UK's Digital Aquifer

Here we have a cooperative project among several British agencies to develop a usable content-sharing framework for "Memory Institutions," e.g. universities, museums, the BBC, and other sources of public information. It's called the Common Information Environment, or perhaps the metaphorical name Digital Aquifer, and you can peruse the details here.

The CIE is not a new search engine or portal to all knowledge, says CIE director Paul Miller: "Rather, it is collaborative work towards a culture in which existing and future organizations presume the need to be joined up to be part of the digital aquifer of national interest information from the outset, and work for that, rather than continuing the trend of building multitudinous silos of data, each fronted by a different Web interface, and each ignorant of related data in neighboring silos." (Ariadne Apr 2004) ShelfLife, No. 159 (June 3 2004) http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/miller/

Seems like a good idea to me.

The journal this appears in is also worth exploring/bookmarking. Check out Ariadne, published quarterly by the Council for Museums, Archives, and Libraries in the UK...and maybe tell me how to pronounce it.