One of the latest and most exciting collaborations is Sakai in which the University of
Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium,
and the Open Knowledge Initiative
(OKI) are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their
considerable educational software into a modular, pre-integrated
collection of open source tools. The result of this collaboration will
be an open and extensible architecture that specifies how the
components of an educational software environment communicate with each
other and with other enterprise systems. Sakai, advancing the model
started by OKI, provides a modular development platform for building
both traditional and innovative applications while leveraging existing
and future infrastructure technologies.Preservation is another issues that is extremely important to Keller and partners. Books, journals and other research materials in digital form are great for access but inferior to paper for preservation. Without better preservation methods, problems with unstable media, system obsolescence, format proliferation, and Web site abandonment could jeopardize the future usefulness of the wealth of digital resources now being created and widely used in colleges and universities. To answer these needs, Keller is initiating a centralized archival strategy, the Stanford Digital Repository, as well as a decentralized system called LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe). LOCKSS creates low-cost, persistent digital "caches" of authoritative versions of http-delivered content. The open-source LOCKSS software enables institutions to locally collect, store, preserve, and archive authorized content thus safeguarding their community's access to that content.
While Keller realizes it takes clear evangelism to promote his projects, the models and prototypes he and his partners have developed are bound to a very pragmatic approach. “Take this evangelism, coupled with models and prototypes and the facts, and you got some powerful arguments for people to shift their thinking.” But, he cautions that over-reliance on standards-based models can be problematic, “The difficulty with standards is they take a long time to get developed and the rate of change in our industry is moving too fast. You get bogged down and trapped by the past and this makes it hard to invent the future.” Keller clearly favors a more dynamic, evolutionary, approach.
