Report of the Second Board Meeting

A second, all-day meeting of the Alexandria Advisory Board was held on June 14th 1996. Board members in attendance included:

Joseph Boisse, Librarian, UCSB
Francis Bretherton, Univ. of Wisconsin
Gary Cantwell, Director of University Relations, DEC
Jack Dangermond, President, ESRI
Jeff Dozier, Dean, School of Environmental Sciences Management, UCSB
Carolyn Gannon, Vice President, Oracle Corporation
Jim Gray, Manager, Bay Area Research Center, Microsoft
Bruce Gritton, Manager, Computer and Information Services, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Bonnie McGregor, Associate Director, USGS
Reagan Moore, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Mark Settle, EOS-DIS Project, Hughes
Terry Smith, Director, Alexandria Digital Library Project Director
Winston Tabb, Associate Librarian, Library of Congress

The Board provided a positive response in its evaluation of the Project, noting that the ADL project ``is engaged in path-breaking work to change the way humans search and retrieve information'' with one of the strengths of ADL being ``its integration of research and operations''. The challenges noted for the project by the report include (1) focusing the research agenda to benefit the project; (2) moving research into development at the right pace and priority, and considering other approaches than those adopted by the project; and (3) providing a ``killer application'' through innovative search and retrieval of useful content. In particular, the Board made three sets of specific recommendations, including:

1. producing a vision statement for the project, in which the scope of the (then-planned October testbed) is embedded, and the benefits of deployment into various communities are evaluated;
2. hiring a project manager for the operational system;
3. evaluating our current interface design and alternative approaches to the use of wavelet based image processing.