Introduction

The World Wide Web is an unprecedented, immediate, low-cost connection among the people of the world. The Web is already revolutionizing many industries, such as book selling, but as a resource for education, its potential remains largely untapped.

In particular, there has been comparatively little effort to develop knowledge archives on the Web. Part of the reason might be the conflicting interests of traditional publishers (although a few publishers have moved on-line). A related reason is the lack of economic incentives for such work: such projects must be locally funded, while the benefits are globally distributed--there is no United Nations ``world education organization'' devoted to developing free, global, educational resources. A third impediment is the retooling necessary for authors to place content on the Web in a way that takes best advantage of the medium.

It is not sufficient merely to scan printed documents and place them on the Web as images. Scanned images are opaque to search engines and do not contain hypertext links. Document sources must therefore be converted to a native on-line format such as HTML. Only then can search engines index their content and links be provided to supporting information. Without indexing and links, the power of the Web as an educational medium is largely wasted.

The retooling required of authors is well worth the effort. By leveraging the Web, educators can incorporate the very best resources world-wide by means of simple links in their on-line documents. As an example of the enormous building opportunities, MIT has announced its OpenCourseware initiative for making the materials for nearly all its courses freely available on the Internet over the next ten years. The Hewlett and Mellon Foundations, in particular, have jointly awarded $11M to fund the first two years of this project. The ability of educators to conveniently knit together the best educational resources on the Web, wherever they may happen to be in the world, has never before existed. The Web provides the largest leap in self-education technology since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. However, it is presently very time consuming to find and utilize globally available resources for on-line education.

In the new world of globally interconnected documents, there will be little point in doing anything half way. The most precious resource will be, as it is today, the attention of the reader. There will be less use for redundant or second-rate treatments. Authors will be compelled to specialize more narrowly and to increase their focus more intensely so that their contributions will be uniquely excellent on a global scale. It will become increasingly difficult to ``serve knowledge'' in the global milieu of competing expertise. Of course, for the learner, this is the ideal situation.

The growth rate of on-line educational resources is currently far greater than that of the ability of educators to find and utilize them. There is therefore a need for a facility which accelerates the process of finding and using on-line educational resources. The Open Dictionary is dedicated to this need.