LESK argued that the photographers were far ahead of BESSER: It is almost impossible to create such digitized photographic collections except with large organizations like museums, because all the photographic agencies have been going crazy about this and will not sign licensing agreements on any sort of reasonable terms. LESK had heard that National Geographic, for example, had tried to buy the right to use some image in some kind of educational production for $100 per image, but the photographers will not touch it. They want accounting and payment for each use, which cannot be accomplished within the system. BESSER responded that a consortium of photographers, headed by a former National Geographic photographer, had started assembling its own collection of electronic reproductions of images, with the money going back to the cooperative. LESK contended that BESSER was unnecessarily pessimistic about multimedia images, because people are accustomed to low-quality images, particularly from video. BESSER urged the launching of a study to determine what users would tolerate, what they would feel comfortable with, and what absolutely is the highest quality they would ever need. Conceding that he had adopted a dire tone in order to arouse people about the issue, BESSER closed on a sanguine note by saying that he would not be in this business if he did not think that things could be accomplished. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ LARSEN * Issues of scalability and modularity * Geometric growth of the Internet and the role played by layering * Basic functions sustaining this growth * A library's roles and functions in a network environment * Effects of implementation of the Z39.50 protocol for information retrieval on the library system * The trade-off between volumes of data and its potential usage * A snapshot of current trends * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Ronald LARSEN, associate director for information technology, University of Maryland at College Park, first addressed the issues of scalability and modularity. He noted the difficulty of anticipating the effects of orders-of-magnitude growth, reflecting on the twenty years of experience with the Arpanet and Internet. Recalling the day's demonstrations of CD-ROM and optical disk material, he went on to ask if the field has yet learned how to scale new systems to enable delivery and dissemination across large-scale networks.