November 2001-- Alice M. Agogino, UC Berkeley and www.smete.org, and Ore Somolu, Education Development Center (EDC), Inc., co-chaired a session on Gender Equity in a collaborative project to identify, catalog and evaluate gender and SMET education resources. The session explored the following issues associated with designing a cohesive collection and on-line services to achieve gender equity goals: *What is the role for Gender Equity in a STEM education digital library? *How do we classify and describe Gender Equity resources? (e.g, indexing and searching vocabularies) *How do we develop criteria for evaluating Gender Equity?

November 2001-- Bill Nye, 'Science Guy,' and Cornell Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 University Professor, recently met with members of the Cornell NSDL Core Technical Infrastructure team for an informal discussion about engaging young people in discovering digital library resources through the use of interactive design. If the 2,000 emails Nye gets each day are any indication, young people are definitely using his web site http://www.nyelabs.com. The Science Guy's recognizable face and style are key elements of the the kooky, yet coherent and innovative Nye Labs web site design that guides kids though visits to his online collections of science materials from experiments ('Home Demos') to Episode Guides for upcoming TV shows. Nye is particularly interested in reaching young people who are at risk which is why the site is small-sized to fit on any computer screen. Nye expressed an interest in learning more about 'metadata,' and believes that the key to media success is to avoid talking down to your audience--of any age.

November 2001--'In the past two years, the Earth system education community has organized and begun development of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE), a community-sponsored an community- governed digital library.'--by Mary Marlino, DLESE, for DLib Magazine, October 2001.

November 2001--'Nearly a decade of research, much of it sponsored by the NSF and the U. S. Department of Education, has shown the potential power of on-line science libraries.' From an article about the NSDL written by Bob Henson appears in the Summer/Fall issue of the Unidata Newsletter.

November 2001--'The Conference enabled participants to enhance their learning about such topics as shared content, peer reviews, learning objects, standards and online communities.' --by Edward M. Cooper, Merlot, for DLib Magazine, October 2001.

November 2001--'The goal is to make resources developed for research available to education,' says William Y. Arms, Principal Investigator, Cornell NSDL Core Technical Infrastructure Project.

November 2001--Has announced a cross-archives searching service. OLAC currently harvests 9000+ metadata records from 10 participating archives.

November 2001--The National Science Foundation's Director Dr. Rita R. Colwell sees equity and access as major technology issues that the NSF is working hard to address through ground breaking initiatives like the NSDL.

November 2001--An interactive look at criminal justice system data, issues, information, and solutions designed by Picture Projects, 'creating online spaces for voices traditionally overlooked by mainstream media.'

November 2001--Diane Kresh of the Library of Congress is collecting online source materials having to do with the events of September 11.

November 2001--Prof. Wilson J. Rugh, Johns Hopkins University, received the 2001 Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Courseware in recognition for his development of 'Demonstrations in Signals, Systems and Controls.' For more information or to receive a copy of the Premier Courseware on CD-ROM see http://www.needs.org/engineering/premier/ or contact premier@needs.org.