[Sigsti-l] Fwd: The National Science Digital Library: An Introduction and call for assistance

[Molly Moss]

>>> "John M. Saylor" <jms1 at cornell.edu> 12/10/02 02:07PM >>>
My apologies for any cross- postings

The NSDL  (National Science Digital Library ) is looking for 
collections of materials in the broad science, technology, 
engineering, and mathematics area ( K through grey) that are willing 
to share  metadata about their resources or content for search and 
discovery services.  I am serving as Director of Collection 
Development of the NSDL. Please let me know if you have or know of 
any such collections. For more about the NSDL see below.

"The National Science Foundation (NSF), through its Division of 
Undergraduate Education, is funding the development of the National 
Science Digital Library (NSDL) over the next 5 years. A limited 
public release of the NSDL (http://nsdl.org) was launched on 
December3,  2002.  NSF expects the NSDL to become, over-time, the 
world's largest digital library of STEM (science, technology, 
engineering and mathematics) information resources and services as 
well as an online network of learning environments and resources for 
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics  education at all 
levels.

Many of the resources that populate the NSDL collection will come 
from projects funded under the NSDL program and related NSF digital 
library initiatives.  However, the goal is to include access to as 
many relevant STEM resources as possible, including both open access 
and proprietary materials.

The Core Integration (CI) team of the NSDL is distributed among a 
group of collaborating institutions (University Corporation for 
Atmospheric Research (UCAR), Cornell University, Columbia University, 
the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the University of California at 
Santa Barbara, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and is 
aimed at the development, deployment, and support of both the 
technical and organizational infrastructure of the NSDL.  The Cornell 
team is lead by a group of computer scientists and librarians.

A core component of CI responsibility is the development and 
maintenance of a metadata repository comprised of collection and item 
level metadata which serves as the basis for search and discovery 
services. The metadata repository will be built using a combination 
of methods including metadata ingest by the Open Archives Metadata 
Harvesting Protocol-OAI-MHP (http://www.openarchives.org). The NSDL 
metadata repository is built on open source, open access principles 
and standards and thus will also be available for harvesting by other 
services. While the principle of open access and free search and 
discovery services is a fundamental principle of the NSDL, the NSDL 
is concurrently looking at integrating proprietary content into it's 
distributed collections.  Authentication and authorization services 
are being developed to allow for user access to fee-based content 
once it has been discovered within the open (i.e.free) search/browse 
services built on the OAI compliant NSDL metadata repository.

To read more about the NSDL see:

  Zia, Lee L., "Growing a National Learning Environments and Resources 
Network for Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology 
Education: Current Issues and Opportunities for the NSDL Program".  
D-Lib Magazine, 7 (3), March 2001. 
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/zia/03zia.html)].

C. Lagoze, W. Arms, S. Gan, D. Hillmann, C. Ingram, D. Krafft, R. 
Marisa, J. Phipps, J. Saylor, C. Terrizzi, W. Hoehn, D. Millman, J. 
Allan, S. Guzman-Lara, and T. Kalt, "Core Services in the 
Architecture of the National Digital Library for Science Education 
(NSDL),", arXiv Report cs.DL/0201025, January 29 2002. 
http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0201025 

Other Library Architecture and Design Documents at:
http://doclib.comm.nsdlib.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl 
-- 
John M. Saylor                        
Director 
Collection Development 
National Science Digital Library 
(http://nsdl.org)         			          
Director (on leave 10/02-9/04)
Engineering & Computer Science Library 
http://www.englib.cornell.edu/jms/      
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-220
email: JMS1 at cornell.edu 
phone: 607-255-4134 
fax:   607-255-0278