of what will help the academic community to embrace the strategies that were recommended in To Publish and Perish, the report of the Roundtable discussion.