The SURWEB digital archive experienced dynamic growth from its inception.  After its launch in 1997, SURWEB accelerated the acquisition and development of content by soliciting competitive grants called “site awards” to curriculum designers who then developed “Media Shows.”  Media Shows address classroom tasks in much the same way that lesson plans address tasks.  SURWEB users can choose to publish their Media Shows for the public, thus sharing research and content with other teachers and students in the SURWEB on-line community.  The sharing of Media Shows is an important “public access” function of SURWEB that builds and sustains a community of learners, offers students a wider audience for publishing, and keeps the database of learning products vital and dynamic (http://www.surweb.org/search/ms_classroom.asp).

The concept of “Learning Segments” was introduced as a new component of SURWEB in 1999. Learning Segments can be defined as "extended Media Shows."  Learning Segments address standards-based learning strategies and are more comprehensive curriculum tools because they include goals, tasks, outcomes and assessments that can be linked to standards and used to address whole units of study across the curriculum (http://www.surweb.org/LS/classroom.asp). 

Toward this end, Learning Segment Development projects are selected based on a set of quality assurance criteria and site need.  SURWEB disseminates a request for proposals for educators who wish to develop and publish information resources for teachers. Selected proposals receive Learning Segment Development awards, which underwrite the cost of development.  In addition, Learning Segments are subjected to a rigorous quality assurance process.  The Utah State Office of Education partners with SURWEB to ensure that Learning Segments are linked to the Utah Core content and performance standards.  Learning Segments ensure that SURWEB content is field-tested; provide an important quality assurance component to SURWEB; and serve as a grass-roots strategy to disseminate and promote the use of SURWEB.

Teachers and students who develop SURWEB content are required to register and obtain a password in order to store their presentations on the SURWEB server.  SURWEB users can also choose whether or not to publish on the site.  Some users prefer to keep their presentations private.  In the three years that the SURWEB project has been widely available on-line, it has registered over 21,146 users who have created more than 20,922 media shows from 237 different collections of media objects representing over 50,000 multimedia source materials, mostly images (Spendlove, 2000).

Both formal and informal educational needs are served by SURWEB.  The types of Media Shows, Tests, and Learning Segments are divided into three broad categories: 1) “Classroom”, that is, resources focused on the specific needs of the classroom; 2) “Community”, that is, informal educational content of broad community interest which may or may not have relevance for formal education. The Classroom and Community Media Shows are published for use by the entire on-line community of SURWEB users, thus serving a public access function. The SURWEB database contains over 746 public Media Shows built by hundreds of educators and their students.  In addition, educators have published 115 Learning Segments and contributed 162 tests to the SURWEB collection and the number is growing (Spendlove, 2000).  The “Personal/Private” category refers to creations that owners do not wish to publish and share publicly most of the 20,922 media shows are in this category.

The SURWEB archive was created through partnerships with local, state and national agencies such as the state and national park system and Utah educational agencies.  For example, the Utah Education Network shares its multimedia collection of over 5,000 images of Utah with SURWEB users.  SURWEB continues to negotiate with content partners who contribute collections and clear copyright so that multimedia materials can be made available to teachers and students. 

SURWEB also reaches out to partners beyond the state of Utah.  In 2000, SURWEB partnered with the Library of Congress to link The American Memory: Historical Collections from the National Digital Library.  In addition, the iMatrix program, a national consortium of school improvement and educational technology agencies is under development with strategic partners across the United States.  These partners will use the Eye 2 Eye media server, an application developed by SURWEB, to load and showcase their own multimedia archives on the Web, thus consolidating and centralizing digital source materials for access by teachers and students (http://www.i2iserver.org/).  The ease of access and the vast, supplementary capability of the Eye to Eye tool and the iMatrix network is especially important for rural schools and far beyond the capabilities of their local media libraries and textbooks.