The catalogue web tool will enable education institutions and school districts to find and connect to standards-based content and learning applications through their enterprise course-management system or portal. The freely available, web-accessible catalogue will enable faculty, teachers, and students to find a wide variety of standards-based digital learning materials and applications such as ancillary textbook assets, e-Books, study aids, and homework applications.

The Digital Learning Connection (DLC) is a new collaboration, announced last November, in which digital learning application and content providers are working together to enable access and installation of a wide variety of products and services using a common set of standards-based protocols and formats.

This new program is designed to make it easier for faculty, professors, teachers, and IT staff to incorporate digital learning applications and content into course websites. Institutions and school districts in the US could begin piloting the approach as early as this coming autumn.

The committed sponsors of the project, providing financial and technical resources are Pearson Education, Cengage Learning, ANGEL Learning, Desire2Learn, and Follett Corporation.

The catalogue web tool will be developed and supported as a web service by Giunti Labs based on the HarvestRoad Hive digital repository. The approach encompasses a variety of open standards for digital learning content and applications - including IMS Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), as well as open application programming interfaces that allow any compliant learning system or portal to interact with the catalogue.