Mass Digitization to Create an Open Digital Library for Scholarly And Public Use

Maura Marx has founded the Digital Library Program at the Boston Public Library and has been instrumental in securing the Library's support of Open Content principles. Maura is also the Executive Director of the Open Knowledge Commons, who last week introduced the OKC. What is the OKC? It's a new organization born out of the Open Content Alliance and dedicated to advocacy for and development of an open digital library of human knowledge.

The following is an excerpt of the announcement first appeared in Open Access News:

"...In funding start-up operations for the Knowledge Commons the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation recognized the need to broaden the community's effectiveness beyond the research and development phase of mass digitization and to create a sustainable open digital library for scholarly and public use. This will be a very interactive session; comments and feedback on the OKC agenda will be encouraged and welcomed.

Maura...began her career in Europe doing development work in cultural heritage institutions and later worked in the U.S. technology sector before coming to libraries and the open content movement. She holds a B.A. in German from the University of Notre Dame, an M.A. in Italian from Middlebury College and an M.S.L.I.S. from Simmons College."

This is particularly important for teachers, since understanding participation in online communities is one of the important areas that will help educators and others who are interested in developing and maintaining effective learning communities.

Findings in Leadership at a distance: Research in technologically-supported work's book provide more clues about creating effective online participation, but we still have way much to learn. It is particularly important for us as Education professionals, to understand more about the relationship between online relationships and online community building. OKC is just a good example and a great project we expect have 100% positive results, as all Berkman Center for Internet & Scoiety Projects.


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