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In the UK, starting in 2002, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) began two influential funding programmes. One was the Exchange for Learning (X4L) Programme, which aimed to increase the practice of re-purposing of learning objects and content for educational purposes. The other was the Digital Libraries in the Classroom Programme which aimed to integrate currently available digital resources into core undergraduate teaching.At the heart of both of these programmes was the intent to help UK institutions to build capacity to manage change, to acquire the skills needed to make informed decisions about adopting digital content within their core programmes and to understand the impact of this integration on student achievement, retention, recruitment and on institutional structures and practices. These were indeed highly ambitious programmes, and as they come to the end of their funding it seems appropriate to reflect on the achievement of these projects and others like them.In 2006 JISC helped fund a workshop on "Critical Success Factors for Institutional Change" (CSFIC '06) which was co-located with the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL '06). The papers in this special issue have emerged from this workshop. The intention is to present a range of experience papers which explain the issues that these projects have faced in making real and permanent change happen within their curricula. The papers are not intended to respond to the research agenda of any particular domain, but rather the authors were encouraged to tell the story as it happened, in language that should be clear and unambiguous to University managers and practitioners from all disciplines.The seven papers presented here represent a range of projects, and present the problems of embedding change from number of different view points.Three of the papers (Breslin et al.) (Davis and Fill) (Donald and Wallace) discuss the problems of embedding funded projects from an institutional management point of view. Three of the papers discuss the same project: Davis and Fill represents the view for the Institutional management point of view, another (Martin and Treves) represents the view of the departmental/subject leadership, and a third paper (Durham and Arrell) examines the challenges and benefits of cross institutional collaboration from faculty point of view. It is informative to observe the extent to which these viewpoints differ; the casual reader might not even notice that these papers discuss the same project.While most of the projects are concerned with how the work of a funded project will be sustained after funding is completed, Cook et al. describe work on re-usable learning objects at London Metropolitan University that has matured into a funded project (The RLO-CETL).

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