Every day, more and more information that once could be seen only under glass or on dusty shelves in library basements is being made available worldwide in digital form. Everything from priceless art objects to the private letters of minor participants in history is being scanned, digitized and posted on the World Wide Web or offered on CD-ROM.

Meanwhile, vast amounts of data, from geological soundings to medical records to the e-mail memos of White House staffers, is being created in digital form, perhaps never to exist on paper.

How will librarians and other information managers deal with all this data, sort it, index it and present it to the public? How can they ensure that it doesn't disappear in some electronic glitch, or simply become unreadable at some time in the future because it's in the wrong format? How will they even decide what data to collect, sort and index?

From Oct. 17-19, librarians, computer scientists and information scientists from across the United States will gather at Cornell University to discuss these and other issues in the first Digital Libraries All-Projects Meeting.

The conference is the first formal meeting of representatives of over two dozen universities and other institutions that have launched research projects under the National Digital Library Initiative (DLI)--Phase 2, which will provide $40-$50 million in funding nationwide over the next five years. The work is jointly supported by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, NASA, the National Endowment for the Humanities and others. Representatives of the funding agencies and observers from the United Kingdom will join researchers at the conference.

The conference is planned as a "working meeting," said Carl Lagoze, digital library scientist at Cornell and chair of the meeting. The agenda consists of reports on the various DLI projects, demonstrations of current status of work and opportunities for informal meetings among the researchers. "It's the first opportunity most of the participants will have to see what the others are planning to do in their recently funded projects and explore opportunities for collaboration," Lagoze said.

Reports will include discussions of methods of collecting, filing and retrieving digital information for special purposes, along with the legal and political problems such collections might pose. Others will describe methods for preserving digital data over long periods of time. There will be a session devoted to the use of digital libraries in education, from grade school through college.

Several special digital collections will be described, including a collection of the folk literature of Sephardic Jews at the University of California at Davis, the Lester S. Levy Digitized Collection of Sheet Music at Johns Hopkins University and a database of three-dimensional scans of the skeletons of many vertebrate species, being developed at the University of Texas at Austin as an educational tool.

The conference is the first of eight to be held over the next four years, the period of Phase 2 of the Digital Library Initiative.