To:  Robert Kahn, CNRI
   From:  Jerome H. Saltzer, M. I. T.
Subject:  informal progress report
   Date:  May 3, 1993

Here are the major items that have been accomplished at M. I. T.
on the CS-TR project since CNRI funding began.

1.  Negotiation of the research agreement with CNRI has been a
surprisingly significant activity.  The reason is that that
negotiation has revealed a number of intellectual property and legal
questions surrounding on-line technical report distribution that may
be better addressed as part of the research project itself:

- Where does liability for content problems in a cooperative
information system such as the CS-TR project lie, and are
indemnification clauses needed in participation contracts?  Who is
responsible when materials contain embedded, unpermitted copyrights,
plagiarization, scientifically invalid data, or dangerously incorrect
material?  Is it practical or appropriate for a university to vet its
materials before distribution?  In practice, how much of this class of
liability problem is real, and how much is imagined or fantasy?

- What permissions and alerts are appropriate for a university to
require of or notification to its authors as part of publishing a
technical report?

- To what extent are notices of rights, permissions and warranties
necessary or appropriate as part of distribution of
university-developed scientific materials?

-  Does it make technical or policy sense to attempt to try to restrict
use of materials distributed over the internet and made available to
all members of a university?  If so, what restrictions are reasonable
and enforceable?


2.  In a series of meetings with M. I. T. intellectual property
specialists, we worked out a plan for permissions and alerts to go
with acceptance of future technical reports, as well as a plan to deal
with copyright concerns surrounding existing technical reports.


3.  In a series of meetings, we made significant progress on planning
and system design for document scanning.  The primary result was a
complete review of all the aspects and preparation of an (internal)
list of issues that need to be addressed.  In parallel, Keith Glavash
and Lindsay Eisan prepared a complete hardware/software scanning
station proposal, and that proposal is now the basis for iterative
improvement.


4.  The MicroReproduction Laboratory has begun locating, gathering,
and evaluating the quality of appearance and completeness of a
comprehensive set of paper originals of LCS and AI Technical Reports,
in anticipation of scanning operations.


5.  Manish Mazumdar, an undergraduate research student, designed,
implemented, and made experimentally available an initial image
display interface for the Library 2000 testbed system.  A small number
of hand-scanned images, together with a set of images imported from
Berkeley are available to test the display interface.  For comparison,
of the interface designs, Mitchell Charity acquired X-mosaic, a
shareware image displayer for the World-Wide-Web and Gopher, and
set up a WWW server with a dummy database of some of the same page
images as those provided by the Library 2000 testbed system.


6.  Mitchell Charity, with tapes provided by Tom Owens, installed and
placed in service on the Library 2000 testbed system the entire M.I.T.
library catalog (about 600,000 MARC records) under a new, large-
database indexing engine.


7.  M. I. T. prepared proposals to IBM and Digital for equipment
grants to carry out the research being supported by CNRI.  The IBM
proposal ($200K for maximum expansion of RAM memory for three existing
index engine servers) was successful and we are just now preparing a
detailed equipment order under that grant.  Recently, Digital
Equipment Corporation invited M. I. T.  to submit a grant proposal
($500K for triplexed 22-Gbyte storage servers), and a proposal is now
in draft, almost ready to be submitted.


8.  Mitchell Charity reviewed and brought up to the version 2.0
specification bibliographic records for about 1000 M. I. T. Laboratory
for Computer Science Technical Reports.  These bibliographic records
are now available to the other CS-TR project participants; Stanford
University has begun making use of this resource.


9.  Jerome Saltzer attended a CS-TR planning meeting at CNRI
headquarters in Reston, Virginia, on February 3, 1993.  This meeting
affirmed use of the RFC-1357 bibliographic record, and participants
agreed to develop other standards.  (To initiate discussion of storage
service standards, M. I. T. sent a draft proposal for a standard
storage service interface to Carnegie-Mellon University.)



Published papers:

Anderson, Greg (with a sidebar by Lucker, Jay K.),  "Mens et Manus at
Work:  The Distributed Library Initiative at MIT," in Library Hi-Tech
11:1 (1993, Issue 41) pp 83-94.

Saltzer, J. H., "Technology, Networks, and the Library of the Year
2000," in Future Tendencies in Computer Science, Control, and Applied
Mathematics, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 653, edited by A.
Bensoussan and J.-P. Verjus, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1992, pp.
51-67.  (Proceedings of the International Conference on the Occasion
of the 25th Anniversary of Institut National de Recherche en
Informatique et Automatique (INRIA,) Paris, France, December, 1992.)

Saltzer, J. H., "Needed:  A Systematic Structuring Paradigm for
Distributed Data," Operating Systems Review 27, 2 (April, 1993), pp.
77-81.