The document discusses the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE), which is a framework that aims to improve discovery, access, use and publishing of resources across UK higher and further education. It focuses on item banks, which are repositories that store learning items and associated resources, and make them available through standards like OAI-PMH and SRU. The document argues that item banks should assign persistent URIs to stored items, expose simple Dublin Core metadata for harvesting via OAI-PMH, and optionally provide search and news feeds to help discover and share learning items according to JISC IE and Web 2.0 principles.