The executive director of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) and the president of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP) answer questions about outsourcing information services. Relevant policy, vendor-client relationships, managerial considerations, and effects on libraries are discussed. Two sidebars offer 19…

Reviews the literature on Internet information policy: an awareness of new policy issues, attempts to apply existing legal regulations to new processes, and the need for new policies for the Net. Explores policy issues that affect the structure of government, the economy, society, designers of the Net, and international issues. Contains 658…

The far-reaching political, economic, and social implications of the speed and uptake of new technology have only recently begun to emerge. It is argued that an international communications policy is necessary to ensure that the world does not divide into the information rich and the information poor. (Author/AEF)

Content-control proposals have been found to be more intrusive and restrictive than supporters of rating systems and filtering software claim. These systems often exceed claims in types of content restricted, numbers and types of people prevented from reaching content, technical changes required to public electronic networks, and burdens on…

Highlights dangers on the Internet that parents should be aware of and provides suggestions on how parents can ensure their children's safety on the Internet. Describes how librarians can help parents by establishing Internet policies, providing access to quality Web sites, resolving filtering issues, and providing instruction for children and…

Abstracts and descriptions of Special Interest Group (SIG) and Panel Sessions include such topics as: knowledge management; information networks; courseware; accreditation; Web site design; information retrieval and processing; digital imaging; electronic journals; human computer interaction; digital libraries; digital divide; information science;…

The ancient Romans had it right. The underlying relationships between contracting parties were considered so important among Roman citizens that breaking a contract was considered a serious offense: The breaching party forfeited social position and property, and, if necessary, his family was expected to make good on his contractual promises. In…

An investigation of the development of Australian scientific and technological information (STI) services has been undertaken. It comprises a consideration of the characteristics and development of the services, which is the focus of this part of the paper, along with a broader examination of discipline formation in information management covered…

The impact that electronic information technologies have had on scholarly communications and university libraries is assessed. Early predictions that the dominance of commercial publishers would decline and journal prices would fall have not been realised. The development of institutional repositories have had limited success in making the…

This paper is a broad review of ongoing and planned applications of the Internet and World Wide Web in higher education, and an analysis of key technical, educational, and broader social issues that these applications highlight. The report attempts to address the following issues about the Internet and the Web: (1) their potential for changing…

The American Library Association (ALA) expresses the basic principles of librarianship in its "Code of Ethics" and in the "Library Bill of Rights" and its interpretations. All library system and network policies, procedures or regulations relating to electronic resources and services should be scrutinized for potential…

This book gives an overview of the leading-edge Internet application areas (streaming multimedia, collaborative tools, Web databases) and key information policy issues (privacy, censorship, information quality, and more). The text serves as a primer on understanding the forces--economic, legal, social, as well as technological--that are shaping…

Introduction: In 1999-2000, a Norwegian youth cracked a DVD-access code and published a decryption program on the Internet. He was sued by the US DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) and the Norwegian Motion Picture Association (MAP), allies of the US Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), arrested by Norwegian police and charged with…

This paper is a practitioner response by an IT manager to a paper by Duncan Greaves entitled "A pedagogical and economic critique of student charges for Internet access", which appears in the same issue of "IJEDICT." Greaves' article proposes four mechanisms to solve this "public goods problem". The author explores…

This is part of a series of reports to the President and Congress developed by the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) on key contemporary issues in information technology. This report defines open source software, explains PITAC's interest in this model, describes the process used to investigate issues in open source…