The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local institutions and organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; to enhance learning and innovation; and to support professional development.  

In the Knowledge Society of the 21st Century, digital content will be created, managed, preserved and disseminated within an infrastructure that is seamless and virtually invisible to users. The future digital environment will include digital representations of accumulated historical knowledge as well as vast amounts of new content. Future generations of users will build on this existing information and preserved digital content to create new knowledge and forms of expression. Libraries, museums, and archives are vital components of the emerging cyberinfrastructure.  

Cultural heritage institutions are developing digital repositories to manage and preserve collections converted from analog formats as well as those that are digital-only. They are also leading efforts to develop tools, standards, and best practices to improve the management, discovery, presentation, and use of digital content. IMLS provides grant opportunities to libraries, museums, archives, and institutions of higher education for research, demonstrationl, and implementation projects to enhance library and museum services and for programs to educate the next generations of library and museum professionals. IMLS grant programs that support cyberinfrastructure include:

National Leadership Grants

• Research and Demonstration Projects
• Building Digital Resources
• Library and Museum Collaborations
• Collaborative Planning Grants

Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program

HASTAC is a virtual university. It is a voluntary international network that spans disciplines, institutions, the boundary of higher education and K-12, libraries, museums and other civic and community institutions. It includes top research universities, underfunded community colleges, HBCU's and other minority-serving institutions, as well as supercomputing centers, grid computing centers and major scientific research labs in the U.S. and abroad. HASTAC is pronounced "haystack" and is an acronym for Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. Since 2003, HASTAC has been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums and other digital projects. HASTAC leaders have served as consultants to U.S. and international organizations and governments on grid computing and cyberinfrastructure.

In 2006-07, over eighty HASTAC centers worked together to produce courses, seminars, workshops and public events on the theme of "In|Formation." Topics in that theme were: InCommon, Interplay, InCommunity, Interaction, Injustice, Integration, Interface and Innovation. The project for 2007-08 is a series of ad hoc podcast Town Halls on any topic of social and political importance to new technologies. All podcasts will be advertised and archived on the HASTAC website. In addition, in 2007-08, HASTAC will host the Digital Media and Learning Competition, a $2 million competition sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of its initiative on Digital Media and Learning. To become part of HASTAC, simply register to the http://www.hastac.org/ website and contribute.

Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg are cofounders of HASTAC.

YouTube is releasing localized versions of its site. You can read more about it here on ZDNet.

Like Flickr, YouTube can be used by foreign language teachers as a great source for examples of authentic language around the world. However, like most massive international sites, the language tends to default to English. There is currently a search function by language if you know where to find it, but it's only about 50% accurate. The new localized versions should be much better about providing video and discussion in the target language.