Digest of a Symposium sponsored by the Nat. Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in cooperation with the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Soc. and the Optical Soc. of Amer. The Symposium consists of 10 invited and 34 contributed papers. Recent events have brought multimode fiber issues back into the measurement arena. Polarization-mode dispersion continues to be a topic of much interest with 2 full sessions devoted to a variety of subtopics in the field. Fiber geometry has several contributions, as does the broad topic of fiber mapping with length (including such parameters as chromatic dispersion and polarization properties).