It is with great pleasure that CNI joins EDUCAUSE and ARL in
announcing that Tim Berners-Lee will be the first recipient
of the Paul Evan Peters award.  The award will be presented
at the closing plenary session of the Spring CNI Task Force
meeting on March 28.

--Joan Lippincott

--------------------------------------------------------

Berners-Lee Receives Paul Evan Peters Award for Founding World Wide Web

February 28, 2000 -- Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee will soon be honored as
the first recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award, which recognizes
notable, lasting achievements in the use of networked communications to
advance scholarship and intellectual productivity.

Presented by the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE,
sponsoring organizations of the Coalition for Networked Information
(CNI), the award honors the memory and accomplishments of Paul Evan
Peters (1947-1996), founding executive director of CNI.  CNI, with some
200 institutional members, promotes the creation and use of networked
information resources and services that advance scholarship and
intellectual productivity.

Berners-Lee is widely recognized as the creator of the World Wide Web,
which opened the Internet to the world.  He is a uniquely appropriate
choice as the first recipient of the award: in the course of more than a
decade he developed a vision and a design for the Web and brought it to
life, creating a capability that would revolutionize communication.

He designed the first version of the protocol for transmitting
information on the Web (Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP), the first
version of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), devised the method for
addressing documents on the Web (later known as Universal Resource
Locators, or URLs), and developed the first Web server and the first Web
browser, which was also an editor.  His creation has changed the way
people communicate and work together worldwide.

In his current role as director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),
Berners-Lee continues to encourage the development of open
specifications to enhance the functionality of the Web as a mode of free
expression and global communication.  W3C, a non-profit,
member-sponsored organization, is headquartered at MIT's Laboratory for
Computer Science (LCS), at the National Institute for Research in
Computer Science and Control (INRIA) in France, and Keio University in
Japan.  Berners-Lee serves as principal research scientist at MIT/LCS,
which he joined in 1994.

Berners-Lee received the Kilby Foundation's Young Innovator of the Year
award for 1995.  In 1998 he was named one of 29 MacArthur Fellows,
receiving $270,000 in this unrestricted "genius grant" program.  He is
the author of Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny
of the World Wide Web by its Inventor.
 
Berners-Lee will accept the Paul Evan Peters Award and give the award
address as the closing plenary presentation at the CNI Spring Task Force
meeting in Washington, D.C., on March 28.  The award will be presented
by Clifford A. Lynch, executive director of CNI, and Brian L. Hawkins,
president of EDUCAUSE.

"It's rare that we have an opportunity to honor someone who has had such
a powerful and multifaceted impact, not just within the academic world
but on our society as a whole," commented Hawkins.  "Tim's creativity
and his commitment to developing the Web as a vehicle for open
communication are remarkable."

Speaking from the perspective of the library community, ARL Executive
Director Duane E. Webster noted that "Tim Berners-Lee, like Paul
Peters, recognized the potential of the Internet for access to content
at a time when the Net was primarily a communications channel.  His
vision of establishing a web of links between and among discrete pieces
of information, allowing researchers to create and share new knowledge,
has had a profound and long-lasting impact on scholarship."

Paul Evan Peters was a visionary and a coalition builder in higher
education and scholarly communication, providing new insights and
direction to the world of networked information for librarians,
technologists, and publishers.  He was named one of the 100 most
important leaders in 20th century librarianship in the December 1999
issue of American Libraries magazine, published by the American
Library Association.

"My friend Paul would have been absolutely delighted to know that
Tim had been selected as the first recipient of this award,"
observed Lynch.  "The Web has had a transforming effect on
scholarship and on our society as a whole; it has created entire
new industries.  Tim's long-standing commitment not only to
furthering the standards and technologies underlying the Web, but
to understanding and shaping the broader social implications make
him an extraordinary figure in the networked information age."

The award program established in his memory is supported by an
endowment from ARL, EDUCAUSE, Microsoft Corporation, and Xerox
Corporation.

The mission of the Association of Research Libraries is to shape and
influence forces affecting the future of research libraries in the
process of scholarly communication.

EDUCAUSE is an international, nonprofit association whose mission is
to help shape and enable transformational change in higher education
through the introduction, use, and management of information resources
and technologies in teaching, learning, scholarship, research, and
institutional management.

For more information about Paul Evan Peters and this award as well as
its sponsoring organizations see
<http://www.educause.edu/awards/pep/pep.html>.


CONTACT:
Karen McBride, EDUCAUSE
303-939-0313
kmcbride@educause.edu