John S. Erickson, Ph.D. has spent many years studying the unique social, legal, and technical problems that arise when managing and disseminating information in the digital environment. At HP Labs John has focused on the policy-based management of distributed, heterogeneous digital object repositories and content processing architectures. He has been an active participant in a number of international metadata and rights management standards efforts and currently serves on the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) advisory committee, the DSpace Architectural Review committee, the Handle System Technical Review committee and the Global Handle System Advisory Committee.