Nicholas Carr's new piece in The Atlantic (July/Aug 2008) raises provoking questions about the effect of the internet on human cognition and progress. Are we embracing artificial intelligence at the expense of human intelligence?

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.

First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer-reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet. Since its start in May 1996, First Monday has published 613 papers in 109 issues; these papers were written by 725 different authors. Edward J. Valauskas is Chief Editor of First Monday. See especially the June 2005 issue, "Teaching and Learning with Digital Resources: Web-Wise 2005."