The following announcement is for the North American public meeting to review the revised open archives initiative specifications that are due to be released in December. This will be an important opportunity for groups planning to implement to these specifications to discuss them. ---------------------------- The Open Archives Initiative (http://www.openarchives.org) (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. An Open Meeting to make public the release of the specifications of the initial OAI interoperability architecture will be held on January 23 at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington DC. The goal of this interoperability architecture is to provide an easy way for data providers to expose their metadata and for service providers to access that metadata and use it as input to value-added services. A key component of the interoperability architecture is the use of the Dublin Core element set as the required resource discovery vocabulary. Complete information on the meeting and a registration form (registration is required) is available at http://www.openarchives.org/DC2001/OpenMeeting.html. Any further questions can be mailed to [log in to unmask]