Spring 2008 CONFCHEM |
Chemistry at the National Science Digital LibraryAn on-line conference, April - June 2008 |
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| Abstracts | Papers | Instructions | Discussion Archive | |
Spring 2008 CONFCHEM |
Chemistry at the National Science Digital LibraryAn on-line conference, April - June 2008 |
|||
| Abstracts | Papers | Instructions | Discussion Archive | |
Lee L. Zia
National Science Foundation,
Division of Undergraduate Education
4201 Wilson Blvd., Room 835
Arlington, VA 22230
In Fiscal Year 2000 the National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated support for the National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program. A series of workshops and accompanying reports and monographs developed a vision for the program that led to a characterization of the digital library as a learning environments and resources network for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. This paper provides an overview of the history of the development of the program and its primary goals and purposes. The paper also describes the design of the program, as well as how the program has evolved as major components of NSDL have come into being and as underlying technologies have emerged. In addition, examples are given of notable funded projects and the key services and capabilities they offer to teachers across the STEM disciplines.
During the latter part of the 1990s the National Science Foundation (NSF) provided support for a series of workshops to explore and capture the perspectives of a wide variety of potential stakeholders about what a national digital library for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education might “look like,” how it might be supported, who would be the audience, and how it might be sustained. The proceedings of these workshops, their recommendations, and other commentaries were documented in accompanying reports and monographs (see [1-8]). From these efforts a picture emerged of the digital library as a “learning environments and resources network” for STEM education, with three central features:
Since an existing related program, the NSF Digital Libraries Research Initiative – Phase 2 (DLI-2), was already in place, the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) conducted a modest funding effort for prototype projects as a special emphasis area under the umbrella of DLI-2, targeting just the undergraduate education sector. Based on the positive response of the community to this funding opportunity and also buoyed by interest shown from staff at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, NSF initiated the National Science, Technology Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) program in fiscal year (FY) 2000 to create, develop, and sustain a national digital library supporting STEM education at all levels – pre-K to12, undergraduate, graduate, and life-long learning. For an article detailing the original vision of the program, early assumptions, and speculations about its growth, please see [9].
In viewing the program since its inception, it is useful to consider developments during two four-year cycles. The first spanned fiscal years 2000-2003, which saw projects funded in each of four tracks:
During these earlier years of the program, before “there was a there, there” that could be identified as NSDL, projects in the first three tracks focused primarily on developing and testing various aspects of the emerging network, addressing issues such as quality control, user access and services, intellectual property, evaluation, and models for sustainability. In addition, projects explored development of collections in new content domains; new value-added library services with which to validate operating capabilities; and targeted research in several areas including identification of user needs, automated generation of metadata tags, analysis of user information-seeking behavior, and development and use of domain specific ontologies. For short descriptors of these projects, see [10, 11, 12, and 13]. Award numbers are given and can be used to view the complete project abstracts on the NSF award search page, http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/.
To support the coordination and management of the digital library’s distributed collections and services, a set of FY 2000 pilot projects in the fourth track, Core Integration, explored models for organizational and technical infrastructure. Based on this work a first stage Core Integration (CI) project took the initial steps of this activity in FY 2001: i) to implement the primary portal (a “branded destination”) through which users would interact with the digital library’s network of resources and ii) to define a suite of core services to access STEM educational resources; the CI activity then began full-fledged operations in January 2003. Funding has supported 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).
During this first phase of NSDL collections development took place in a variety of areas, including: various engineering disciplines, life sciences, physics, mathematical sciences, sub-areas of geosciences, chemistry, materials science, anthropology, economics, demography, computer science, statistics, bioinformatics, linguistics, plus cross-disciplinary collections. In addition, the program saw a growth in the number of thematic projects: e.g. video collections, services for targeted audiences, etc. A very positive development that has only continued to strengthen as the program has evolved was the involvement of professional societies, in some cases as the fiscal agents for NSDL awards, and in other cases as a principal partner. Towards the latter part of this initial phase the program also began to see the growth of nascent private sector interest (some awards were made to small for-profit concerns) and the involvement of publishers both from the not-for-profit and for-profit sectors. An important hallmark of many projects was their funding and execution as so-called “collaborative awards.” These formal collaborative projects brought together highly interdisciplinary teams of faculty bringing disciplinary expertise, personnel from emerging schools of information and library science, and practicing librarians from a variety of institutions and organizations. Finally, an excellent pattern of involvement arose featuring principal investigators whose main focus lay in the experience and expertise regarding the pre-K to12 sector. Indeed, of the many projects funded during the first four-year cycle of the program, forty-three had explicit pre-K to 12 linkages and another twenty-eight had strong potential for application to this sector.
The second four-year cycle of NSDL began in FY 2004 when the program replaced the Collections track with a new Pathways track. These projects were intended to assume a stewardship role on behalf of NSDL for the educational content and/or the services needed by a broad community of learners. In addition, such projects would maintain criteria and mechanisms to identify, select, annotate, and generate metadata for high-quality and relevant digital content; sustain the currency of the aggregated educational resources; and preserve the usability of digital content as the underlying information technology systems evolved.
The program also began to introduce an element of prescriptiveness within the Services track by strongly encouraging two particular types of projects: 1) Selection services and 2) Usage development workshops:
These three new elements: Pathways, Selection services, and Usage development workshops were deliberate programmatic moves that reflected 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.
In FY 2005 the program continued support for projects in all of these areas of emphasis. Early Pathways projects had definite disciplinary themes, e.g. mathematical sciences, biological sciences, computational sciences, engineering, and physics. But the original vision of the Pathways, as embracing more thematically defined content or otherwise serving the needs of an audience that would have learning needs that cut across disciplines, was also borne out with projects serving, for example, the community college sector in applied mathematics and science, and the need of K-12 teachers to have access to rich media resources either in their own classes or as the basis for professional development. The FY 2004 projects and FY 2005 projects also began developing both the capacities of individual users and the capacity of the larger community of learners to make use of NSDL. And the workshop settings were expected to permit the study of user information-seeking behavior and user interaction with specific NSDL content.
In FY 2006 the program solicited another round of proposals in the Pathways track. However, due to budgetary factors that had led to constraints in the overall NSDL program budget the program only accepted proposals in a limited sub-track of Services termed the “Integrated services” sub-track. In addition, requests for small amounts of supplemental funding from current projects in the Services and Targeted Research tracks, or earlier Collections projects were solicited. These requests for supplements proposed to extend or enhance the “parent” project’s ongoing work and activities so as to integrate with other projects or the Core Integration activities, to reach a larger audience, or improve the functionality and capability of user services. In FY 2007 the program solicited another set of proposals in the Pathways track, a set of proposals in a specific component (“Integrated services”) of the Services track, and expanded the previous year’s option to submit proposals for supplements into a full-fledged “Small grants” track.
The decision to formally offer such a “small grant opportunity” was intended to capitalize on an important decision that took place on the technology front as the earlier “metadata-centric” orientation of NSDL’s underlying information architecture was completely overhauled and replaced by a resource-centric NSDL Data Repository that exploited the emergent Fedora database architecture. A key driver for this decision was the torrid growth of the new Web 2.0 paradigm and the realization that an investment in a new and broader approach to organizing NSDL’s metadata and other digital assets would position NSDL to promote its NSDL 2.0 capabilities. In particular the small grants opportunity was formalized in the recognition of the possibility that relatively small investments could support projects of relatively modest funding but very high impact on the larger “ecosystem” of NSDL projects. Already the benefits of this technology upgrade have been felt, as NSDL’s wiki and blogging systems grow in use. Since this project type has still received only a small number of proposals, the program has included support for projects in these areas during its FY08 cycle.
The NSDL program is an unusual program for NSF in that its projects are engaged in building an enterprise much larger than the object of any one award. Indeed, the ultimate success of the program rests at least partly on the degree to which its projects embrace a collective sense of identity and mission. To foster this goal, an initial grantees meeting was held at NSF in late September 2000 for the purpose of introducing all projects to one another, with an eye towards identifying potential areas of collaboration and partnership. Attendees demonstrated a great sense of passion and responsibility, and notably, they self-organized into various working groups around topics and issues of joint concern. Many of these working groups have remained quite active since this first meeting and more information may be found at http://nsdl.org/about/?pager=organization. Threaded discussions continue, and the broader STEM educational community has always been encouraged to join these.
This theme and practice of collaboration has grown steadily as the NSDL program has evolved and there are several compelling examples of early collaborations that have grown into genuine partnerships over time. Perhaps one of the most mature examples is the active cultivation of relationships with major publishers. Early work in the NSDL Sustainability Committee (see the Events Archive of this committee’s work available at http://sustain.comm.nsdl.org/?pager=145) explored various prospects for sustainability of the NSDL enterprise with representatives of both the commercial and not-for-profit publishing communities participating actively in these meetings. Over time agreements between a number of major publishing concerns and NSDL have been entered into to share metadata and in some cases full content in exchange for digital librarianship expertise and services and extension of reach into digital markets. A number of the most notable agreements include publishing houses such as Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, John Wiley and Sons, and National Academy Press; and more recently NSDL partnerships have extended into new media opportunities with the placement of NSDL content on iTunes U.
Another particularly strong set of partnerships has grown with sectors of the K-12 community.
A last example illustrates the emergence of “utility-like” application services that NSDL is in a position to offer to consortia of information providers. Late in summer 2007, NSDL began a partnership with the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL) through which CARL has adopted the NSDL Data Repository and its Fedora-based technology platform to provide distributed collection management for its eleven member institutions. This work has begun with the creation, storage, management, and delivery of very large image collections from the member libraries, with a key public benefit of the project that it enables these resources to be accessible to all school districts and public libraries across Colorado and Wyoming. This initial effort points the way towards the provision of more extensive repository services for the text, image, and video resources of the Alliance. NSDL is also cultivating a similar type of relationship with the Southern Regional Education Board, a consortium representing higher education institutions across sixteen southeastern states.
As the program enters its third four-year cycle of projects it can look back on substantial progress on a number of fronts some of which have been described above. However, challenges still remain. Some reflect shifting trends and the potential for expanding, if not changing roles within the educational community; and some represent important issues that projects must address.
First, the traditional roles and relationships to one another of faculty and librarians are likely to change on campuses. Faculty, as producers of scholarship – all of which is now essentially “born digital” – will need to develop awareness of, if not base level expertise in issues of library management: e.g., cataloging, metadata tagging, and preservation. As a result, library staff are likely to find that their presentation of externally produced resources to campus users will be balanced by a need to convey to the external world the products of faculty efforts on campus. Certainly the explosion of user-generated content with accompanying social bookmarking and tagging tools is serving as a driver for this trend. And there are similar implications for teachers and librarians in the pre-K to12 sector. As these trends continue to grow, then they will certainly have important implications for graduate programs, from where the next generation of faculty and library and information specialists will come. More than just a matter of disseminating information about these advances, this broader engagement will require systematic and systemic effort to help different audiences learn a new language, with faculty needing to understand issues of librarianship and librarians growing to appreciate faculty roles. Of particular interest is the challenge these changing roles will place on the future structure and content of graduate and professional school programs. Similar issues bear on the future of museums and other informal learning venues and the professionals who work in them.
Second, it is vital that the educational community (and NSDL is positioned well to provide the appropriate leadership) focus attention on evaluating the impact on learning that results from the increased access to resources and data made possible by digital libraries. Closely related is the need to develop appropriate “metrics” to capture both the degree of reuse, repurposing, or repackaging of digital material and to assess the value of such activities. Moreover, deeper understanding and satisfaction of end user needs that move beyond pure searching for factual “data” to more nuanced semantically imbued sense making is needed. Here the promise that increased customization holds must be balanced against privacy concerns, since learners must be willing to reveal more of themselves in order to gain the benefits of personalized profiles.
Third, the question still remains of how to compensate creators of content for their efforts. Contributions of “fine-grained” content (e.g., short applet tutorials or simulators) and creation of mashups can gain peer recognition; and in open source/community source software efforts such recognition has proven suitable, functioning as a legitimate “currency” for compensation. Whether or not the same can hold true for the continued creation of educational content is still unclear, but the promise does exist. NSDL offers a way to make such innovative content available through locally maintained digital repositories and shared through a broad network of contributing providers. While producers have primarily been from the higher education community, the evolving capabilities and ease for reusing and reforming content are broadening participation in this activity rapidly. However, key issues will continue to center on questions of authenticity, the certification of expertise, and mechanisms and practices for attribution of creation.
Finally, two additional opportunities merit the attention of the NSDL program. One is in the area of international collaboration and the other is in the area of promoting collections and services development in content domains outside of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education. Although both fall outside the nominal purview of the NSF it is well within the responsibility of NSDL and NSF to seek to partner with other organizations both at the federal level and internationally to make progress on these fronts.
How might the capability to address the multiple challenges identified above be mounted and sustained? One approach would be to place responsibility in the hands of a non-profit organization to provide leadership for the science, science education, and more general scholarly community to meet these challenges. Through a public funding effort educational institutions would receive initial support to connect to such a (virtual) organization as a member institution for several years. However, grants would not be for physical connectivity, but rather:
Continued membership would fall on each individual institution, and (eventually) a relatively modest annual fee multiplied across interested institutions of higher education and local school districts could generate a significant source of self-sustaining revenue. As the “network effect” took hold – with the value of the network increasing as more members join – such a strategy would enable NSF and other funders to transition support for this facility to a community-based mechanism.
[1] Information Technology: Its Impact on Undergraduate Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology (NSF 98-82), April 18-20, 1996.
[2] Developing a Digital National Library for Undergraduate Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education, NRC workshop, August 7-8, 1997.
[3] Report of the SMETE Library Workshop (NSF 99-112), July 21-23, 1998. Available online at http://www.dlib.org/smete/public/report.html.
[4] Serving the Needs of Pre-College Science and Mathematics Education: Impact of a Digital National Library on Teacher Education and Practice, NRC workshop, September 24-25, 1998.
[5] Digital Libraries and Education Working Meeting, January 4-6, 1999.
[6] Portal to the Future: A Digital Library for Earth System Education, workshop report, August 8-11, 1999.
[7] “The Digital Libraries Initiative: Update and Discussion”, ASIS Bulletin, October, 1999.
[8] Mogk, David W. and Zia, Lee L. "Addressing Opportunities and Challenges in Evaluation and Dissemination through Creation of a National Library for Undergraduate Science Education." Invited Symposium in Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Geoscience Information Society, October 28-31, 1996, Denver, CO (1996). Available at http://gdl.ou.edu/rp1.html.
[9] “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. Available at http://dlib.org/dlib/march01/zia/03zia.html.
[10 FY00 NSDL projects - http://dlib.org/dlib/october00/zia/10zia.html.
[11] FY01 NSDL projects - http://dlib.org/dlib/november01/zia/11zia.html.
[12] FY02 NSDL projects - http://dlib.org/dlib/november02/zia/11zia.html.
[13] FY03 NSDL projects - http://dlib.org/dlib/march04/zia/03zia.html.