practical or particularly value-adding for the Encyc- lopaedia, he discussed current plans to prepare an expanded version on the University of Chicago local campus network as an experiment. No general Internet access is in the works, for Esposito described (and other publishers agreed) that the Internet is a frighten- ing place; copyright violations are epidemic and integrity of information and trademark are far from assured. Nonetheless, the corporation has aggressive corporate goals for electronic publishing, which does so many things so well that print simply cannot do.

To sketch the highlights does not exhaust the riches of the symposium, especially the informal discussions, many of which took place at the group luncheons and the informally arranged sign-up dinners in DC cafes. Participants at such a symposium come from a wide variety of backgrounds and levels of experience. The second day of the symposium sought to ground the discussion (and atone somewhat for the piles of paper with which departing briefcases bulged) by giving detailed hands-on experience in networked access to information, through such programs as telnet, ftp, gopher, and WAIS at computer labs in the Univer- sity of Maryland. After lunch on the last day of the symposium, a panel of participants, including a publish- er, a librarian, a journals publisher, and two working academics, gave brief wrap-ups of their concerns and hopes as they returned to take up their day-to-day responsibilities. At the opening, Peter Grenquist, executive director of the AAUP, had begun the pro- ceedings with a quotation from Borges' famous short story, "Funes the Memorious," a reminder of just how dizzyingly various the contents of our culture's store- house have become already; to leave this symposium was to go away wondering just what will become of all of us when that storehouse begins to expand geomet- rically in all dimensions at once at ever-increasing rates of speed.

The symposium organizer was Ann Okerson of the ARL's Office of Scientific and Academic Publish- ing. The AAUP contributed a planning group and sponsorship. All technical support including the hands-on sessions and handouts, as well as the SYMPL-L communications list for all participants, were arranged by Dave Rodgers of the AMS/Math Reviews Systems team in Ann Arbor, with support from his staff. The NSF offered financial support. All four organizations are committed to partnerships and progress in scholarly and scientific communications, particularly in exploiting promising new technologies.

Currently, papers are being contributed by most of the symposium speakers and the ARL hopes to distribute a collection of papers during the first quarter of 1993, priced for cost recovery.

In addition, ARL has recently released a collection of papers from the symposium entitled Scholarly Publishing in the Electronic Networks: Proceedings of the Second Symposium. It contains text or summaries of 17 papers presented at the symposium, as well as two supplemental papers. Prepaid orders are available for $20 plus postage and handling ($4 North America, $8 Europe, $12 others). Check or money order payable to ARL may be sent to Jeff Day, program assistant, Association of Research Libraries, 21 Dupont Circle, Ste. 800, Washington, DC 20036.

Okerson is director of the Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing Association of Research Libraries, Washington, DC. This report was assembled from notes by the following participants in the symposium, whom we thankvery much: Vicky Reich, Stanford University Libraries; David Sewell, University of Rochester; Roger Taylor, National Science Foundation; and Margo Young, University of Alberta Libraries.

Eleventh Annual Society for Scholarly Publishing Top Management Roundtable,

12-13 November 1992

Scott Bennett

The Society for Scholarly Publishing held its 1 lth Annual Top Management Roundtable in Baltimore on 12-13 November 1992. Organized by Karen Hunter (Elsevier Science Publishers) and Czeslaw Jan Grycz (University of California), the Roundtable brought together individuals who are directly engaged in transforming scholarly communication through electron- ic innovation.

Karen Hunter set the tone for the Roundtable by observing that her own firm recognizes scholarly publishing is undergoing fundamental and rapid change with outcomes that cannot confidently be predicted. No one with vital interests in scholarly publishing can afford to watch developments from the sidelines. The Roundtable was meant to attract those who are actively committed to shaping change. It brought together a record 115 participants from academic, learned society, and commercial publishing; from libraries; from academic centers; and from information vendors.

The Roundtable consisted of presentations of ten model projects and discussions among the Roundtable participants of three infrastructure issues. These issues were copyright (discussion led by Scott Bennett, Johns Hopkins), networked communication (Stuart Lynn, Cornell University), and economic models for electron-

CONFERENCE REPORTS - - FALL 1993 47

ic scholarly information (Czeslaw Jan Grycz, University of California).

The range of model projects was impressive. Three participants described projects for the creation and management of scholarly information in electronic formats. These projects grow out of particular research needs and support collaborative investigation:

Robert Robbins described the Human Genome Database at the Welch Applied Research Laborato- ry at Johns Hopkins University.

David Rodgers described the e-Math system being developed by the American Mathematical Society to support scholarly communication in mathemat- ics.

Susan Hockey described the Center for Electronic Text in the Humanities sponsored by Rutgers and Princeton universities.

Three model electronic publishing ventures were presented:

Judith Turner described the online availability of the Chronicle of Higher Education at the Universi- ty of Southern California.

Karen Hunter described the TULIP project for the online delivery of engineering journals at Cornell University.

Walter Peter described the CD-ROM publication of its journals by the American Society for Micro- biology.

The emergence of electronic publishing creates the need for a new generation of information manage- ment software. Some beginnings are being made to respond to that need:

William High demonstrated the considerable power of Voyager Company software to enhance the interest, utility, and educationalpower of book texts.

It is also clear that information in electronic form lends itself to the creation of new products and new marketplaces:

John Hearty described OCLC's efforts to shape electronic products for libraries.

Tom Michalak described Faxon's online document delivery services as a means of enabling libraries to move away from ownership of the information their readers need.

Perhaps most interesting of all, Paul Gherman described the partnership of Virginia Tech and the town of Blacksburg, Virginia, to create an "Electronic Village" where all sectors of the community are brought together electronically for business, education, entertainment, and civic life.

The SSP Roundtable was designed to explore new ideas and new initiatives for electronic systems scholar- ly communication. Thanks in part to the vision, energy, and willingness to take risks of those at the Roundtable, the environment for scholarly communication is most robust.

Bennett is director, The Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.

American Mathematical Society Panel Discussion, 14 January 1993

Nancy D. Anderson

Participants in the panel discussionon "Publishing Costs: Are They Controllable?" sponsored by the Library Committee of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) at its annual meeting in San Antonio, 14 January 1993, included Riidiger Gebauer, vice president editorial, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.; Daniel H. Jones, assistant library director for collection development, University of Texas Health Science Center; David L. Rodgers, system manager, Mathemat- ical Reviews; and I. Edward Block, managing director, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Moderator was James L. Rovnyak, co-chair of the AMS Library Committee and professor of mathematics, University of Virginia. This session was well attended by mathematicians, librarians, and others.

Each panelist was sent the following questions posed by members of the Library Committee in order to help them prepare for the discussion:

1. Somelibrarians feel thatscholarly communication is in need of fundamental restructuring. Do you agree? If so, what form should the new structure take? If not, can you see a scenario for a resolution of the crisis of spiraling costs and journal cancellations?

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