Robert ZICH, special assistant to the associate librarian for special projects, Library of Congress, and moderator of this session, first noted the blessed but somewhat awkward circumstance of having four very distinguished people representing networks and networking or at least leaning in that direction, while lacking anyone to speak from the strongest possible background in CD-ROMs. ZICH expressed the hope that members of the audience would join the discussion. He stressed the subtitle of this particular session, "Options for Dissemination," and, concerning CD-ROMs, the importance of determining when it would be wise to consider dissemination in CD-ROM versus networks. A shopping list of issues pertaining to CD-ROMs included: the grounds for selecting commercial publishers, and in-house publication where possible versus nonprofit or government publication. A similar list for networks included: determining when one should consider dissemination through a network, identifying the mechanisms or entities that exist to place items on networks, identifying the pool of existing networks, determining how a producer would choose between networks, and identifying the elements of a business arrangement in a network. Options for publishing in CD-ROM: an outside publisher versus self-publication. If an outside publisher is used, it can be nonprofit, such as the Government Printing Office (GPO) or the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), in the case of government. The pros and cons associated with employing an outside publisher are obvious. Among the pros, there is no trouble getting accepted. One pays the bill and, in effect, goes one's way. Among the cons, when one pays an outside publisher to perform the work, that publisher will perform the work it is obliged to do, but perhaps without the production expertise and skill in marketing and dissemination that some would seek. There is the body of commercial publishers that do possess that kind of expertise in distribution and marketing but that obviously are selective. In self-publication, one exercises full control, but then one must handle matters such as distribution and marketing. Such are some of the options for publishing in the case of CD-ROM. In the case of technical and design issues, which are also important, there are many matters which many at the Workshop already knew a good deal about: retrieval system requirements and costs, what to do about images, the various capabilities and platforms, the trade-offs between cost and performance, concerns about local-area networkability, interoperability, etc. ******