A really great talk by Clifford Lynch.  Given what we are trying to do at the Interactive University with the University Library and with the University Art Museum, I was particularly intrigued to read:

All of these efforts are producing numerous large collections of material, databases which are open to exploration and presentation in dozens of different directions. These are collections - raw material. The focus is on creating large amounts of digital content and providing some fairly simple access tools, rather than upon sophisticated systems for ongoing use or apparatus providing interpretation. Now, what's interesting to me is to contrast this to so much of the public interest rhetoric which speaks not just to raw materials but to learning materials, to the need to package raw content from collections up in various ways such as learning experiences or curated exhibitions or interpretation and analysis. We need to study the lines of demarcation between raw cultural heritage materials, if you will, and interpretation or teaching, or presentations of these materials. This is a boundary line that I don't think we really have a very clear understanding of. It gets to the historic mission differences among museums, libraries and archives, and the growing confusion about those distinctions in the digital world; it involves the historical and perhaps changing roles of scholars, teachers, curators, and librarians. It invites questions about which audiences or user communities we are teaching to use uninterpeted databases of raw cultural heritage materials, and the methods we are teaching them to use in exploiting these resources. We have to ask questions about just how "interpretation-neutral" a collection of raw materials can really be - surely, for example, interpretation creeps into the descriptive metadata; as my friend and colleague Michael Buckland has pointed out, the changes in practice in the construction and assignment of subject headings over the past century is a window into many social changes that have taken place during that period.

But I think that we can identify a series of trends that may lead us to a world of digital collections - databases of relatively raw cultural heritage materials, for example - and then layers of interpretation and presentation built upon these databases and making reference to objects within them. Probably we'll see interpretations that draw from many digital collections, and single digital collections contributing materials to many different interpretations. While I think that libraries, archives, museums, and the higher education community will be among the major creators of digital collections, the creators of presentations and interpretations of materials from these collections will be much more numerous and diverse.

Also some interesting thoughts about reusability:

We know that we want our digital collections to be reusable, though I suspect that there is little consensus on what reusability really means. I think that we believe that collections of lasting value have the characteristics of reusability. Part of reusability or re-purposing clearly is the ability to contribute, over time, to a large array of interpretations or presentations of materials for many different audiences and purposes within the context I've just described. In essence, it's the ability to have collections be overlayed in various ways. We have very limited experience with reusability and repurposing today. And right now our thinking about overlays is still in its infancy: we think about union catalogs, cross collection finding aids, new teaching or analytical works that make reference to objects in digital collections. As I'll discuss later, I think we are beginning to get a glimpse of much more sophisticated re-use and re-purposing that has deep implications of both markup of digitized objects and the metadata that accompanies them, however. Indeed, accommodating overlay may be too limited a way to describe the full range of repurposing that we'll want to facilitate.

And about metadata:

For instance, I think there's a mental picture that many of us have that digitization is something you do and you finish, in the sense that when you digitize a photograph this is a finite, one-time process and as a result you have an image file, or you convert a book into marked-up text. But when we consider objects with mark-up, I'm starting to think that we're going to need to revisit this mark-up periodically as our understand of mark-up evolves, and our capabilities to apply mark-up economically also evolve. There are going to be layers of mark-up. In fact, we may need to be thinking about representations for things like contingent or speculative mark-up, mark-up with confidence levels and provenance.

There's lot more, but I hope that these quotes will encourage you to read the paper!