Noting two of LC's roles, first, to act as a repository of record for material that is copyrighted in this country, and second, to make materials it holds available in some limited form to a clientele that goes beyond Congress, BESSER suggested that it was incumbent on LC to extend those responsibilities to all the things being published in electronic form. This would mean eventually accepting electronic formats. LC could require that at some point they be in a certain limited set of formats, and then develop mechanisms for allowing people to access those in the same way that other things are accessed. This does not imply that they are on the network and available to everyone. LC does that with most of its bibliographic records, BESSER said, which end up migrating to the utility (e.g., OCLC) or somewhere else. But just as most of LC's books are available in some form through interlibrary loan or some other mechanism, so in the same way electronic formats ought to be available to others in some format, though with some copyright considerations. BESSER was not suggesting that these mechanisms be established tomorrow, only that they seemed to fall within LC's purview, and that there should be long-range plans to establish them. Acknowledging that those from LC in the room agreed with BESSER concerning the need to confront difficult questions, GIFFORD underscored the magnitude of the problem of what to keep and what to select. GIFFORD noted that LC currently receives some 31,000 items per day, not counting electronic materials, and argued for much more distributed responsibility in order to maintain and store electronic information. BESSER responded that the assembled group could be viewed as a starting point, whose initial operating premise could be helping to move in this direction and defining how LC could do so, for example, in areas of standardization or distribution of responsibility. FLEISCHHAUER added that AM was fully engaged, wrestling with some of the questions that pertain to the conversion of older historical materials, which would be one thing that the Library of Congress might do. Several points mentioned by BESSER and several others on this question have a much greater impact on those who are concerned with cataloguing and the networking of bibliographic information, as well as preservation itself. Speaking directly to AM, which he considered was a largely uncopyrighted database, LYNCH urged development of a network version of AM, or consideration of making the data in it available to people interested in doing network multimedia. On account of the current great shortage of digital data that is both appealing and unencumbered by complex rights problems, this course of action could have a significant effect on making network multimedia a reality.