Workshop on Technology of
Terms and Conditions
September 24-26, 1996
Preface
The National Science Foundation sponsored the workshop on Technology Issues for Terms and Conditions held at the Arden Conference Center on September 24-26, 1996. The organizers were James R. Davis of Xerox PARC and Judith L. Klavans, Director of the Center for Research on Information Access, Columbia University. The program committee included David Millman, Columbia University; William Arms, CNRI; Carl Lagoze, Cornell University; with Stephen Griffin as NSF advisor.
The workshop was the outgrowth of a conversation between the organizers at the 1996 ACM Digital Libraries meeting held in Bethesda, Maryland in the Spring of 1996. Challenges in the coming availability of digital information were creating pressures to formulate flexible and functional technologies for handling rights management. We approached Steve Griffin who assisted us in formulating a proposal for this workshop. The workshop was funded by the National Science Foundation, Division of Information Robotics and Intelligent Systems, the Information Technology and Organizations Program (ITO). We acknowledge the guidance of both Steve Griffin and Les Gasser, the ITO Program Officer. We also acknowledge Rebecca Hawkes, Wayne Huang, and Amy Friedlander in the preparation of this report.
The workshop provided an opportunity for an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners to share both information and perspectives. Interaction was lively and has continued to be so. This report indicates a few of the follow up results of the meeting, including articles and presentations. The development of terms and conditions technologies persists as a serious inhibitor to the digital library and we encourage this issue to be targeted in future funding decisions. As one of the organizing committee members stated, poor rights management could be a "show stopper". We hope that this workshop made a contribution towards discovering workable solutions.
Judith L. Klavans
Columbia University
March 26, 1997