About the collection

M. David Merrill spent a career asking a deceptively simple question: what actually makes instruction work? His answers — Component Display Theory, Instructional Transaction Theory, the Pebble-in-the-Pond model, and finally the First Principles of Instruction — shaped how generations of designers approach adult learning, corporate training and performance improvement.

That body of work is scattered. Papers sit behind different publishers, keynote recordings live on separate platforms, slide decks and lecture notes circulate privately, and the growing literature that extends, applies or critiques Merrill's principles is spread across a dozen fields. This library exists to gather it in one catalogue.

What belongs here

• Works authored or co-authored by M. David Merrill, in any medium.
• Research, whitepapers, and practitioner accounts that apply, test, extend, or critique his frameworks.
• Teaching materials — lecture notes, slide decks, course outlines — that make the work usable by others.
• Adjacent traditions in whole-task and problem-centred design where the connection is substantive.

How it's curated

Anyone can browse and search. Signed-in contributors submit a work — a file or a link — and an AI assistant reads it, proposing a title, authors, year, media type, abstract, summary and topic tags. The contributor corrects anything wrong, and a curator reviews the record before it joins the public catalogue. Approved records are also indexed for meaning-based search, so related work surfaces even when the vocabulary differs.

Records point to sources rather than replacing them. Rights remain with the original authors and publishers; where a full text cannot be hosted, the catalogue holds the metadata and a link.