The Open Content Alliance (OCA), created in 2005 to bring books and other material online, currently comprises more than 80 members--universities, public libraries, and commercial companies working together and embracing the values of openness central to the tradition of the creation of the Internet. Our goal is to build a digital archive of global content for universal access.

For thousands of years, humans have been putting their knowledge in books to pass on for future generations. Today, we have to have these materials in digital form, and we have to have them in a form where we can access and use them in new and different ways, as an engine for research, learning, and discovery, even if in ways not originally intended. I think that so far, as a culture, we have been negligent in our responsibility to perform this task: not because we don't have the materials, but because we haven't put them into the formats that new generations expect.

NCTE--The National Council of Teachers of English--has assembled an excellent set of resources to help educators think about literacy as going well beyond print texts, encompassing how texts are produced and how multimodal forms of representation convey meaning. According to the introduction to the site, "NCTE is taking the lead in defining how emergent technologies are used to teach language, literacies and critical thinking skills as well as how ethical considerations can guide the use of various technologies."

The site includes some "research-based policy statements" that some may find surprising:

The Humanist List calls attention to the new edition of a Scandinavian journal, Human IT, which includes some work in English, notably an essay by Daniel Paul O'Donnell. O'Donnell discusses his editing of the Old English poem Caedmon's Hymn  based on "SGML-encoded diplomatic transcriptions of all twenty-one known witnesses to the poem." O'Donnell attempted to create a filter that allowed readers to choose different features and versions of the text. But in this essay, O'Donnell rethinks the need for the human editor and discusses "a system in which the computer would generate, but a human edit, the final display texts presented to the reader."

O'Donnell moves toward  the somewhat obvious point that "technical advances of the last eight years have greatly improved our ability to extract and manipulate textual data--and our ability to build editions in ways simply impossible in print." But he finds particular significance in meeting his original two goals: "a method for avoiding reinputting primary source documents" and "a description of the locus of editorial activity." O'Donnell concludes with an intriguing note for producers and consumers of digital tets: "in an increasingly collaborative and interactive scholarly world, it appears that the ghost in the machine may reside in the stylesheet."