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This article provides information on National Communication Association's 2000 Summer Conference, Communicating Politics: Engaging the Public in Campaign 2000 and Beyond, to be held on June 22-24 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Washington, D.C. The conference planners believe that members of the communication discipline need to go beyond commentary about the current state of politics and take the lead in creating a public sphere and improving the overall quality of political discourse and reporting about it. The conference will be unique in structure and diverse in its content and participants. The conference will combine reactions to previously written position papers, comments by practitioners, and analysis by scholars to develop action plans. At the conclusion of each day, interested conferees will meet in small groups with the conference planning team to formulate recommendations for action plans. Recorders will summarize each group's recommendations to be presented for comment during the final work session on the last day of the conference. The final product of the conference will be a position paper on each major theme. The conference will be enhanced by events such as receptions, a visit to C-SPAN, and guest speakers of relevance to the conference theme.

This paper focuses on the annual convention of the Speech Communication Association which will be held on December 1-4, 1977 in Washington, D.C. at the Sheraton Park Hotel. It will focus on the theme Anatomy of Purpose: A Center Which Holds. For example: one of the general sessions will ask: What Are the Key Concepts in Speech Communication? Herbert Simons will chair the program; Dennis Gouran, Wayne Brockriede and David H. Smith will present position papers and Marie Nichols and Samuel Becker will act as respondents. At least a dozen dimension, divisional and committee programs will focus on the convention theme. Washington as a Resource will be a thread throughout the program. The Committee on Accountability and Responsibility in Government Communication will sponsor a program featuring spokesmen for Common Cause, the U.S. Information Agency, the U.S. Civil Service Commission and the Fair Campaign Practices Committee. Concerns about increasing the range of job opportunities in the profession including one jointly sponsored by the Applied Communication Section, the Instructional Development Division and the Student Section, entitled Communication Training in Business, Industry and Government.

This article presents information on a National Communication Association Summer Conference titled, Communicating Politics: Engaging the Public in Campaign 2000 and Beyond to be held at Hyatt Regency Hotel Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. from June 22 to 24, 2000. It is co-sponsored by the Political Communication Center in University of Oklahoma and the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics in Iowa State University. The registration for this summer conference opens March 1. All registered attendees will be invited to submit position papers that relate to the topics for invited panels. Position papers will be discussed during break out sessions. Attendees developing papers will have their paper title and name appear in the conference program.

This article focuses on the four-day summer conference conducted by the Task Force on Technology and Communication of the U.S. National Communication Association on July 21 to 25, 1999 in the Washington, D.C. area. The first two days of the conference focused on information presentations. One day of the conference was held at Virginia Tech University's Northern Virginia Center. Participants saw competitively-selected displays of technology use, heard presentations on communications technology policy by Virginia Congress member Rick Boucher and on the history of and prospects for the Internet by Vinton Cerf, long recognized as one of the founders of the Internet. They also saw how Virginia Tech has reconfigured itself to bring technology use into all aspects of teaching and research on campus. The other conference sessions were conducted more traditionally. Mark Luker, Vice President of EDUCAUSE, the association for academic computing, presented a keynote address on prospects for technology in higher education. A variety of NCA members presented position papers on topics related to key technological issues, and these presentations were followed by lively discussion. Finally, the session chairs reported to the entire group on the issues that were raised, and conference participants spent the better part of a day refining those discussions into recommendations for NCA projects and policies.

This article reports on a tour of the National Digital Library at the Library Congress in Washington, D.C. being offered by the National Communication Association of the U.S. on July 21, 1999 as part of its summer conference events. Librarian of Congress James Billington summarizes the Library's mission as to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and people in the U.S. and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. The National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is a five-year program to assemble an initial core of U.S. historical and primary source material in digital form, selected for conversion from the Library's holdings of print and non-print materials. Rare books, pamphlets and papers provide valuable material for the study of historical events, periods and movements. Photographs, prints, maps, musical scores, sound recordings and moving images in various formats reflect trends and represent people and places. The NDLP must also provide convenient and effective access to the digital archive it assembles, access for a broad constituency of users, from scholarly researchers and professionals to college students and schoolchildren. The Library is faced with the challenge of applying technology as it performs its roles of library service to Congress and the protection of intellectual property rights, and its constitutional mandate to promote the progress of science and useful arts.