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Dear all -- a grab-bag: the first two are items that we used in last week's DLF strategic planning session and were not widely known to us beforehand, so may well not be common knowledge to the wider DLF community; the second two are recent press releases of awards of interest to the digital library. David ******************************************************************* ATKINS COMMITTEE ISSUES NSF REPORT ON DEVELOPMENT OF CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE http://intel.si.umich.edu/cfdocs/si/news/news-detail.cfm?NewsItemID=295 Professor Daniel Atkins chaired an NSF blue ribbon advisory committee on cyberinfrastructure. The committee's report is online. A National Science Foundation (NSF) committee chaired by University of Michigan professor Daniel Atkins has recommended the organization spend an additional $1 billion per year developing the nation's "cyberinfrastructure" to support scientific research. The Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure argues that investment in a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure can change profoundly what scientists and engineers do, how they do it, and who participates. Its recommendations are detailed in a newly released report titled Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure. Executive summary: http://www.communitytechnology.org/nsf_ci_report/ExecSum.pdf ************************************************************************ ** A FUND FOR AMERICA'S FUTURE, A DIGITAL GIFT TO THE NATION http://www.digitalpromise.org/aboutdp.asp We recommend the creation of the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT), a nonprofit, nongovernmental agency designed to meet the urgent need to transform learning in the 21st century. Our emerging knowledge-based economy makes the people's access to knowledge and learning-across-a-lifetime in the sciences and humanities a national imperative. DO IT will do for education what NIH does for health, NSF does for science, and DARPA does for national defense. It is the 21st century counterpart of the 19th century's Land-Grant Colleges Act and the 20th century's GI Bill. The proposed Trust will be financed by revenues earned from investing $18 billion received from the mandated FCC auctions of the radio spectrum. This parallels the historic use of revenues from the sale of public lands, which helped finance public education in every new state and created the great system of land-grant colleges voted by Congress and signed by President Lincoln during the darkest days of the Civil War. House and Senate DO IT Bills http://www.digitalpromise.org/ DO IT legislation in the Senate and House (S. 2603, the "Digital Opportunity Investment Trust Act," and HR 4641, "The Wireless Technology Investment and Digital Dividends Act of 2002") is moving forward. Hearings began in the Senate with Senators Christopher Dodd of CT and Jim Jeffords of VT testifying on behalf of the bill. Click here for the House bill and Senate bill. ************************************************************************ ** COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AND EPIC RECEIVES JOINT $2 MILLION GRANT WITH LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS FROM NSF/JISC http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/news/files/2003-02-01.lse_jisc_epic.html Columbia University and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) have been awarded a grant totaling approximately $2 Million by The NSF (National Science Foundation) and JISC (the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee) for a joint project on the use of digital resources in the teaching and learning of social and cultural anthropology. The project is entitled, "Teaching and Learning Anthropology: Using Scalable Digital Library Platforms and Innovations In Approaches to Content." Columbia University was awarded $990,000 for their part of the three-year project. ************************************************************************ ** HARPWEEK WINS THE MAJOR DIGITAL HISTORY AWARD: 'E-LINCOLN PRIZE' FOR BEST ACHIEVEMENT IN NEW MEDIA http://www.gettysburg.edu/academics/cwi/lincoln_prize/2003%20press%20rel ease.htm A special "E-Lincoln Prize" has been bestowed on Harpweek.com's recently introduced website, Lincoln and the Civil War. This extraordinary digital resource has made available on the worldwide web the complete contents of 40 wartime newspapers published in both the North and the South. The $50,000 award goes to its founder, John Adler. The 2003 E-Lincoln Prize to Harpweek.com marks only the second time that the Lincoln Prize honors have included an additional award for a significant contribution in the new media. A special study considered a wide array of nominees, their scholarly originality, design aesthetics, organizational logic, user interface engineering, tutorial functions - and, of course, on their accessibility. In the words of T. Lloyd Benson, Walter Kenneth Mattison Associate Professor of History at Furman University, Harpweek is "a truly extraordinary digital resource," and "an attractively designed web-based system that is both fast and user friendly.a remarkable accomplishment," adding: "It promises to significantly influence a wide range of researchers working in a broad range of areas for many years to come." Boritt called Lincoln and the Civil War.com "a great teaching tool," and the first eLP Laureate, Ed Ayers of the University of Virginia, described it as "a national treasure." ************************************************************************ ******* David Seaman Director, Digital Library Federation 1755 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20036 tel: 202-939-4750 fax: 202-939-4765 e-mail: [log in to unmask] web: http://www.diglib.org/