“A Library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people.” --Andrew Carnegie
Dec 13, 2015
“A Library outranks any other one thing a community can do to
benefit its people.”
--Andrew Carnegie
Digital Libraries
• Building on the tradition of libraries as a community resource– Collecting, organizing, preserving– Sharing – Services for Users– A Community Center– Providing a Meeting Place
A Digital Library Supporting Learning about the Earth-
• Integrated, multidisciplinary approach to Earth system education
• Natural connections to the physical, life and social sciences, and engineering disciplines
• Central facility in support of Earth system education for all
The DLESE VisionA consensus view, developed in a broadly
representative community forum.
• Rapid, sophisticated access to collections of peer-reviewed teaching & learning resources
• Interfaces and tools to enable student exploration of Earth data sets
• Services to help users effectively create and use materials
• A community center to facilitate sharing and collaboration
• Good libraries help institutions & communities– Change patterns of information flow & learning– Establish an “intellectual commons”
• Libraries built with digital technologies can– Foster new (geography-independent)
communities– Offer fundamentally new types of information– Organize information in radically new ways– Engage users as creators, reviewers...
Building New Scholarly Communities
3
NSDL Purpose
To catalyze & support continual improvements in science education– A network of learning environments &
high-quality resources
– For all settings & levels • Individual, collaborative, formal, informal
• All levels: K-12, undergraduate, graduate, lifelong
– Collaborative development & operation• Resource users are resource providers
• Distributed, autonomous components
NSDL Is• A modern digital information environment
– Distributed network of collections & services– Immense variety of multi-media materials– Computer-aided discovery, utilizing
• Metadata created by experts• Content analysis• Inference
• A library– Foundation for community advancement– Starting point for anyone who’s curious– Locus of intellectual discourse– Quality materials
NSDL Is Not
• A centralized, top-down endeavor– NSF (in the past 2 yrs) has award 64 NSDL grants
totaling about $38M– One grant (shared by Columbia, Cornell, & UCAR) is
for “core integration,” including coordination of all funded projects
• A gigantic repository for digital materials– NSDL/core points to collections maintained
by others, rather than holding them directly– NSDL/core holds metadata records
Key Concepts & Principles(as proposed for year 1 by the CI team)
• NSDL is an “Education Layer” over the Web• NSDL will be seen by
– Users, as one library with many portals– Builders, as offering a spectrum of interoperability
• NSDL soon must exhibit– Diverse collections– Appropriate user interfaces & library services– Means for access & content management– A framework for technical evolution– Educational excellence
Note: NSDL embraces much more than the NSDL-funded projects
BEOnBiology Education Online
An interactive, peer-reviewed, online journal for teaching and learning biology
Access Excellence
and
National Association of Biology Teachers
Serc.carleton.edu
• Integrating services and collections– Support “On the Cutting Edge” professional
development workshops– Teaching Quantitative Skills in the Geosciences– Community Issues and Groups– NSDL Portal for Using Data in the Classroom– Research on Learning in the Geosciences– “Starting Point” resources for introductory
courses