Third Annual MeetingDecember 2002

Welcome

2002 Annual Meeting

Initial Library Launch

What is NSDL?

A partnership of NSDL-funded projects A library of exemplary collections and

services with practical educational value

A center of innovation in digital libraries applied to education

A community center, focused on digital-library-enabled science education

What’s Ahead This Morning

Interactive session

Meet your table

Find a scribe

Opening Reflections

Lee Zia

NSDL Program Director, NSF

“Where are we, and where are we going?”

Thank you(s)

Purpose Progress Prospects

Pre-NSDL (FY98-99)

Applications and testbeds focusing on undergraduate education

Multiple projects exploring aspects of the current program

FY00-02 Award Information

354 proposals (~ $225M), 105 awards (~ $63M)

In Collections, Services, Targeted Research: 80 proposals in FY00, 103 in FY01, 156 in FY02 !!

56 projects in Collections, 32 in Services, 10 in Targeted Research

Core Integration project - “technical and organizational glue”

13 NSDL projects co-funded by MPS ($3M), 11 co-funded by GEO ($1.7M), one co-funded by BIO ($100K)

Project Characteristics

Current content domains include: various engineering disciplines, life sciences, physics, mathematical sciences, geosciences, chemistry, materials science, anthropology, computer science, plus multiple cross-disciplinary collections

Thematic projects growing: e.g. video collections, services for targeted audiences, etc.

Increased involvement of professional societies Nascent private sector and publisher involvement Numerous formal collaborative projects 28 with explicit pre-K to 12 links, 19 with strong

potential for application to the pre-K to 12 sector

Additional Information

http://comm.nsdlib.org - Communications Portal - user and developer exchange and community building

http://www.nsdl.org - Main Portal

D-Lib Magazine articles:

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/ - a look at the “big picture” http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november02/ - FY02 awards http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november01/ - FY01 awards http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/ - FY00 awards

NSDL Program in FY03

Proposal deadline mid-April 2003 (anticipated) Letters of intent mid-March 2003

(anticipated) Next solicitation expected: early January

2003 (refer to site below)

due-nsdl-program@nsf.gov (contact point) http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/DUE/programs/nsdl/

(links to background reports and related projects)

Collections: The Whys and Hows for the NSDL

Len Simutis

Director of the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse

And member of the Policy Committee

Collections: Why?

Archival and “just in case” repositories

Specialized audiences and needs New collaborations around shared

resources—scalability, sustainability Digital content in a digital context—

post-bibliographic world Be a part of something new, but not

quite sure what it is

Collections—How

Define user requirements, match resources to audience needs

“islands” of specialized collections Up and running first, retrofit,

export, cross-walk as needed Maintain, build on uniqueness of

resources and audiences

Collections: What ENC has learned

Learning objects require greater cataloging skills and time

Standards have been adopted, but not understood operationally

Plan, design, do, redo, redesign, redo…

Too easy to avoid the big picture, other players

Collections: What’s Next?

NSDL not a library, but a fundamental element in the transformation of educational infrastructure

Islands sink, networks bind The educational object is the

building block—research and services transform the objects in the collections

Collections: The Big Picture

Interoperability is key to sustainability—for collections and the overall NSDL

Have to find better ways to learn from each other

Have to find better ways to contribute effectively to services and research tracks

Re-search in a digital world

Collections Discussion

For the collection builders:What difference has participating in NSDL made for you, and what difference have you made to NSDL?

In general:What do you see as the biggest challenges in building collections currently?

Services

Mimi Recker

Utah State University

And PI on Instructional Architect

The Instructional Architect

<ia.usu.edu>

Mimi Recker Jim DorwardDavid WileyNSF DUE 0085855 Utah State University

NSDL service tool The Instructional Architect facilitates

the discovery, selection, and use of NSDL resources for creating a personalized, permanent, and annotated collections for instruction

Audience: K-12 teachers seeking to integrate high-quality Web resources in instruction

Instructional Architect

MDR

DLsmete.org

NSDL

SearchInterface

Create accountSearch & gatherCreate & OrganizePublish

Annotated learning objects for instruction (web pages)

NLVM

Instructional Architect

Emergent themes from our NSDL work

Evaluation as research Resource granularity and the

‘reuse assumption’ If we build it, will they come?

Evaluation as research

How to evaluate a multi-disciplinary, collaborative project with an evolving social and technical surround?

How to involve teachers and students as co-participants and researchers?

Granularity & the ‘reuse assumption’

Assumptions about resource granularity?

How to tap into economies of reuse? What is the ‘right’ grain size?

If we build it, will they come?

Rich diversity in ‘we’ and ‘they’ NSDL will be used in innumerable

and unknowable ways -- none wrong

Services Discussion

For the service builders:What difference has participating in NSDL made for you, and what difference have you made to NSDL?

In general:What do you see as the biggest service needs for NSDL currently?

Targeted Research

Rick Furuta

Texas A&M University

And PI on Walden’s Path Project

The Walden’s Paths projectPIs: Richard Furuta and Frank M. ShipmanTexas A&M University

Metadocuments as Communicative Artifact to Enable Use of a Research Digital Library in Undergraduate SMET Education (DUE-0085798). 9/1/00-8/31/03.

Design and Evaluation of Maintenance Tools for Distributed Digital Libraries (DUE-0121527). 9/15/01-9/14/03.

Project components

Walden’s Paths System Organize, contextualize, and present

materials selected from throughout the World-Wide Web

Walden’s Path Manager Assist the maintainer of collections of

Web-based resources by flagging significant change to collection items

Walden’s Paths System

Off the path traversal

Returning to the path

On the path traversal

Walden’s Paths reader

Original Web page

Navigational controls

Annotation

Reader’s path traversal

Off the path…

Path authoring

On-line (Web) interface

External (off-line) interface

Walden’s Path Manager

Web-based collections (paths, bookmark lists, …) You can choose materials for

collections but cannot control what happens to those materials subsequently

Requires ongoing maintenance to counteract change

Change can be easy to detect……but hard to understand Page not found/site not found/site unreachable

Is this condition temporary or permanent? Has the material moved somewhere else? Where? Are there reasonable substitutes for this material?

Page has changed Is this a change I care about?

Do care: changes that change the rhetorical purpose of the page; reuse of URLs for other purposes…

Don’t care: pages that are supposed to change (e.g., weather, news), grammatical corrections, ephemeral material such as site counters, …

Walden’s Path Manager

Determine what kinds of changes to Web pages are perceived to be significant

Develop new heuristics and adapt existing ones that reflect perceived change

Provide tools that support collection managers in managing changes within their collections

Path Manager’s user interface

Walden’s Paths

Project Web pageshttp://www.csdl.tamu.edu/walden/ View example paths Create and view your own paths using

the Web-based on-line authoring tool (registration required)

Download the Walden’s Paths system components (prototype versions) for hosting on your own computer

NSDL and targeted research

Walden’s paths—initiated targeted research track in the first round

NSDL presents an opportunity for a research program to refine novel techniques given the benefit of a clearly-identified use domain

Advantage to NSDL is that the techniques are already tested and accepted within their specialized research communities, although not necessarily ready to be deployed as a product

Targeted research keeps NSDL in touch with future technologies and techniques

By encouraging applications in its significant and interesting testbed NSDL helps to influence topics in its research areas

Targeted research provides the basis by which NSDL can adapt to the future, through partnership with specific research areas, rather than as a passive consumer

Walden’s Paths

Project Web pageshttp://www.csdl.tamu.edu/walden/ View example paths Create and view your own paths using

the Web-based on-line authoring tool (registration required)

Download the Walden’s Paths system components (prototype versions) for hosting on your own computer

Research Discussion

How would you like the results of the targeted research projects to be fed back into the NSDL so that you can take advantage of this information?

Where do you see the biggest area of need for research?

Break

Please reconvene by 10:20