 Once you have metadata recorded, the next step is to put it to work. There are lots of internal applications within most institutions that can benefit from this information, particularly in the use of search engines and navigation. But perhaps the greatest benefit is interoperability. Sometimes it appears that hooking your projects up to the larger network of educational content providers requires fairly regular proactive work. There are some elements of this that are that way, but when it comes to technical interoperability, if it is set up the right way at the start, relationships can happen effortlessly and organically. Let me provide an example. Members of the OCW Consortium, or content producers, who publish their courses in one of a few variations of XML-based feeds like RSS, Adam or RDFA, can share the URL to their feed with us. At this point, the content producer does not have to do anything else besides just keep those feeds in operation. We have a computer process that will look at these feeds, record all the information contained therein, and index it in a database. We then use this database to power a search engine for individuals to find OCW courses. We also publish our own feed called an OPML feed, which basically is a list of all the RSS feeds of our members. Our OPML feed is available for other tools to use to find content sources without having to find them all individually. CC Learn has a great prototype search engine called DiscoverEd, which takes this a step further. Among other resources, they are using our OPML feed as a reference to include content. DiscoverEd utilizes the same indexing technology to capture the metadata contained within those RSS feeds. After indexing the data from our feed, they also programmatically read the web page to gather more information than just what was included in our feed. We actually plan to migrate our integrated search engine to use the DiscoverEd service. These kinds of interoperating relationships will flourish as more and more providers are publishing a basic level of metadata. So what is a basic level? Well, what is considered basic or standard or best practice will vary based on the community in which you wish to participate. But for this presentation, I'll simply illustrate the current climate of the open courseware community. The OCWC supports RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Adam, and RDFA. A feed in any of those formats will be interpreted and stored correctly in our database. DiscoverEd recommends using a combination of RDFA and XHTML, but they are able to read somewhat comfortably those other formats as well. The following constitutes the OCW Consortium's best practice guidelines for publishing courses through an RSS feed. Channel tags represent the top level of your feed, which would be your institution. So this is not specific to a course. These are the general items that are related to the institution itself, like the title of the feed, a link to the homepage of the site, the description of the feed. Items would be all of the courses, and we'll cover that in a minute. Date, publisher, which would be the name of the institution or the OCW site, and then the primary language of the feed. Items would represent courses or resources that you're publishing. And so obviously we have some mandatory fields like the course title, a link to the URL. We use that link in order to refer people back to your site when they find it in our search engine. A description is useful so that people have a brief abstract. The general idea would be to do something along the lines of a course catalog that you might use in print if you're trying to decide whether or not you wanted to take that course. You need to read something about the topic that it covers. A subject would be topics or keywords. You could do multiple entries of this, so as many keywords as you find appropriate that are, you know, subjects that are covered in that course, the better it will be, the more effective it will be. Creator would be, typically we'd be looking for the creator to be represented, either creator or author, represented as the person who created the course. And that would be usually your professor. Publishers, again the name of the OCW site and the date it was published. There are other optional fields that can be useful too, but the mandatory fields are what we're primarily concerned with as a basic level. The most software platforms that are currently being used to publish open courseware are supportive of these recommendations without modification. They will produce RSS feeds that will be as good as the information you capture as you produce the courses. Beyond these basic elements, recording and publishing more metadata will create even more possibilities. More advanced and coordinated efforts could enable many exciting applications. So we're just hoping that we can have more people kind of adopt these standards and start publishing that metadata. Summary metadata is a crucial element of leveraging technology to improve our ability to maintain, find, use and share educational content. It begins with the basic level of standardization to tap into existing tools and resources and then creating new opportunities through increased richness as we add on some of those optional things. We offer some additional resources for those who are looking to learn more information about metadata as it applies to open courseware and we encourage you to visit these resources at your leisure. Thank you.