during this session included the implications of the pro- posed term limit extension; guidelines for electronic reserves, distance learning, and multimedia; and emerging technologies that will provide electronic information rightsholders with absolute control over the use of their material.

The fourth and final plenary session was a demon- stration of and discussion about the evolving role of the “Virtual Hospital” World Wide Web site led by its cre-

ators, Michael D’Allessandro, M.D. and Jeffrey R. Galvin, M.D. from the University of Iowa College of Medicine.

Thirty-four continuing education classes covering a wide range of topics were offered during the week, as well as two all-day conference symposia, one on collection development in health science libraries and the other on telemedicine. Over 106 papers were presented as part of section and special interest group programming. In addition, two “Late-Breaking Sessions” were added to the program. “Late-Break- ing Sessions” were an experiment this year to try to assemble programs on “cutting-edge” topics rela- tively late in the conference planning process. “Infor- mation Technology Developments of the Next Five Years and Their Potential Impact on Libraries,” was presented by Clifford Lynch, Director of Library Automation of the University of California’s Office of the President; Brian Wailing, Manager, Digital Library Operations, University of California at San Francisco; and Dalia Kleinmuntz, Webster Library, Evanston Hospital. The other session, “Benchmark-

ing: Collecting and Analyzing Data Effectively” included Holly Shipp Buchanan, Associate Professor and Director of Libraries, Greenblatt Library, Medi- cal College of Georgia; Valerie Florance, Director, Edward G. Miner Library, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry; Sandra I. Martin, Assistant Director, Shiffman Medical Library, Wayne State University; Robin M. Rand, Director, Maine Medical Center Library; and Marion N. Sabella, Director, Parks Library Resource Center, Long Beach Memorial Medical Center in Long Beach, California.

About 635 exhibitors representing 101 vendors dis- played, demonstrated, and discussed their products. In addition, over sixty “Show Me!” print posters and twelve electronic demonstrations were on display in the exhibit hall. Other services in the exhibit hall included the Internet Center placed in the middle of the exhibits, and a “Relaxation Station” which provided neckrubs and other services for weary conference-goers.

Social and entertainment opportunities were als plentiful. The welcome reception and opening of th exhibits was quite festive, and included an exuberar performance by The Cougars, a local drill team an drum corps group. The Friends of the National Librar of Medicine hosted a reception at the Kansas Cit, Museum one evening. The next night, another Kansa City museum, the Arabia Steamship Museum, was th site of a barbecue and jazz party. Many conference goers hopped on the Kansas City Trolley for a guide1 tour of the city, or just used it as transportation to visi the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, Country Club Plaza, or othe exciting destinations!

Conference publicity and communication befon and during the conference were excellent. The Frontie

Express, the daily newspaper for the conference, pro vided conference-goers with daily updates about pro gram changes, services and social opportunities, ant other news. A new edition of this paper was available every day both in print and on the MLA 1996 Web site The MLA 1996 Web site, located at http:/ www.kumc.edu/MLA/MLA96/, provided up-to-date information as it became available. Preliminary infor mation about the next MLA conference, which will bc held in Seattle next year, is already available at http:/ www.kumc.edufMLAfMLA97l.

The various programs offered at this year’s confer ence were relevant and challenging. Conference-goer: returned home tired but fortified with ideas they car use to survive and even thrive on the Information Fron tier.

Stimson is Reference/Instruction Librarian, Healtl Sciences Library, State University of New York a Buffalo, Buffalo, NY.

CANADIAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION~ERIALS

INTEREST GROUP PROGRAM, JUNE 1996

Wayne Jones

The 51st annual conference of the Canadian Library Association was held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, June 5-9,1996, with “Sail Into Our Future” as its theme. The CLA’s Serials Interest Group organized a session called “Wiring the Dory” on the topic of providing access tc and preserving online electronic serials. About forty-

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five people attended to hear two speakers: Nancy Bro- die of the National Library of Canada (NLC), who spoke about NLC’s Electronic Publications Pilot Project, and Rob Cameron of Simon Fraser University (SFU), who spoke about SFU’s Internet Electronic Library Project. Summaries and highlights of their pre- sentations follows.

The National Library’s project ran from June 1994 to July 1995. Its basic purpose was to gain practical experience dealing with e-publications for all areas of the library (acquisitions, cataloging, serials check-in, collection management, and reference). E-publications archived at the NLC include Canadian electronic jour- nals and publications of the NLC itself; excluded are e- mail, discussion lists, listservs, online databases, and any title for which the NLC cannot obtain permission to store on its server.

Some of the findings of the project were:

Canadian electronic serial publishing covers a broad range, including scholarly and popular peri- odicals, newsletters, and zines. Less than half are also published in a printed version. The typical electronic formats are ASCII, HTML, and PDF. Electronic publications are generally acquired via e-mail or FIP, or via “mirroring”. NLC practice is to archive the publication in the format in which it is originally published. Storage and preservation of electronic publica- tions are challenging because the media of storage are subject to deterioration.

Technological obsolescence is also an issue: NLC concentrates on the collection of serials in standard for- mats in order to alleviate this problem.

Though the project has ended at NIX, its activi- ties continue: NLC still collects, catalogs, provides access to, and archives electronic serials (and mono- graphs). The Web site of the NLC’s Electronic Col- lection is at http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/e-coll-e/index- e.htm and a summary of the project’s final report is available at http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/eppp/ereport.htm.

One of the components of the project at Simon Fraser University, the focus of Rob Cameron’s presen- tation, is a directory of computer science journals which was developed and made accessible on the World Wide Web. The directory consists of entries for over 450 journals (electronic and print) dealing with computer science. Each entry contains not only typical bibliographic information about the journal (e.g., title, publisher, ISSN, table of contents of available issues,

etc.) but also hypertext links to other resources on the Internet which might be useful to users of the journal (e.g., WWW, gopher, and/or FTP servers of the pub- lisher, availability from CARL Uncover or CISTI (Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Informa- tion) document delivery services, etc.). Currently, access to the journals and to the information about the journals is offered two ways, by keyword and alphabet- ically by title.

The-main principles behind the directory are:

Authoritativeness and currency of information. Maintenance of links is always necessary. Comprehensiveness within a well-defined focus. Define a subject area, and attempt to be compre- hensive within that subject, erring on the side of including, rather than excluding, serials margin- ally within the subject area. Integrated access to printed and electronic resources. This is important because scholarly research demands all resources, no matter what their format. Efficiency and reliability. Again, link maintenance is essential.

The idea is that this philosophy and method of pro- viding access to computer science serials could serve as a prototype for how catalogs could be developed which take advantage of the hypertext and networking aspects of the Internet. One issue for the future is how directo- ries of this sort fit in with the conventional library cat- alog.

The Web site of the directory is at http:// elib.cs.sfu.ca/cs-journals/. An article about the direc- tory-published also in The Serials Librarian, vol. 29, no. 3/4-is available at http://fas.sfu.ca/pub/cs/techre- ports/l996/CMPT96-Ol.html. And the site used to give the presentation itself is at http://elib.cs.sfu.ca/CLA- talk.html. The presentations were followed by ques- tions to both speakers from those in attendance.

Jones is Leader, Serials Team, National Library of Canada, Ottawa, Ont., Canada.

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FIFTH NORTH CAROLINA SERIALS CONFERENCE: VERIALS AT THE SPEED OF WRITE-C• PING,”

BURLINGTON, NC, APRIL 4-$1996

Frieda B. Rosenberg

Serialists are serious trend-watchers. From public, aca- demic, and special libraries across the state of North Carolina and beyond its borders, they gathered on a beautiful early April day in Burlington for the opening of the two-day Fifth North Carolina Serials Conference on the topic “Serials at the Speed of Write-Coping,” co-sponsored as before by the School of Library and Information Science of North Carolina Central Univer- sity in Durham and EBSCO Information Services (the new name of its Subscription Services). The Comfort Inn served meals, kept a well-stocked snack counter for us, and offered a surprisingly secluded setting next to the bustle of the state’s biggest expressway and the well-known attractions of Burlington’s factory outlet stores.

Dean Benjamin Speller of North Carolina Central University (NCCU) welcomed attendees with a spot- light on the serialist “at the hub of technological change,” managing information that increasingly will not find its way into published books. He underlined the title word “coping,” which conference planners had made a special effort to address by including several sessions on human interaction.

John Shuler, Documents Librarian at Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, gave the keynote address. He used props, striking meta- phors, and Socratic.questions to sketch a future library where, despite technical changes, librarians are facing the same fundamental questions and must defend the same ethical ground. We are already in a “public library century,” where machines have largely destroyed hierarchy. The future will demand a clear vision of, and political commitment to, the goal of community service.

Shuler said that libraries will be expected to deliver vendor and publisher-provided services which they no longer own, while safeguarding “fair use” as a valid concept, upholding the need to preserve the historical record, and forging new tools to deal with new organi- zational issues, new technologies, new community needs. The audience helped Shuler visualize future roles for librarians from the reductive (changing printer paper, transmitting requested documents) to the educa- tive and interpretive (furnishing answers to the ques-

tion “What do I do with this [information] now?“: Throughout his address, Shuler reassured librarian that they would have a vital and positive role in thi future, but they must find it and adapt to it, and mean

while persuade others that this role is essential.

Most small group sessions were given only once, SC this reporter had to miss some. Ameice Bowen, Heat Cataloger at North Carolina A&T University, spoke OI

“Anxiety and the Online Serial Record.” Elain Druesedow, Serials Cataloger at William R. Pet-kin,

Library, Duke University, recounted Duke’s participa tion in the OCLC project, “Building a Catalog of Inter net-Accessible Materials.” She showed records wit1 browser-accessible URLs embedded in the description and natural-language viewing instructions on the hold ings screen. She chose as examples of cataloging treat ment a number of different Internet resources, from ;

familiar cyberserial to electronic archives both at he own and other institutions and sites. Druesedow dis cussed policy-setting, examining the decisions ant solutions that Duke had arrived at in response to prob,

lems such as data storage, URL instability, and tht sheer numbers of available resources; and she provide< addresses to several useful home pages at Duke

OCLC, LC, and other sites.

In the second set of breakout sessions, Gwen Gard. ner, a training and development specialist at the Uni versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, led 2

discussion of change management in libraries, focusing on psychological factors impinging on library employ. ees. She assigned case studies to two- and threesomes to analyze ways to overcome staff resistance to reorga- nization and automation. Marcia Tuttle, Head of Seri- als Department at UNC-Chapel Hill, spoke on “Seriah Principles: Some Things Never Change,” a welcome idea in short supply at this conference! (Why weren’l we surprised when her first topic was change?) This talk was aimed at beginning serialists. Julie Blume Nye, Document Delivery System Project Manager for the Triangle Research Libraries Network, serves four libraries (North Carolina State University, Duke, UNC- Chapel Hill, and North Carolina Central University) with divergent collections and loan and reproduction policies. She spoke on integrating the serials collection into the delivery plans. According to Nye’s report, the TRLN plan of making a document request available at any location and at any time, as well as automating routing and delivery as much as possible, has been far more adaptable to monographs than to serials.

Over lunch, attendees heard Barbara Baker, Associ- ate Dean at Durham Technical Community College,

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