From left: Alex Chapin, Tim Berners-Lee (award presenter), Adam Franco and Carrie Rampp

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - Middlebury College is one of nine institutions to receive the prestigious Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration (MATC) earlier this month. Middlebury received the award for its development of Segue, an open source curricular content management system used by the college’s students, faculty and staff.  Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium and inventor of the World Wide Web, presented the awards at a meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information on Dec. 10 in Washington, D.C.

Middlebury College Principal Curricular Technologist Alex Chapin received the award on behalf of the college. Adam Franco, lead developer of the next version of Segue, and Carrie Rampp, director of resource development and services for Middlebury’s Library and Information Services department, also attended the event. “This award is a great tribute to our contribution to open source software development and to the development of standards for systems inter-operability,” said Rampp. “We believe this is a real key to the next generation of development, if institutions want to take advantage of all the work happening in the open source community.”

Segue was developed to give faculty, staff and students an easy way to create Web sites for teaching, learning and research.  “What distinguishes Segue from other course and learning management systems,” said Chapin, “is its flexibility, ease of use and integration of emerging technologies such as wikis, blogging and podcasting.”

The MATC award committee, which chose the recipients, was comprised of several leading figures in the field of information technology, including Berners-Lee, Mitchell Baker, chief executive officer of Mozilla Corporation; John Seely Brown, former chief scientist for Xerox Corp.; Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, Inc.; John Gage, chief researcher and director of the science office for Sun Microsystems, Inc.; and Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media.

The MATC awards were created to honor not-for-profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities, as well as cultural heritage not-for-profit activities. Other winners included Duke University, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the American Museum of the Moving Image and the University of Toronto. For more information on the MATC awards, click here.