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National STEM Education Digital Library (NSDL): Summary of Developments to Date

The NSDL program seeks to create, develop, and sustain a national digital library supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education at all levels--preK-12, undergraduate, graduate, and life-long learning. The resulting virtual institution is expected to catalyze and support continual improvements in the quality of STEM education in both formal and informal settings.

During FY2000-FY2003, projects have been funded in each of four tracks:

• Collections: Compilation of resources forming a subset of the library's content within a coherent theme or specialty.
• Services: Development of services that support users, collection providers, and/or the core integration effort and enhance the impact, efficiency, and value of the library.
• Targeted Research: Exploration of specific topics that have immediate applicability to one of the other three tracks.
• Core Integration (CI): Coordination and management of the library's core collections and services and development of the library's primary portal.

Projects in the first three tracks have been developing and testing various aspects of the NSDL, addressing issues such as quality control, user access and services, intellectual property, evaluation, and models for sustainability. New projects funded at the end of FY2003 are supporting further development of collections in new content domains, new value-added library services with which to validate operating capabilities, and research targeting evaluation of user behavior and needs and automated generation of metadata tags and domain specific ontologies.

To support the coordination and management of the digital library's distributed collections and services, a set of FY2000 pilot projects in the Core Integration track explored models for organizational and technical infrastructure. Based on this work, a single Core Integration project began in FY2001 to execute the initial steps of this activity: (1) to implement the primary portal (a "branded destination") through which users will enter the digital library and (2) to establish a suite of core services to access STEM educational resources. Funding supports the organizational and management functions incumbent on the Core Integration team, implementation of essential user services, and facilitation of community-developed practices and policies (including protocols for tagging resources with metadata and development of indexing taxonomies to facilitate searches).

In FY2004 NSDL will again support projects in the Services and Targeted Research tracks, but will replace the Collections track with a Pathways track. Within the Services track, two particular types of projects will be strongly encouraged: (1) selection services and (2) usage development workshops.

• Pathways projects will assume a stewardship role for the educational content and/or the services needed by a broad community of learners.
• Selection services projects will focus on increasing the amount of high-quality STEM educational content known to NSDL.
• Usage development workshops will promote the use of NSDL and its resources by various communities of learners.

These three elements reflect an appropriate expansion in emphasis for NSDL from its initial (and necessary) collecting of educational resources, materials, and other digital learning objects, towards enabling learners to "connect" or otherwise find pathways to resources that are appropriate to their needs. Simultaneously, these projects will develop both the capacities of individual users and the capacity of the larger community of learners. In addition, the workshops will permit the study of user information-seeking behavior and user interaction with specific NSDL content.