News
Call attention to accomplishments, events, news items or "resources of interest" right now by contributing news and information to NSDL. Items submitted will go through a review by the NSDL Resource Center before being published to this website. 
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Apr 28, 2010News
MatDL Pathway and MRS co-hosted a roundtable on Translating Materials Research to Education at the 2010 MRS Spring Meeting held April 5-9 in San Francisco CA. The roundtable included a demonstration of the new Chemical Equilibrium Virtual Lab and attracted participants interested in the use, assessment, and ongoing development of the pilot MRS/MatDL Expert Wiki which will spotlight materials science advances to help recruit beginning undergraduates and upper level high school students as well as to support introductory science courses.
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Apr 05, 2010News
Here's a great example oft how NSDL projects and the partnerships they foster can create terrific results. The Earth Exploration Toolbook project was originally funded through NSDL in 2002 (Tamara Ledley, PI) and resulted in a very well done resource featuring seven 'chapters' of computer-based Earth science activities using online data sets and analysis tools that enable users to explore aspects of the Earth system.
With additional funding from the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Data Services project, and the AccessData project, a series of annual workshops were held over the past six years. Each workshop facilitated about 10 teams, each with 5-6 members who worked together to develop a new EET chapter. Each team had the expertise of a data provider, analysis tool specialist, scientist, curriculum developer and educator represented. Through those workshops and other partnerships, the Earth Exploration Toolbook now contains 27 chapters, with approximately 15 more in development, all covering a wide range of Earth science topics and data analysis skills. That in itself is a gratifying accomplishment - but to put the human face on the story:
- As a result of the 2009 AccessData workshop a team focused on using the Education Global Climate Model (EdGCM) developed a new EET chapter that went live in January 2010. This EET chapter was found by a high school student who based her science project on the EET chapter. That student has now been selected to present the project at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
- Through the use of EET in the DataTools program—a professional development program for teachers on the use of technology (funded by the ITEST program), a group of workshop teachers from one school in Massachusetts have some unscientific, yet impressive evidence for how use of EET had an impact on their students' performance on standardized tests. Teachers compared the MCAS scores (Massachusetts standardized test) of the 8th grade students in their middle school, to those scores of other middle schools in their district, all of whom use the same curriculum and textbooks. The school in question—the only one to use the EET and the strategies that the teachers learned in the DataTools program—usually records that they are within 25 points of the other schools on the MCAS. This past year, they were 100 points above the other middle schools in scoring.
Nice going, EET!
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Apr 02, 2010News
Shodor, a national resource for computational science education, is located in Durham, N.C., and serves students and educators nationwide. In addition to developing and deploying interactive models, simulations, and educational tools, Shodor serves students and educators directly through workshops and other hands-on experiences.
Last year Shodor received funding from the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), which has been used to supplement the National Computation Science Institute (NCSI) project, and has enabled them to take their talents on the road, offering more summer workshops last year and this coming summer. NCSI provides workshops covering a wide range of subjects relating to computational science. These workshops are designed for undergraduate faculty as well as high school and middle school teachers, giving participants ideas and resources to use in their classrooms. The return on investment in terms of web usage is amazing; Shodor has a definite increase in the usage of their online resources. In March, Shodor served 4.25 Million Web Pages and 800,000 visitors. Details. Shodor is also the home of NSDL's Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD).
Shodor would like to thank all of its partners for sharing in their resources and supporting them in every way possible.
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Mar 30, 2010NewsThe Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) has been established to encourage innovation and excellence in education, as well as to encourage the use of high-quality on-line resources by students, teachers, and the public. Essays from the SPORE winners are being published each month in Science (many of which are part of the NSDL collection).
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Mar 05, 2010News
The National Science Foundation (NSF) released the 2010 program solicitation (request for proposals) for the National STEM Distributed Learning (NSDL) program on February 25, 2010: NSF 10-545.
NSDL is a program of the Division of Undergraduate Education, in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources. The optional Letter of Intent deadline is April 24, 2010. Full Proposal deadline is May 26, 2010.
If you are interested in submitting a proposal to NSF under the NSDL solicitation, see also NSDL's About pages and Partnering with NSDL, on this site.
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Mar 04, 2010News
The NSDL community has recently approved revision of the NSDL Collection Policy and Resource Quality Guidelines. Together, these documents articulate the intended scope of NSDL collections, communities served, quality and technical standards for inclusion in NSDL, and roles and responsibilities of various parts of the NSDL community for implementing the policy.
In related news, we are very pleased to announce membership of the new NSDL Accessioning Board (NAB) which will review and approve collections prior to accessioning and deaccessioning into NSDL. The NAB is responsible for ensuring that collections meet the policy requirements and guidelines. NAB members are:
- Marcia Mardis, will
serve as NAB chair. Marcia is Assistant
Professor in the College of Information at Florida State University and is also the Associate Director for the
Partnerships Advancing Library Media (PALM) Center. Marcia has been involved with NSDL for over
a decade and has extensive experience in educational digital libraries.
- Richard H. Audet, a STEM education consultant from Nashville, Tennessee, was formerly a classroom science teacher and science methods professor. He has extensive experience in the use of digital media and developed the review process for StemResources.com
- Elizabeth Brown is the Scholarly Communications and
Library Grants Officer and Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Material Science
Librarian at Binghamton University Libraries. She has served as selector
and liaison for academic departments in chemistry, physics, mathematics,
materials science, nursing, engineering, geology, and science Reference. She
has experience selecting at the popular, academic and professional levels and
experience with undergraduate and graduate curricula as well as K-12 curricula
in Chemistry.
- Robert
Payo has recently assumed a new position at
the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He was formerly the Education and
Outreach Specialist at the NSDL Resource Center where he coordinated NSDL’s
presence at national meetings, conferences and events. He also conducted
professional development programs and presentations across the country on NSDL
and its resources.
- Luti Salisbury is university professor/librarian and head of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Library at the University of Arkansas Libraries. She has extensive experience in collection development in the sciences and in digital collections assessment and review in all areas of science and technology, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics, etc.
- Marcia Mardis, will
serve as NAB chair. Marcia is Assistant
Professor in the College of Information at Florida State University and is also the Associate Director for the
Partnerships Advancing Library Media (PALM) Center. Marcia has been involved with NSDL for over
a decade and has extensive experience in educational digital libraries.
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Mar 03, 2010News
The DuraSpace organization recently announced the long-awaited release of DSpace 1.6, the popular turn-key open source application for managing and providing access to digital content used to create more than 800 repository instances worldwide. The release of DSpace 1.6 was led by Stuart Lewis, community release manager and IT Innovations analyst and developer at the University of Auckland Library. Lewis worked closely with DSpace developers, community members and DuraSpace staff to make the best possible version of DSpace 1.6 publicly available.
Download DSpace 1.6 here: http://www.dspace.org/current-release/latest-release/
Bram Luyten, @mire (http://atmire.com/), who is an active DSpace community member commented, "Both from an end-user perspective, as well as the administrator side of things, this release is a great leap forward."
Community-requested features in the new release include an enhanced statistics package which provides more information about how your repository is being used, an embargo facility so items can be kept dark for a period of time, and a batch metadata editing tool which can be used to change, add, find/replace metadata as well as facilitate mass moves, re-order values or add new items in bulk. And there's more such as authority control which contains an integration with the Sherpa Romeo Service for publisher names, as well as the Library of Congress Nameservice. Other new features include:
•Delegated administration
•OpenSearch
•Command launcher
•OAI-PMH harvesting of items from remote repositories
•Configurable OAI-PMH dublin core output
•Move item functionality in XMLUI
•If-Modified-Since / Last-Modified header support in XMLUI
•Change to logging behaviour to ensure better log retention and management
•Update to the latest handle server library
•Ability to perform batch imports and exports from zip files of items
•New test scripts to test database and email settings
•Ability to set legal jurisdiction in creative commons licensing
Ina Smith, University of Stellenbosch Repository Manager, explains what the release of DSpace 1.6 will mean for her institution:
"The University of Stellenbosch (www.sun.ac.za), one of the top research institutions on the African continent, has been using DSpace since 2007. We take the digital preservation of our most valuable asset – i.e. research output by our researchers – very seriously. Our focus on digital preservation made DSpace an obvious choice as a platform to host our varied digital assets. As part of our digital preservation management strategy we regard upgrading to DSpace 1.6 as a given, thereby guaranteeing continued access to digital objects. At the same time various instances of DSpace running at our institution will be integrated into this new DSpace version. We are proud to be one of the early adopters of DSpace 1.6, and together with add-on’s obtained from @mire are looking forward to providing new functionality to benefit our researchers and the rest of the international research community. Thank you to the DSpace community for the work you do, and for sharing DSpace with those who do not necessarily have expertise and resources. You can visit the ‘new’ repository of the University of Stellenbosch – SUNScholar – at scholar.sun.ac.za. Currently DSpace is used by 12 South African institutions (http://ir.sun.ac.za/wiki/index.php/List), which includes the major research institutions."
More Information About DSpace 1.6
• Join Stuart Lewis, the DSpace 1.6 community release manager, who will offer an overview of the lastest release and how it can help you manage your repository. This free DuraSpace/SPARC "All About Repositories" web seminar will highlight new Fedora 3.3 and DSpace 1.6 features on March 17, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. ET. Register for the web seminar here: http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/event_registration.shtml.
• Lewis has published a blog post explaining what key changes and improvements in DSpace 1.6 will mean for you. Read the post here: http://blog.stuartlewis.com/2010/02/10/dspace-1-6-what-will-be-in-it-for-me/.
• The February issue of the DSpace Newsletter features in-depth information about DSpace 1.6.
About DSpace
DSpace (http://Dspace.org) is an out-of-the-box open source repository application for delivering digital content to end-users. Globally it is the most widely used open source repository software for institutional repositories and open access repositories. DSpace has been installed all over the world by organizations, especially libraries, as a way to provide access to research output, scholarly publications, library collections, and more. The DSpace application has many features and tools for managing digital content and enabling digital preservation. DSpace stores any type of content and offers built-in workflows for content submission and review. Organizations can easily make their digital collections available on the Web using DSpace's customizable end user interfaces along with many community-developed features and utilities.
About DuraSpace
DuraSpace (http://DuraSpace.org) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. DuraSpace software and services are used worldwide as solutions for open access, institutional repositories, digital libraries, digital archives, data curation, virtual research environments, and more. DuraSpace provides leadership and innovation in the use of open source and cloud-based technologies to serve libraries, universities, research centers, cultural heritage institutions, and other knowledge stewards. The organization’s open source technology portfolio includes the DSpace open access repository application, the Fedora open repository platform, and the Mulgara semantic database. DuraSpace is the home of DuraCloud, an emerging cloud-based service that leverages existing cloud infrastructure to enable durability and access to digital content. The DuraSpace team includes recognized leaders and experts in the management of digital information. The team works with an active and diverse international community committed to the durability of digital resources.
The DuraSpace technology portfolio inherently addresses the issue of durability of digital content. Our values are expressed in our organizational byline, “open technologies for durable digital content.” -
Feb 23, 2010News
MatDL Pathway and The Minerals, Metals & Materials (TMS) Society co-hosted two Integrated Computational Materials Research and Education roundtables at the TMS Annual Meeting held February 14-18 in Seattle WA. Participants included materials code developers and faculty members interested in integrating materials codes into appropriate undergraduate courses. Roundtable participants represented interests of government labs including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Sandia National Laboratories, and Los Alamos National Laboratory; universities such as Northwestern, University of Michigan, and Carnegie Mellon; and industry including Ford Motor Company.
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Feb 15, 2010News
Engineering Pathway PI Alice Agogino is the author of a fascinating article about the history and evolution of the Barbie doll and the forthcoming release by Mattel of a computer engineer Barbie. Even if you never had a Barbie (like me)—or your older brother(s) routinely tormented you by breaking off her arms (just the impetus, perhaps, that may have sparked some girls to pursue engineering?)—the article is a great read: Engineering Education "Today in History Blog: First Barbie doll goes on sale and the recent announcement of the first computer engineer Barbie. Additional links to EP's resources on Barbie creator Ruth Handler, toy design, women inventors, and links to resources on women in computing and information science, are also available.
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Feb 04, 2010News
The National Science Foundation has announced that Director Arden Bement will leave NSF on June 1, 2010, in order to serve as Director of the Global Policy Research Institute (GPRI) at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana.
See announcement