Digtial content's availability has created opportunities for universities and publishers to improve the marketplace, motivating the development of an education electronic marketplace and reshaping how academic institutions view information discovery, evaluation, and acquisition. As a first step toward designing such a system, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) and IBM collaborated in developing a framework that IBM designers used to build a prototype ede-marketplace. Evaluation in a field test indicated that this framework offers a trusted environment that is suitable for use in the secure creation, management, and delivery of digital content. Testing in real situations helped the researchers understand business rules and services that the system must provide for each user.