Six of the world's most renowned educational and cultural institutions -- including libraries, museums and universities -- have joined together with a for-profit online venture, Fathom, billed as "the premier site for knowledge and education on the Internet."
The initial Fathom partners are the British Library, Cambridge University Press, Columbia University in New York, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the New York Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.
Fathom will include some free content and a large amount of fee-based material, including its own college-level courses and other materials.
(This is in contrast to the recent $100 million pledge by Michael Saylor, founder and president of MicroStrategy, who wants to provide a free, "Ivy League-quality" education to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.)
One of the Internet's primary drawbacks is the lack of authentication for much existing online material, according to a statement from Columbia University officials. All the material on Fathom will be attributed to specific institutions and their faculty or staff, and will be overseen by a panel of senior faculty and curators.
The site will feature a directory of online courses offered by universities and cultural institutions, textbooks and related academic materials, periodicals, articles and other publications, CD-ROMs, and learning resources. While users will register for the online courses through Fathom, tuition, accreditation, and admissions will be set by the individual member organizations.
Given the wide variety of material that will be presented -- much of which hasn't previously been available outside the specific schools, libraries and museums -- the site will be "far more than another distance learning site," said Fathom President and CEO Ann Kirschner, Ph.D.
"We are creating a vibrant 'main street' for knowledge and education. We intend to go beyond the current limits of information sites scattered across the web and also go beyond online initiatives from individual schools," Kirschner said.
Initial Fathom offerings will include:
an oral history research project from Columbia University that includes 7,000 interviews conducted over 50 years with such diverse people as Nikita Khrushchev, Dorothy Parker, Jimmy Stewart and Frank Lloyd Wright;
an overview of the new astrobiology field presented by Cambridge University Press that features the search for extraterrestrial life, planetary science and molecular life sciences;
a discussion of "The Weightless Economy" by London School of Economics and Political Science Professor Danny Quah;
the British Library's multimedia presentation of objects including the Magna Carta and the Lindisfarne Gospels.
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http://www.fathom.com/pressreleases/04032000.html
