The impression I got from the presentation and the information here on this site is that this has all the hallmarks of a content provider push intitiative without aclear idea of who the users are and what they want to do (although memoryshare was a bit better in that respect)- and a point well made by Meredith Quinn in her presentation.

Issues of standards, formats and interoperability are universal but beginning to shake out a bit but have little influence on discoverability of e content per se, especially if it is to just find information (search engines can do that without formally linking repositories although you may want federated search for particular users/purposes). Where they are important is about reuse and remixing or adding user content or augmenting existing content. So are you wanting to do all these things and who do you want to participate as primary or secondary users. Is it individuals or groups or organisations? Or is it about just making the stuff ‘more’ available or in controlled ways and see what happens?

And the biggest barrier to people using stuff beyond just searching for information is not technical but a cultural one embedded in habits and formalised laws (especially about copyright)where value in most work is destroyed in the belief that content (= ideas) itself, rather than what people do with it is most important. In other words the extension or physical property law to intellectual ‘property’ is even less meaningful for virtual (digital) property where the economics of abundance not scarcity starts to kick in.

So it would be great to know more of the thinking behind the SCA as I am still struggling to see what will turn a worthy venture into a useful one.