From the Proceedings Editors
Bill Kasson and Ray Quay	Author Info

Publishing the 1999 Proceedings, Approaching the Millenium, on CD-ROM presented unique opportunities and challenges. The ability to deliver a large amount of material in a small and inexpensive package will greatly enhance the sharing of information and ideas among professional planners. This year we are not only providing the Proceedings of the 1999 conference, but the proceedings of the 1997 and 1998 conferences as well. In addition, on this CD-ROM, the APA is providing a copy of the Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook, and Intergraph is providing their GeoMedia Viewer software. With all conference participants receiving a copy of the CD-ROM, this concept clearly provides more for less and in a very small package that will be easy to carry home.

Preparing the submissions for publication on a CD-ROM useable on both Macintosh and PC platforms was a new experience for the editors. The majority of submissions were prepared for print media. Converting these files to HTML format for viewing with an Internet browser required some reformatting and conversion of images, graphics, and tables to a browser-compatible format. The resulting documents differ somewhat from the printed versions but every effort has been made to maintain the integrity of the original document. The appearance of the proceedings may vary from computer to computer.

The large capacity of a CD-ROM allows a virtually unlimited number of papers to be published in the proceedings. If this medium proves to be popular, every effort should be made to take advantage of the available space by including as many papers as possible as well as other items of interest to planners. Production timelines are tight and session moderators can help by being aggressive in soliciting papers from speakers in their sessions. Certainly there are many papers that will be presented at the conference this year that were not included on this CD-ROM. These papers can be included in the on-line version of the proceedings after the conference.

Thanks to all the authors who took the time to prepare papers for these proceedings, and for the extra effort involved in preparing them for electronic publishing. Thanks also to Sally Lambertson, Karen Fernandez, and Renee Kaiser for their help in contacting authors and soliciting papers.

Sincerely,

Bill Kasson and Ray Quay

Just a few comments on the technical aspects of the proceedings:

The articles are all provided in HTML, written for HTML 3.0 compliance. They should work with Internet Explorer Versions 3 and higher and Netscape Versions 3 and higher. Some JavaScript is used for navigation buttons and in some cases to open secondary browser windows to display oversize graphics. The pages are designed to be viewed on at least a 800 x 600 display, though they will display at lower resolutions, some tables and graphics will be difficult to view. The search engine is a client side JavaScript Application.