Start the school year by reinvigorating curricula on the scientific method with a focus on the study of birds. NSDLs monthly series of free Web Seminars with the National Science Teachers Association begins again on Tuesday September 26 with featured experts and resources from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) has teamed up with NSDL to present a series of free web seminars that showcase NSDL partner organizations, and provide professional development in science content and the use of digital libraries.

Next Tuesday, September 26, join experts online for NSDL's next seminar in the series, that will focus on the study of birds as a context for understanding the scientific method. Participants will use NSDL resources to learn the basics of birdwatching and hone observational skills in order to record results for citizen science projects such as Cornell Lab of Ornithology's BirdSleuth and Urban Bird Studies projects, which collect data from students across the nation.

Registration for this free seminar is on a first-come, first-served on NSTA's website.
Related Link: http://institute.nsta.org/NSDL/webseminar2.asp>http://institute.nsta.org/NSDL/webseminar2.asp

In an article by Diana Tanase, David A. Joiner, and Jonathan Stuart-Moore the authors explain that trust is a key issue in opening the "virtual library shelves" of the NSDL Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD) to those interested in educational resources for computational science. While the lack of quality control on the web is not an issue unique to computational models, the many computational models that are on the web have their assumptions, their logic, their very science hidden beneath the veil of the graphical user interface, and the user often does not even have any text to read to discern whether or not they should believe the information they are receiving. CSERD addresses this issue through the use of both professional and community reviewing built into the portal infrastructure. Read the article here.
Related Link: http://www.shodor.org/refdesk/

The NSDL Middle School Portal takes an in-depth look at teachable concepts in science and math for middle school students. Features include lively text and graphics along with background for teachers, interactive online activities, data analyses, and links to related topics. Updated features include new math and science articles with associated resources, and mini-collections of "just-in-time" resources designed to help teachers find high quality classroom information streamlined for easy-access.
Related Link: http://msteacher.org/default.aspx

FOR A COMPLETE LOOK at what's in store during this year's Annual Meeting to be held at AAS in Washington, D.C. Ocr. 18-20, please see the schedule available at http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org/schedule/.

GOOD NEWS FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT YET SUBMITTED A POSTER for the lively NSDL poster reception to be held this year from 5:30-7:30 p.m. on October 18: the submission deadline has been extended until Friday Sept. 22, 2006.

DAN ATKINS, DIRECTOR, NSF OFFICE OF CYBERINFRASTRUCURE will offer opening remarks from 8:30-10:30 a.m. on October 19.

MEETING WEB KIDS ON THEIR OWN TURF: Expanding Online Social Spaces for Scholarship, is a panel discussion exploring different views of how we might imagine digital spaces for scholarship with leaders from publishing, educational gaming, and educational research from 10:45-12:15 on October 19.

TAKE A PRACTICE LAP WITH PROJECT TESTDRIVE will include participants in a brainstorming session to discuss successes and challenges of marketing NSDL resources to K-12 educators with Julie Evans CEO of NetDay/project Tomorrow from 4:00-5:00 p.m. on October 20. NetDay has surveyed thousands of teachers and students nationwide about their views on educational technology since 2002.

Feedback from interested stakeholders who are developing and/or marketing National Science Digital Library resources to K-12 educators will be incorporated into Project TestDrive. Project TestDrive is being conducted in cooperation with the National Science Digital Library and the Digital Libraries go to School Project at Utah State University. During the 2006-07 school year Project TestDrive staff will work with 50-100 teachers and their students to solicit feedback about the classroom effectiveness of K-12 NSDL resources.

STAY-TUNED FOR THE 2005-2006 ANNUAL REPORT Since 2003 NSDL has released an Annual Report at each year?s Annual Meeting that details the breadth, depth, and geography of NSDL projects as well as providing information about NSF funding for the general public.

2006 is a landmark year for NSDL. The Library has become an integrated national network of partners that include Pathways projects, targeted research and services projects, educators, researchers, publishers, and library builders. As NSDL 2.0 technologies (Fedora-based NSDL Data Repository and allied tools and services) are tested and released, NSF-funded NSDL Pathways projects strategies and priorities have also been solidified. To adequately report on emerging strategic priorities that will include outcomes from community discussions during the 2006 Annual Meeting, Core Integration will delay publication of the 2005-2006 Annual Report until the end of January 2007 to focus on this unique network of partnerships as well as on NSDL?s key position in the national landscape as the source for STEM educational content, tools, and services. The Annual Report Committee and members of the community will continue to advise and contribute to the development of the Annual Report.
Related Link: http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org/

The NSDL Registry Project will be an important presence at the upcoming International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, October 3-6 2006. This year's conference theme is "Metadata for Knowledge and Learning," and attendees are expected from the IEEE LOM metadata community in addition to Dublin Core. Members of the NSDL Registry group will be presenting a paper: "A Metadata Registry from Vocabularies Up: The NSDL Registry Project" (available from: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0605111) and demonstrating the current version of the Registry at the Dublin Core Registries Working Group meeting at the conference. Co-PIs of the NSDL Registry project are Stuart Sutton (U. of Washington) and Diane Hillmann (Cornell University), working with developers Jon Phipps (Cornell University) and Ryan Laundry (U. of Washington). Joseph Tennis, on the faculty of the University of British Columbia, is also associated with the project. The NSDL Registry will also be demonstrated at the NSDL Annual Meeting in October.
Related Link: http://metadataregistry.org

The Fedora Project invites you to submit proposals for the next Fedora User Group Meeting, to be held in conjunction with the Open Repositories Conference (OR07) to be held January 23-26, 2007. The Fedora program committee is currently soliciting proposals for 30 minute presentations.

IMPORTANT DATES November 6, 2006 Extended abstract, less than 500 words, double spaced
November 24, 2006 Notification of acceptance
January 23-26, 2007 Fedora Users and Open Repositories 2007 Conference
Author Submission Info: Please submit your proposal to the author submission site . Select the submission category of ?Fedora User Group.?

PRESENTATION THEMES Technical Solutions and Innovations: Topics include, but are not limited to:
- New services in the Fedora Service Framework
- Supporting data repositories and e-science
- Building collaborative workspaces on top of Fedora
- RDF, semantic web technologies, triplestores
- Digital preservation and Fedora
- Federating Fedora repositories
- Repository backup, mirroring, and recovery strategies
- Security and access control
- Integrating workflow with Fedora


Organizational Perspectives and Applications: Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Why choose Fedora? Feature analysis of Fedora for different use cases.
- Building awareness and nurturing Fedora community development
- Fedora for institutional repository
- Fedora for digital preservation and archiving
- Fedora for digital collections and digital library
- Fedora for publishing (scholarly, open access, etc.)
- Fedora for knowledge management (e.g., semantic technologies)
- Fedora for ?e-scholarship? and ?scholarly workbenches"
Related Link: http://fedora.info/

This paper describes the findings of a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation that seeks to understand how various academic values (including tenure and promotion concerns) shape choices in scholarly publication and scholarly communication in different disciplines.
Related Link: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/papers/papers.html

http://www.openrepositories.org
On January 23-6, 2007 Open Repositories 2007 Conference Open Repositories 2007 will continue the very successful format of Open User Group meetings for DSpace, Fedora, and Eprints, followed by general conference sessions that cover cross-cutting and overarching issues in San Anonio, Texas. This year, the user groups will partition their programs into Plenary, Technical Issues, and Management Issues, and the partitions will be staggered so that IT directors can attend all plenary sessions and technical staff can attend all technical sessions. The User Group meetings are open to all attendees.

October 9, 2006: Extended abstract, under 500 words, double-spaced
November 6, 2006: Notification of acceptance
January 8, 2007: Final presentations due


Related Link: http://www.openrepositories.org

Pancam is a high-resolution stereo camera that takes color pictures of the surrounding Martian landscape from the Mars Exploration Rovers. These images are being used in the discovery of local geology, morphology, topography, and meteorology. They also help determine which sites the rovers should visit next.

Related Link: http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_instrument/