Good afternoon. I am Sandy Schwalb with the Government Printing Office (GPO). Last month I joined the staff at GPO as a permanent employee. For 18 months prior to that, I was a temporary "expert consultant" at the agency as part of the Electronic Transition Staff. Before coming to GPO I was with the Special Libraries Association for 10 years and from 1975-1986 worked on Capitol Hill in the office of a U.S. Senator. From 1990-93 I served on the Depository Library Council.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to be a part of this panel to discuss the pilot project, on which we are all working, between GPO and the National Technical Information Service (NTIS).

I have been asked to serve as the moderator for the panel and as such I will introduce the other speakers.

Although Kris Vajs has never been a depository librarian, she has spent virtually her whole career working with documents. Her first library job was in Minneapolis Public Library's Municipal Information Library. Kris spent 19 years at the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, where she was involved with database creation, imaging, document delivery, and the creation of research tools. For the last 18 months, she has been at NTIS, where she is responsible for database creation and online help desk.

Linda Kennedy is Head, Government Information and Maps Department, University of California at Davis. She has been a documents librarian since 1971. She is past Chair of the Government Documents Round Table of ALA and a former member of the Depository Library Council.

Duncan Aldrich is Head, Business and Government Information Center, University of Nevada, Reno. He is currently a member of the Depository Library Council and spent one year, July '96-July '97, as a member of the Electronic Transition Staff at GPO.

As you are no doubt aware, an Interagency Agreement (IA) was signed by GPO's Superintendent of Documents and NTIS to establish a pilot project through which NTIS will furnish U.S. Government information products in electronic image format to the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). In order to assure free public access to these products, the GPO, as the administrator of the depository program, and NTIS have agreed that products delivered as part of the project will be subject to the rules surrounding the use and accessibility of material in the depository program.

I hope that many of you saw the announcement on GOVDOC-L seeking volunteers for the pilot project. Both Linda and Duncan can fill you in on more of the details about how their institutions are going about selecting and accessing the image files from NTIS and Kris will talk about the work she has done to get the project up and running at NTIS.

Kris and Linda have been working together on the initial phase of this pilot. Now that a formal agreement is in place, GPO would like to go ahead with identifying additional libraries. NTIS has asked that 20 libraries be added to the pilot on a phased-in basis. We would like to include a variety of libraries in the pilot, ranging from technologically higher-end institutions to libraries that have an interest in obtaining this information, but might not have high-tech equipment.

We have 25 volunteers at the moment. Following this conference, I will be getting back to everyone who has expressed an interest in being part of the project with more details. We should be ready to choose all 20 libraries by early June.

And now I would like to turn this over to Kris Vajs.