Universities, libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural heritage agencies are investing heavily in exposing more of their content via the Web:

• MIT made headlines worldwide by promising to make freely available materials from its courses in the OpenCourseWare (OCW) project.
• The UT Austin Knowledge Gateway Initiative is aimed at providing digital Knowledge to all Texans.
• The Museums and the Online Archive of California is aimed at "providing access to collections held by archives, museums, and libraries throughout the state of California."

Making content available is only the first step in a long process in how universities, libraries, and museums can share their knowledge. Right now, users can look at digital content (texts, images, video) but cannot easily handle them as malleable, reusable pieces that work together regardless of data type or data origin.

This talk explores how emerging technologies of the "second generation Web" increase the flexibility and reusability of content stored in digital libraries and educational software, enabling content and ideas to flow among software of the users choice. Yee also presents a prototype of the "Scholar's Box" (being built at UC Berkeley) that will enable users to gather digital materials from disparate archives, annotate the materials and then create new documents from the source materials. A key goal of the Scholar's Box is to break down data silos that will emerge in the world of cultural digital objects to promote practical interoperability in a sea of data heterogeneity.

Yee provides additional background: "As I was finishing my Ph.D. in biophysics on the Berkeley campus, I became deeply interested in K-12 education, deciding to work as educator rather than as a scientist. The Interactive University Project, whose goal to use the internet to make the community and content of UC Berkeley available to K-12 teachers, appealed to not only my convictions about what a great university can and should do -- but also to the technical visionary in me as I design a system to exactly that.

"I think that there are incredible, untapped opportunities for two communities to learn and work together: those of the educational/cultural heritage world of higher education, museums, and libraries and that of the alpha geeks (to use Tim O'Reilly's affectionate term). For example, MIT has promised to give to the world, free of charge, learning materials from all of its courses through the OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. OCW alone is a great development, especially for those of us who want more knowledge to be freely accessible. But what's really exciting is what people will do with the course materials. All that rich material will be ready for people to use -- but so far, there are next to no tools to exploit it. Here, I think, is where alpha geeks have a role to play. Whole courses are great -- but how does one use bits and pieces of courses and mix them with all the other services and content on the Web, say linking to Amazon for related books and drawing on Wikipedia for encyclopedic synopses? Can we find easy ways to drop just the right part of a OCWcourse into a weblog? Can we build communities of learners around OCW? We need the alpha geeks to apply what they have already done with RSS syndication, weblogging, P2P, and screen-scraping to exploit these materials. How will we incorporate images coming from, say, the Museums and the Online Archive of California (MOAC) -- recently featured in Wired Magazine -- with OCW materials? Course materials may not be as cool as the chart-toppers in mp3 but they can be equally or more significant. As commercial interests continue to lock content down into their money-making silos, I'm holding out hope that the wealth of open materials generated by universities, libraries, and museums will be a powerful counterweight to the privitization of thought and creative expression in our society.

"My talk will certainly touch upon the question of the long-term sustainability of making content freely available. In some cases, what does not make sense on superficial analysis turns out to make eminent sense. For example, many have been puzzled by why MIT would give away its course materials for free. MIT faculty Hal Abelson eloquently argued that OCW is actually aligned with MIT's mission because 'digitial distribution increasingly commoditizes content,' which helps MIT focus on its core strengths ('residential education'). Moreover, ''Giving it away' helps defuse complex intellectual property issues of ownership and control that can otherwise distract the university from its mission to disseminate knowledge.' I suspect that there are salient parallels in this area to the development of good business models for open source software -- and I look forward to hearing about such models at the conference.