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To report on the 2005 EDUCAUSE Conference held in October in Orlando, Florida.

Provides a review of some of the events of the conference.

EDUCAUSE is a non‐profit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The programs were designed to help participants tackle current issues and prepare them for future challenges. The conference focused on the theme “Transforming the academy: dreams and reality” and the program included pre‐conference seminars; track sessions; poster sessions; small group meetings; and corporate exhibits, presentations, and workshops.

A conference report of interest to information management professionals, especially those involved with higher education.

To meet the challenges of the electronic library, technical services staff members must be able to articulate the value they add to the institution—not only in the realm of the library's bibliographic database but also in the larger context of building an organizational framework for electronic information and services. Technical services departments must be willing to re‐engineer processing activities and equip their staffs with both the hardware and the skills needed to meet these challenges. In Mann Library, the digital or electronic library is being built upon the traditional infrastructure of the library. Responsibilities related to selecting, acquiring, describing, and servicing networked information are mainstreamed into the operations of the library. This article describes three projects that illustrate the range of activities in which technical services staff are engaged. In these projects, technical services staff have been called upon to provide an organizational framework for numeric, full‐text, and bibliographic information.

Most automated library systems include a transaction logging component. Yet this fact may be among the best kept secrets in the automated library arena. Often only a few people within a library are aware of its existence, and even fewer have access to the transaction log data. This is unfortunate, since the concrete data garnered by transaction logs can provide bibliographic instructors, reference staff members, systems librarians, and system designers with unique and valuable insights into the patron/system interaction.

This paper presents a high‐level overview of linking, with a consideration of what can and can not be accomplished with present‐day technology and products. The intended purpose is to help readers make informed decisions about what a full text and linking product mix can bring to your institution.

To provide an overview of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Task Force Meeting, held in Portland, Oregon, December 2004.

A descriptive review of the main points from the meeting.

Participants were offered a rich and diverse set of presentations that advanced and reported on CNI’s programs, showcase projects and issues from Task Force member institutions, and highlighted key activities in the broader field of networked information.

This paper is a useful summary of a conference of interest to library and information management professionals.

With two official standards available for requesting an item, a rather confusing picture arises when planning the automation of interlibrary loan and document delivery facilities for libraries, commercial document suppliers, and patrons. Which standard should be implemented: the ILL Protocol or Z39.50 Extended Services for Item Order? There was substantial concern within the ISO community that Item Order was moving into a domain already covered by the ILL protocol standard and that these two standards would be competing. Even though there is an overlap in the functions these standards perform, they are unique and meet different operational requirements. In a distributed communications environment, they can be used to complement rather than compete with each other.

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the history and development of transaction log analysis (TLA) in library and information science research. Organizing a literature review of the first twenty‐five years of TLA poses some challenges and requires some decisions. The primary organizing principle could be a strict chronology of the published research, the research questions addressed, the automated information retrieval (IR) systems that generated the data, the results gained, or even the researchers themselves. The group of active transaction log analyzers remains fairly small in number, and researchers who use transaction logs tend to use this method more than once, so tracing the development and refinement of individuals' uses of the methodology could provide insight into the progress of the method as a whole. For example, if we examine how researchers like W. David Penniman, John Tolle, Christine Borgman, Ray Larson, and Micheline Hancock‐Beaulieu have modified their own understandings and applications of the method over time, we may get an accurate sense of the development of all applications.

This article provides a broad overview of telecommunications and network‐related technologies. Topics covered include identification and review of network elements, analog and digital signals, synchronous and asynchronous transmission formats, transmission media and equipment, transmission techniques and characteristics, multiplexing, network types, access technologies, network architectures and topologies, local‐area network technologies and attributes, protocols and protocol issues, gateways, internetworking, local networking alternatives, equipment certification, and various aspects of network management. It is intended to provide the practicing professional in the field of library and information science with a broad, up‐to‐date technical review that might serve to support and facilitate further investigation of current developments in networks and networking. Although the broad range of topics is not treated in depth, numerous references are provided for further investigation.

Describes research undertaken to investigate the role of public libraries in developing and exploiting the next generationof national networks, such as Internet. Considers developments in Internet and NREN, public libraries and networking, and the impact of the network on public libraries. Surmises that the research will help identify factors that affect the library′s role in electronic networks, although many questions about networks may have more to do with how libraries define themselves than with the technology itself.