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A meeting will be held from 11am until 1pm on the 17th of June at the CVCP, 20 Tavistock Square, London to discuss the HE Shopping Mall project. Members of the steering group and the consultants appointed to produce the tender document (to be released shortly) will be in attendance. The consultants will give a presentation and there will be an opportunity to ask questions. The financial and organisational framework has now been decided. It is envisaged that HE Mall will form a virtual reference site on the internet acting as a portal enabling easy access to related sites and easy return back to HE Mall. The Mall itself will act as a conduit to guide users to the most relevant internet sites from across the Higher Education sector to meet their specific needs. It will not in itself take over the role of other sites or dictate their content or format. It will act as a powerful search engine directing users to the full range of relevant information available from contributing sites on the world wide web. The HE Mall will be broken down into a series of zones which will be focussed on particular topics or areas of interest and that access to other sites will be via one or more of these zones based on a standard protocol to be developed. Appropriate sponsorship and connections to relevant commercial sites will be used to generate income with the expectation that the project becomes self financing once it is fully up and running (expected to be in 2002-03). The steering group now need to hear the views and opinions of the university web community on the implementation of the project. A lunch will be provided after the meeting. It is strongly advised that each institution send a representative to attend this meeting. Those wishing to attend should email [log in to unmask] with the names and contact details of people who will be attending so we can organise an appropriately sized venue at the CVCP and cater for the correct numbers. Damon Querry. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%