Can open learning digital repositories be sustained?

Whoa!  The NSDL is being cut off from funding?  What does this mean for the Ensemble CS Education Portal?  At the end of the article, the author suggests that MIT OpenCourseWare and Yale’s Open Courses are facing “questions of financial sustainability.”  How do we keep the digital equivalent to the public libraries open?

The National Science Digital Library had ambitious goals when it started in 2000: create a massive open repository of STEM learning materials culled from projects funded by its benefactor, the National Science Foundation; then organize these materials so that they could be easily cherry-picked and used by science and math instructors, from higher ed all the way down. The NSF poured well over $100 million into the project.

Just over a decade later, the science digital library is on death row. It is set to be stripped of all funds in 2012, “based in part on recent evaluation findings that point to the challenges of sustaining such a program in the face of changing technology and the ways educators now find and use classroom materials,” according to a foundation directorate issued in February.

via News: Cutting the Cord – Inside Higher Ed.