There is a massive movement in content acquisition and management. Old uncopywrited materials are being scanned and placed into digital media. In some cases they are being opened up to the public.

Here is a nice story on NPR that brings a piece of this movement into perspective.

The basic premise behind content management is that intellectual capital of a firm can be stored and managed in some unified manner. Simple. The reality is that firms have huge loads of non-standardized content on all sorts of media ranging from the more manageable text and visual media (digital media being especially manageable) to the least manageable audio and tacit knowledge content.

I frequently try out and contribute to a variety of open-source online community-type tools including Mambo, Tiki-wiki, Drupal (a commercial version of Drupal = Acquia ), and Moodle. I have several currently installed and use some of them for testing out comparative features.

Several guides on the Web provide discussions of the various tools available. Here are links to some of them:

This one is by technology platform: http://www.la-grange.net/cms