Metadata harvesting. Funding was secured from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a planning process to identify the technical and organizational issues involved the development of agreements and protocols to support harvesting of metadata from digital library collections for use in new digital library collections (for further details about the initiative see the report for April 2000). An initial meeting was held on 1 May to review technical challenges and strategies and a further meeting is scheduled for 23 May to address organizational issues. A draft report on the technical meeting is now available in word and in pdf formats for review and comment. consolidated report presenting the results of both meetings will be made available shortly from the DLF web pages for review and comment.

Reference linking. "End users in search of information want to go directly from a citation in electronic form to the cited journal or journal article in electronic form. The citation may appear in any number of places, including an online catalog, an online index, or among the references in an online text. In the simplest case, the user may achieve a link by clicking on the citation and connecting to a document located on a web page identified by a URL. Increasingly, however, the simplest case does not apply. The identifier embedded in the citation may be old and out of date. The cited object may be behind a firewall or available only through an online service which uses purely internal identifiers. The identifier may be an indirect reference, such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which requires access to a resolver service. To further add to the complexity, a number of copies and/or versions of the cited object may exist, forcing the user to discover which ones he or she is authorized to use".

During the past year, the DLF has supported a number of investigations into the architectural and other issues surrounding this so-called "appropriate copy problem", for example in a workshop series sponsored jointly with NISO and other bodies. Recently, an enquiry to CrossRef seeking jointly to explore some of these issues resulted in a conference call held on 16 May with representatives of Cross Ref, NISO, the DLF, and a number of other publishing and library organizations. A series of meetings jointly sponsored by NISO, the DLF, and CrossRef have been proposed to document service requirements, review technical options, and identify prospective testbed activities. For information about reference linking activities already conducted by the DLF with NISO see http://www.diglib.org/architectures.htm.

The Academic Image Cooperative (AIC). The AIC has reached a critical phase in its development. After nearly a year's work it has proved its potential as a model for shared cataloguing of art historical image resources and for the development of a shared repository of copyright cleared digital image surrogates that may be used in teaching. It has identified:

• a demand for the service that will likely maintain and develop it on a self-sustaining financial basis;
• significant opportunities for developing its collections; and
• very real possibilities for attracting the inward investment it will need to move beyond a prototype phase.

In order to realize its substantial potential, the AIC needs to transform itself from the loose and informal confederation that has been appropriate to its work as a research and development project. It must become instead an organizational entity capable of delivering content and other services on a financially self-sustaining basis.

In support of this development, a planning meeting, sponsored by the DLF and hosted by the New York Public Library reviewed the AIC's progress to date and defined strategies for its further development. The meeting produced a detailed "Collection Strategy and Development Framework" which also identifies immediate next steps for the AIC.

Building on this progress, the DLF will be operating along two lines over the coming months with respect to the AIC. First, it will be developing a business plan to guide the AIC in developing the new and independent organizational and financial structures it requires. The plan will also provide essential information to institutions that may be interested in some further involvement with the evolving service. Second, the DLF will be helping to complete work on the prototype, notably by seeking public-domain images to complete the "core" collection defined as the image set appropriate to teaching the art history survey course.

Licensing digital materials. The LIBLICENSE web site (A Resource for Librarians) was funded in phases by CLIR and DLF and has not yet been formally announced to the DLF membership. It offers a primer on licensing electronic information resources for libraries, including vocabulary, definitions, bibliographies, links to other relevant sites, a discussion list and much more. The site also includes the LIBLICENSE software. Operating with Windows and NT, this freely available software systematically queries librarians (or producers) concerning the details of the information to be licensed and, based on that input, produces a draft license agreement. The draft license agreement can then be sent to information publishers (or customers) to serve as the basis for further negotiations for license agreements with acceptable terms.

Strategies for developing digital collections. A draft framing document is now available and is focusing discussion about a proposed DLF initiative intended to assemble, review and document practices adopted by libraries in developing their digital collections. The initiative would result in publications that document practice and supply decisions tools to aid in the selection of third-party digital information resources and in the production of online collections comprising digital surrogates for locally held special collections. Although titles will recommend the good or even best practices that emerge from review, they are intended to inform local decision-making rather than to prescribe local practice.

At present, we are actively soliciting any selection criteria or other guidelines that members use to inform the work of those responsible for:

• selecting and acquiring access to third-party commercial data resources; and
• designing and implementing digitization projects based on existing library holdings.

If such guidelines exist within your organization and you are able to supply these to us to inform our work, please let us know by mailing Ann Marie Parsons.

TEI Text Encoding in Libraries. These guidelines, now available, grew out of a workshop convened to explore the use of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and XML in libraries. They make recommendations pertaining to the application of the TEI Guidelines and particularly "best practices" for the encoding of electronic texts developed for different purposes. The guidelines have been endorsed and are in use by leading text centers in the US and Europe.

The initiative reported in the April report has made significant progress. A document outlining the fundamental requirements of a digital archival repository was reviewed and amended by a group of librarians interested in developing some archival capacity. The initiative is documented on the DLF's preservation web pages which link to the requirements statement as amended by the libraries group and a framework within which it is hoped initiatives intending to gain experience in digital archiving may share the fruits of their work. A further draft of the requirements statement based on discussion amongst publishers will be made available from the site shortly. The requirements document will be further reviewed and refined by a group of licensing specialists to be convened by CLIR in June 2000. It is hoped that the agreement forming around the requirements statement will serve as a starting point for initiatives aimed at developing archival repositories for selected digital journal publications.

The DLF is pleased to welcome Novera King in her new role as Administrative Associate. Novera will be with us for a month in the first instance and is already making significant headway putting the office into some kind of order and developing our communications infrastructure. We are as pleased to report that Ann Marie Parsons, an MLS student working as an intern for CLIR, will be assisting the DLF in various research projects. At present, Ann Marie is developing the two databases that are mentioned below under communications.

DLF web pages. The DLF web pages have been comprehensively updated and re-organized. The old site will remain intact though not be kept up to date.