AAAS 2003: Science as a Way of Life

Citation

Mihram, D. and Arthur Mihram, G. (2003), "AAAS 2003: Science as a Way of Life", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920dac.002

AAAS 2003: Science as a Way of Life

Conference reports

AAAS 2003: Science as a Way of Life

Danielle Mihram and G. Arthur Mihram

The theme of this year's Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), was "Science as a way of life". The AAAS (www.aaas.org) is the world's largest general scientific organization, with more than 134,000 individual members (from 130 countries) and 275 affiliated scientific and engineering societies (comprising more than 10 million members). This year, the 169th national meeting, held in Denver, Colorado, 13-18 February 2003, drew an attendance of almost 5,000 registered individuals, of whom 1,000 were members of the press. It almost constituted a sequel to last year's 2002 Meeting "Science in a connected world," held in Boston. AAAS's President last year, Peter Raven, recognized "the global community of which we are a part and the many challenges ahead in building a world in which perhaps eight or nine billion of us will be able to live in relative prosperity, peace, and good health".

This year's meeting moved from the global perspective to that of our daily lives: "Science and technology play an ever-increasing role in our daily lives", noted AAAS's current President, Dr Floyd Bloom from the Scripps Research Institute, in his "Welcome" message. "Computers, cell phones, pagers, and other devices have rapidly become indispensable parts of our existence. Breathtaking achievements are reported almost daily in human health, and an ever more detailed picture is emerging about how our universe and we arrived where we are today. Under all of this is a massive flow of data, which presents its own challenge to manage but also unique opportunities for further advance."

The program, squeezed into five event-packed days, was equally "massive" with four plenary lectures, 16 topical lectures, three seminars (each spread over two consecutive full days), 27 workshops (12 career workshops and 15 exhibitor workshops ranging from pharmaceutical and chemical companies such as Du Pont, Celera, and Monsanto to national laboratories such as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the US Department of Energy's Fossil Energy National Laboratory (NETL), and 150 sessions (a record number!)) Such an array provided an overwhelming number of presentations on the latest developments in scientific research and a real challenge in choosing what to attend.

The format for this year's Abstracts is quite bewildering. All conference registrants found a CD-ROM (sealed in a jacket bound into the program) which contains pdf files to be opened by Acrobat Reader 5.0.5 so that any computer system below 8.6.0 is unable to access these files. However, in the publication AAAS On-Site (2003), analogous to that of Cognotes, distributed onsite at the meetings of the American Library Association) the following announcement appeared regarding the incompleteness of the CD:

Abstracts received since closing of the CD have continued to be posted to www.aaasmeeting.org Paper copies of the CD materials may be purchased from AAAS registration or from the AAAS store for $10.

Two sessions of particular interest to librarians and information technologists provided extremely interesting insights into recent developments in digital libraries, while a third, on copyright, proved disappointing except for the last presentation (on the protection of "traditional ecological knowledge").

Collaborative opportunities for libraries

This session was organized by Frederick Weingarten (Director, Office for Information Technology Policy, American Library Association (ALA)); Louis Fox, Vice Provost, Office of Educational Partnerships and Learning Technologies, University of Washington; and Elaine Albright, Dean of Cultural Affairs and Libraries, University of Maine.

Frederick Weingarten ("The libraries and their new role as the community service grid") gave background information about the issues monitored by his office that include:

• •

  Policy research and analysis on the impact of digital copyright.

• •

  Cybersecurity.

• •

  Policy education for ALA members.

• •

  Advocacy in non-legislative arenas (e.g. regulatory agencies and the National Science Foundation (NSF)) for strategic outlook (e.g. emerging trends and their implications for libraries).

He explained that the concept of "infrastructure" needs to be broadened to institutions and policy peer process. As a result, institutional issues dealing with information should be part of a scientific research agenda and such research is critical to the future of library service. Thus his role at ALA: to sustain a "community/social" mission in a research agenda.

Part of the research agenda for libraries is to participate actively in the latest NSF Internet initiatives: an overview of its programs is listed at: www.nsf.gov/ Weingarten provided an overview of the evolution of that foundation's networks:

• •

  NSFNET. Its roots stem from early ARPA research on packet switching and its development of the TCP/IP protocol suite, which the NSF elected for its NSFNET program in the mid-1980s. Detailed information about NSFNET appears at: http://moat.nlanr.net/INFRA/NSFNET.html

• •

  The National Research Network in the 1980s.

• •

  The National Research and Education Network (NREN) in the 1990s – NSF divested itself out of it. During the Clinton era it became the commodity Internet.

Currently, the research agenda for libraries can be developed within two NSF initiatives:

1. 1.

   Next generation Internet-Internet2: new sets of programs started around this initiative.

2. 2.

   Revolutionizing science and engineering through Cyber-infrastructure (Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyber-infrastructure, issued January 2003, available as a pdf file at: www.communitytechnology.org/nsf_ci_report/). The executive summary notes that scientific and engineering research is not only pushed by continuing progress in computing, information, and communication technology, but also pulled by the expanding complexity, scope, and scale of today's challenges. The capacity of this technology "has crossed thresholds that now make possible a comprehensive 'cyber-infrastructure' on which to build new types of scientific and engineering knowledge environments and organizations". The Panel's overarching recommendation is that the NSF establish and lead a large-scale inter-agency, and internationally coordinated Advanced Cyber-infrastructure Program (ACP). It is to be sustained by new NSF funding of $1 billion per year "to achieve critical mass and to leverage the coordinated co-investment from other federal agencies, universities, industry, and international sources necessary to empower a revolution".

(See also Shread (2003).)

For information on the partnerships and collaborations of libraries, see Lippincott, 2002).

The second speaker, Louis Fox, did not attend the meeting but he did send his Special Assistant, James Werle, a librarian, whose presentation was titled: "The libraries and the relation to the Internet2 K-20 project." Internet2 is a consortium led by 202 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. The primary goals of Internet2 are to:

• •

  create a leading edge network capability for the national research community;

• •

  enable revolutionary Internet applications;

• •

  ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community;

• •

  through Internet2 Working Groups, Internet2 members are collaborating on: partnerships, initiatives, engineering, middleware, and advanced applications (the core of Internet2). Advanced applications include: distributed computation, virtual labs, digital libraries, distributed learning, and digital video applications.

Werle's presentation was an overview of the Internet2 K20 initiative which brings together Internet2 member institutions, primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, libraries and museums whose collective aim is to get new technologies – advanced networking tools, applications, middleware, and content – into the hands of innovators, across all educational sectors in the USA, as quickly and as "connectedly" as possible (see http://k20.internet2.edu/about/index.html). For descriptions of specific projects go to the Web site at: http://k20.internet2.edu/projects/index.html

Elaine Albright, in her presentation, "A research agenda for the libraries and Internet2", spoke about a meeting of ALA and Internet2 that was held in August 2002 so as to prepare for the compilation of a report for NSF that contains a library research agenda.

Among the items discussed were issues related to access, such as community libraries provide equal access to information to all in the community. This is particularly important for high-speed network applications that are not available at home. Thus those libraries aid in the diffusion of technology in the community in addition to access to print, video, visual, and human resources. She also noted the important role of libraries in the development of middleware (authentication, security, identification, authorization, directories, global interoperability – a "ware" between network and applications). This strength, present in the traditional role of libraries, can also be extended to electronic publishing.

Part of the research agenda, according to Albright, is to develop a close partnership between libraries and researchers (creators of knowledge) now that the information/publishing world has been disrupted with the new digital environment. For example, the traditional safeguards assured in printing are not currently present in digital information: rather they remain inconsistent, ineffective, and disorganized. Peer review (authenticate, validate) of electronic material is not always in place. Information on the Web is here today, gone tomorrow. No standards are set as technology evolves and changes. Therefore there is a need to create a new system that puts in place the safeguards made possible by the printed medium.

Libraries can become the electronic publisher of choice (in lieu of very expensive publishing). They can develop meta schemes that go beyond content, and which provide several points of access to information, and thus they can become electronic publishing outlets. For example, each university can become the publisher of its researchers by collecting systematically the data and by publishing them together with related information that would not have been published in print.

Unfortunately the session was poorly attended, and the audience numbered 11 at most.

NSDL: progress toward enhancing education via digital libraries (afternoon of Sunday, 16 February)

Organized by Dave Fulker, NSDL; Alice Agogino, University of California-Berkeley.

Dave Fulker's presentation, "How 'core integration' activities relate to the educational goals of NSDL", provided an overview of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) (http://nsdl.org/) a recent initiative (begun in 2000) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It is a digital library of exemplary resource collections and services, organized in support of science education at all levels. Starting with a partnership of funded projects, NSF has already awarded over 100 grants for organizing collections, developing services, and conducting research related to NSDL goals. The fiscal year 2003 NSDL solicitation for proposals (deadline: April 21, 2003) appears at www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03530/nsf03530.htm

As Fulker noted, the NSDL is emerging as a center of innovation in digital libraries as applied to education, as well as a community center for groups focused on "digital-library-enabled" science education. Its mission statement appears on the NSDL Web site: "NSDL is a comprehensive, online source for science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. The NSDL mission is to both deepen and extend science literacy through access to materials and methods that reveal the nature of the physical universe and the intellectual means by which we discover and understand it."

The key purpose of the NSDL is to become a place on the Web where educators and learners find resources and collaborate to enhance science learning on national and international scales. The goal of the NSDL is to be available to all learners and to span all of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The variety and diversity of the collections are most evident in the list of 18 "featured collections" on the NSDL Web site: earth sciences, physics, atmospheric visualization, health education, paleontology, gender and science, computing and information technology, to name just a few. Rather than a simple Web-based library, the NSDL includes a set of many "specialized portals" defined by NSDL as entry points "to an aggregation of many decentralized online resources including online services for using those resources. A portal is a Web system of content and applications rather than a simple HTML page."

Currently there are three additional NSDL specialized portals under construction:

1. 1.

   Using data in the classroom – providing information and discussion for educators and resource developers interested in effective teaching methods and pedagogical approaches for using data in the classroom.

2. 2.

   The NSF Educator Portal – to be released in Spring 2003. Aimed at K-12 instruction.

3. 3.

   Sciences pictures – currently an exhibit in the NSDL main portal. This is being developed as a technology model for techniques that might be used to highlight visual materials in the NSDL catalog.

A core integration (CI) team, led by Dave Fulker with primary collaborators at Cornell and Columbia Universities, holds responsibility for creating a coherent, effective, and leading-edge (yet operational) library from numerous and distinct efforts. The initial release of the NSDL library (now completed) enables easy access to almost a quarter-million, highly diverse educational resources, collected by organizations with reputations for excellence and innovation. According to Fulker, this initial release does not reflect the comprehensiveness eventually sought, but it reflects a strategy for leading the NSDL toward an ambitious goal of breadth and depth. Specifically, the approach of the CI team is to create general-purpose building-blocks and, as Fulker emphasizes, use them to realize exemplars that model how specialization and depth can be realized along multiple dimensions.

Fulker also indicated that one challenge, especially with such a large and diverse set of digital library builders, is to create a clear and focused definition that informs priorities and answers such questions as whether NSDL is a research effort (as are most NSF-funded projects) or an operational entity. Currently his team is gaining clarity by defining four aspects of the NSDL:

1. 1.

   Library of exemplary collections and services, with practical educational value.

2. 2.

   Community center (e.g. libraries or museums), focused on science education enriched by a digital library.

3. 3.

   Center for innovation in digital-library technologies, applied to education.

4. 4.

   Partnership among resource providers, including NSDL-funded projects, publishers, and various partners.

The session's remaining presentations show-cased a very small number of the diverse initiatives begun as the "starter" set of NSDL collections. Some have been developed via NSDL grants, while others, though developed independently, are contributing to the goal of enhanced science education.

The presentation by Lee Zia from NSF was, as indicated by its title, "An overview of the NSDL portfolio of awards". Much of her presentation was a tour of the information available at: http://whiteboard.comm.nsdlib.org/vol1.11.html and www.ehr.nsf.gov/ehr/due/awards/nsdl.xls

Mary R. Marlino, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), spoke about "Community building in the digital library for earth-system education (DLESE)" (see www.DLESE.org). DLESE is a critical geoscience node of the NSDL whose operating annual budget is $3 million. Over 100 projects are currently funded. It is a community-owned and governed library (currently staffed by 20 individuals) offering easy, online access to high-quality resources to all educational levels, from K-12 through undergraduate, and graduate, and "community lifelong learning". Currently in its third year of development and operation, DLESE resources are designed to support systemic educational reform. The contents of the library include peer-reviewed Web-based teaching resources and tools, maps, lesson plans, lab exercises, datasets (and services for the inclusion of data in classroom activities), virtual field trips, interactive demonstrations, and a "virtual community center" that supports community goals and growth.

The creation of DLESE was based on the need for an educated citizenry capable of making informed and reasoned policy decisions through an understanding of basic scientific principles and their applicability to everyday life. Inherent in this initiative for scientific literacy in the geosciences is the integration of research and education, and its emphasis on enquiry-based education (the experience of "doing science") where learners are engaged in the enquiry of scientific exploration, and acquire the skills to answer not only the "why" and "how" of science but also the "what". The aim is twofold:

1. 1.

   To educate from a systems approach which targets learning about Earth sciences as a whole, integrated system, rather than through discrete disciplinary approaches.

2. 2.

   To contribute to the body of evidence on the value and efficacy of digital libraries as a vehicle for educational change.

What makes DLESE unique in digital library development is its participatory approach to both library building and governance, and its singular community-based focus, founded on a philosophy of "users as contributors". Numerous individual faculty members, agencies, and institutions maintain local storage of these resources on their own servers, which are then accessed via the DLESE database of searchable metadata ("data about data") records that describe them. DLESE users include learners and instructors in all venues, many of whom are resource contributors developing peer-reviewed educational materials, providing scientific knowledge, and evaluating DLESE holdings.

Like NSDL, DLESE development is distributed across a number of efforts, multiple institutions and innovative ways to access information. These include PDA-based portals for K-12 (University of Michigan), "strand maps" (see T. Sumner's presentation, below) integrating AAAS Benchmarks for Science Literacy with resources, University of Colorado, and specific reference resources such as the Encyclopedia of Earthquakes (SLEC). The mission of the DLESE Program Center, hosted by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, is to support the community in the library-building effort, and to support resource discovery across a diverse, federated network of holdings and collections. The DPC is partnered with NASA and the ADEPT digital library of the University of California, Santa Barbara in developing a metadata framework that supports geo-referenced search and discovery of resources, educational standards, and event-based resource descriptions. Other partnerships are developing tools to discover and use datasets in educational contexts (UCAR and TERC).

Current holdings of DLESE amount to almost 4,000 items in the library. Before resources can become part of the DLESE Reviewed Collection they are reviewed according to seven criteria as noted at www.dlese.org/libdev/GUI/dleseReviewCriter.html:

1. 1.

   Scientific accuracy.

2. 2.

   Importance, or significance of material.

3. 3.

   Pedagogical effectiveness.

4. 4.

   Quality of documentation.

5. 5.

   Ease of use for students and faculty.

6. 6.

   Inspirational or motivational elements for students.

7. 7.

   Robustness/sustainability as a digital resource.

Future stages of library development will focus on enhanced community collaborative support; the development of controlled Earth system science vocabularies aiding resource discovery; collection building, and continuing development of community review systems, in addition to georeferenced and education standards-based discovery.

The presentation by Alice M. Agogino, University of California, Berkeley, titled "Bringing the educational experience of NEEDS and SMETE to NSDL", was an overview of two digital library resources, and a visit to their Web sites is informative. The National Engineering Education Delivery System (NEEDS), located at Berkeley, CA (www.needs.org/) is a digital library of learning resources for engineering education. It provides Web-based access to a database of learning resources where the users (whether they be learners or instructors) can search for, locate, download, comment on resources (e.g. quizzes, courseware, visuals) to aid their learning or teaching process.

This resource, which contains an information navigator and a search engine, responds to several educational needs. Because it takes too much time to revise or create new course materials with multi-media components, faculty wants to locate good relevant material, some of which is difficult to find. The information is thus tailored to satisfy different learning/teaching goals and contains information labels (relating to age/grade, pedagogical objectives, quality teaching resources). There is a rating system on the quality of the material and much of it is peer-reviewed and there are two awards given each year: the Premier Award and the Premier Courseware Award. Judges look for authentic learning outcomes and instructional design: they try to raise the bar by awarding projects that demonstrate the most improved learning outcome.

The Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Technology, Education (SMETE) Open Federation (www.smete.org:80/public/about_smete) is a digital library, which was formed to promote the teaching and learning of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology at all levels. It provides direct access to a comprehensive collection of pedagogical material relating to those fields and they are distributed through the establishment of a federation of digital libraries. Students can retrieve resources for the preparation of classes or exams while instructors can incorporate learning materials into their classroom. The Federation was built with funding by the National Science Foundation, the National STEM Education Digital Library program, and partnerships with nationally recognized professional educational organizations, academic institutions and private e-learning companies.

Yolanda Scott George (AAAS) described the "BEN (BiosciEdNet) portal" in her presentation, "BiosciNet (BEN): transforming biology teaching in higher education".

That portal (www.biosciednet.org/portal), managed by the AAAS, is a collaborative composed of 11 professional societies and coalitions for biology education. It provides searchable and seamless access to the digital library collections of its partners, and users will find accurate and reliable biology education resources. Currently there are 680 resources at www.biosciednet.org/portal/teach/resources.php, covering 46 biological sciences topics (www.biosciednet.org/portal/teach/topics.php) and 25 different types of resources (including teaching strategies and guidelines) ranging from journal articles to simulations from the AAAS, the American Physiological Society, the American Society of Microbiology, the’Ecological Society of America, and the Society of Toxicology. Registration (easy to accomplish) is required to search the site and to browse services.

David A. Smith, Duke University, presented "MathDL: a digital library for mathematics education". The Mathematical Sciences Digital Library (www.mathdl.org) is a resource for teaching and learning and the principal investigator for the NSF grant and first executive editor of that library is Lang Moore of Duke University. Smith, the founding editor of the Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications (JOMA), a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, accessible at that site, provided an orientation to MathDL, by giving an idea of the scope and contents of this resource.

In addition to JOMA the library comprises:

• •

  A Digital Classroom Resources (DCR), edited by Doug Ensley, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, a collection of class-tested and reviewed materials; and

• •

  A Catalog of Commercial Products (CCP) – an extensive listing of textbooks, software, and other products relevant to the teaching of mathematics, as well as user reviews and links to publishers' pages.

Tamara Sumner (University of Colorado, Boulder) presented "Strand maps as an interactive interface to NSDL resources". Sumner noted that, when fully realized, the NSFL will house a collection of science and educational resources supporting the vast spectrum of both scientific research and classroom and lifelong learning opportunities. Access to, and retrieval of, such massive information, it is hoped, will be facilitated by networking and communication technology that will bring the library's resources directly into the classroom and the home.

However, as any librarian knows only too well, one of the biggest design challenges in any information retrieval system is the vocabulary problem associated with the cataloguing and indexing of items and resources: What word, what term must one use to access the desired information?

The goal of the project described by Sumner is to help students, teachers, and parents to locate science education resources not by having to search using scientific terms but rather by using concept maps. These maps, known as "Strand maps", were developed over the past decade by Project 2061 at the AAAS. Such maps focus on topics important to science, technology, engineering and mathematics by providing a compact visual representation of key scientific ideas and skills ("learning benchmarks"). The underlying benchmark knowledge base and the Strand Map interfaces are being created by an interdisciplinary team of specialists in science education, human-computer interaction, and digital library technologies. This project is a collaboration between the University of Colorado at Boulder, Project 2061 (AAAS), the Digital Library for Earth System Education Program center, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Science's shrinking public domain?

This session actually dealt with the fact that "we are now in an information age" and, therefore, could have been of considerable interest to professional librarians. The one librarian (Ann Okerson, Yale University) among the panel of six speakers was unable to be present. The remaining five panelists were, in order of presentations:

1. 1.

   Paul F. Uhlir, National Academy of Sciences, "Promoting open access’and the public domain in scientific data and information".

2. 2.

   Robert Bolick, representing the Association of American Publishers, "Digital rights management: lock or key?"

3. 3.

   Stephen M. Maurer, University of California-Berkeley, "New game, new rules: moving science forward in an increasingly commercial world".

4. 4.

   Barbara Simons, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "Copyright wars: computer scientists on the front lines".

5. 5.

   Justin Van Fleet of AAAS, "Promoting the public domain to protect traditional knowledge".

The focus of most of the presentations ("case studies" or anecdotes, primarily) was on the fear that there may be current efforts (by commercial firms or individual scientists) to "lock up" (or restrict) electronically data and information which would be available for "fair use" in the printed medium. Indeed, the AAAS's representative on the panel spoke about the traditional ecological knowledge * prior art database (TEK*PAD) (http://ip.aaas.org/tekindex.nsf/), a non-profit Internet collaborative supported through the contributions of funders and project collaborators (listed on the Web site). His presentation could probably be "rated" as the best one among the panel's offering.

According to the information appearing on that site, "Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK)" describes those aspects of indigenous knowledge systems relating to the use, management, and conservation of the environment and natural resources. Ethnobotany, or the knowledge, classification, properties, cultivation and uses of specific plants, is an important part of TEK. New sources for antibiotics as well as advances in molecular pharmacology led to a decline (in the twentieth century) in the importance of ethnobotany in drug discovery programs. However, interest in natural product research has been rekindled by discoveries of potent new chemotherapeutic agents from plants. This interest has led to the exploitation (and pharmaceutical patenting) of indigenous knowledge of the cultivation and application of botanical resources.

Much indigenous knowledge and technology is shared orally and therefore not documented. The financial costs of registering, maintaining, and defending the patents are a prohibitive barrier to effective protection of indigenous knowledge. The result is that holders of indigenous knowledge cannot defend themselves against the improper use or exploitation of their knowledge, while the patent holder has the right to exclude anyone else from using, making, and selling the patented subject-matter for a certain period of time.

TEK has therefore been created as an electronic database of "Traditional ecological knowledge" to register, document, and maintain such knowledge (thus to protect indigenous "intellectual property"). The "Biopiracy hot list" (on the Web site) features (currently 18) plants patented by Western pharmaceutical companies and corporations without regard to indigenous "intellectual property": "patented" well-known plants such as turmeric (Curcuma longa) and kava (Piper methysticum) are on the list.

This step was taken as a result of a recently published white paper by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It stated that electronic publications, including online databases and other types of Internet publications, are considered to be "printed publications" within the scope of prior art and/or the public domain (a link to that paper is available on the site). In his presentation, Robert Bolick faulted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) because it not only undermines "fair use" but also treats ideas as property, which can be kept under lock and key. Since the "political movers" on the DMCA were apparently the recording and cinema industries, one could probably understand why the DMCA so antagonizes those of us in academia (for whom the copyright protection was truly intended). There appears to be a widespread notion among "entertainment types" that being creative is a strictly mental activity (=’ideas), whereas "creativity" (see OED) relates to a concrete product (like a writing or a physical invention (or sketch of same)). Unfortunately, Mr Bolick – also speaking on fair use in a digital world – noted that "One can't put a judge on a chip!", this being said despite the fact that a chip, like a mini-computer program, is indeed a decision-making replica, one which, by examining the states confronting it, makes a "judgement" as to which decision/option is to be made/taken. His presentation on incidents in the history of copyright protection was quite informative (e.g. Sir Isaac Newton's engagement with Rev. Jon Flamsteed).

Unfortunately, the organizer of the Session was oriented to its symposium's declaration that somehow, in our information age, 'the monetary value of information becomes more evident. More importantly, the issue confronting science is the failure of the US Congress to meet as yet its constitutional mandate, "to promote science and the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (US Constitution, Clause 8). This issue was only obliquely raised by the first speaker. It was then explicitly raised in the recorded Q&A by several comments that pointed out that the authors of the US Constitution, in the copyright clause, were concerned not strictly with the financial gains of authors but also with establishing priority of insight/invention, so important to the marking of the progress of science. An emphasis of this was made with references to papers in WEBNET 2000 (Mihram and Mihram, 2000, pp. 396-401), IEEE-sponsored MILCOM 97 Proceedings (Mihram and Mihram, 1997, pp. 1145-51) and Internet Librarian '98 Proceedings (Mihram and Mihram, 1998, pp. 196-203).

Although Ms Simons' presentation was fact-filled, it lacked coherence. She apparently came well-equipped, bringing along more slides than would permit discussion during her presentation's limited time, yet the haste to cover these left her trying hard to reach a conclusion about how computer scientists, those on her proclaimed "front lines", will contribute to settling her proclaimed "Copyright wars". An attention to the already published material (see references above) will lead the present reader (and/or Ms Simons) to the resolution of the difficulties arising from copyright protection within the digital dilemma (to transmit electronically a document is to make a copy of it) now confronting us: namely, a nationally-secured (and operated) electronic postal service through which electronic copyright registration via the Library of Congress is facilitated.

As a matter of fact, the AAAS itself seems to be creating difficulties with its own Meeting's "proceedings". In past years, the abstract of each author's paper/presentation was published within that Annual Meeting's Program Book. Yet this year the printing of these was replaced by a CD, Abstracts. It apparently does not include the entire set of abstracts, as was noted at the beginning of this report, and brings into question the 2003 Annual Meeting's printed prefatory proclamation ("Abstracts and symposia published in this volume … ", p. ii) that these were published within the program. The AAAS, by this action, is itself underscoring a major difficulty in electronic publishing. Are we not going to have in the future disappointed scientists who, having paid the registration for this Meeting, find that they cannot access the "data" (abstracts) because the version of the Acrobat Reader (contained as a downloadable file within the CD) is (has become) incompatible with their newer computer system? Time will tell.

The 2004 Annual Meeting of the AAAS, "Science at the leading edge", will take place in Seattle, Washington from 12-17 February.

Danielle Mihram (dmihram@usc.edu) is Assistant Dean, Leavey Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USAandG. Arthur Mihram,is an Author and Consultant based in Princeton, NJ.

ReferencesAAAS On-Site (2002), Vol. 8, 13-18 February.Lippincott, K. (2002), "Cyberinfrascture opportunities for connections and collaboration", available at: www.vala.org.au/vala2002/2002pdf/31Lipnct.pdfMihram, D. and Mihram, G.A. (1998), "Tele-cybernetics: standards and procedures for protecting the copyright of digitised materials", Internet Librarian '98, Monteray, CA, Info Today, Medford, NJ, November, pp. 196-203.Mihram, G.A. and Mihram, D. (1997), "The enhanced electronic postmark: integration of military and commercial communications", in Integrating Military and Commercial Communications for the Next Century, MILCOM '97 Proceedings, Monterey, CA, IEEE, New York, NY, November, pp. 1145-51.Mihram, G.A. and Mihram, D. (2000), "Tele-cybernetics: on some necessary government roles in the Internet and the Web", in Webnet 2000, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, Norfolk, VA, pp. 396-401.Shead, P. (2003), "NFS recommends $1B annually for cyberinfrastructure", Datamation, 5 February, available at: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/it_res/article.php/1580141