December 2001--A report on the progress of 'StandardConnections', a mechanism for the standard representation of academic standards as well as a tool for mapping these standards using GEMCat 4.0, a metadata generation tool based on fully qualified Dublin Core was presented at Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) headquarters in Aurora, Colorado Nov 29-Dec 1. Collaborators include McREL, Achieve, Inc., and the Center for Natural Language Processing.

December 2001--Alice Agogino and Lee Zia worked together on a presentation for the 'Forging Library Partnerships' conference on the Berkeley campus on November 2, 2001 http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/LAUC/Partner/ A copy of the slides can be found at www.smete.org/about_smete/publication.php. Paul Duguid, co-author with John Seely Brown of The Social Life of Information, gave the Keynote talk on 'Partners in Time'. Key questions addressed by Agogino and others in the 'Successful Partnering' panel were: --What are the challenges facing libraries now? What will they be 20 years from now? --What kind of partnerships are feasible and beneficial? How to initiate and maintain a successful partnership? --What are lessons learned from collaborative projects and programs that have prospered (or failed)? --How must libraries and librarians change?

December 2001--Approximately 160 NSDL PIs will gather December 2 - 4 in Washington D.C. to move forward in creating an integrated NSDL from many funded collections and services projects nationwide. The primary goals of the meeting are to introduce the services provided by the Core Integration (CI) team, and to foster collaboration among participants. The program will include project poster presentations, remarks from NSF Education and Human Resources leadership, presentations by the Core Integration team, and opportunities for small group discussion and networking. A full agenda for the meeting is available at http://nsdl.comm.nsdlib.org/agenda_12_01.html Lee Zia, NSF's Director for the National Science Digital Library Program (NSDL), will be speaking about the NSDL Program next summer at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition in Montreal in a session sponsored by the ASEE Engineering Libraries Division facilitated by John Saylor, Cornell CI. Tech and Director, Cornell Engineering Library. Also participating in the session will be Terry Smith, UCSB, who will introduce his project, 'Textual - Geospatial Integration Services for NSDL,' and Professor Muniram Budhu, University of Arizona, who will highlight his collection project, 'The Geotechnical, Rock and Water Resources Library--towards a National Civil Engineering Resources Library.' For a current report on the NSDL program's progress please read Dr. Zia's article 'The NSF National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program' in the November 2002 issue of D-Lib Magazine.

December 2001--Increasing the intelligibility of the Web is a compelling vision. Imagine how the utility of local data could be enhanced if they were meaningfully linked to data posted by strangers far away. The Web could evolve into a comprehensive meaning system, a universal encyclopedia or 'world brain,' as prophesized by H.G. Wells. This call is for papers http://informationr.net/ir/ that discuss the challenges of transforming the current Web into a meaning space. The scope of discussion extends from technical challenges, such as affixing meaning to an XML (Extensible Markup Language) source, to linguistic and cultural barriers, such as the development of semantic tags that will be widely accepted and validly used.Completed papers should be received by 31st May 2002. Questions and proposals for papers should be sent to the editor of the special issue: Dr. Terrence A. Brooks The Information School, University of Washington Box 352840, Seattle, WA 98195-2840voice: 206 543-2646fax: 206 616-3152 e-mail: tabrooks@u.washington.edu web: http://faculty.washington.edu/tabrooks/

December 2001--NPACI is an NSF sponsored project to support computational science. The services include compute engines, persistent archives, digital libraries, and data grids that link nationally distributed resources. The San Diego Supercomputer Center is the leading edge site for the NPACI project. NPACI partners include UCSB (ADEPT digital library), U Wisconsin (education multimedia tools), Caltech (scientific collections). NPACI has promoted development of data handling systems, information catalogs, and knowledge repositories. These technologies are used to support distributed data collections, digital libraries, data grids, and persistent archives. Through the NPACI Education, Outreach, and Training program, support is provided to promote science education. The activities within the NPACI program are described at http://www.npaci.edu/. The data and information management systems are described at http://www.npaci.edu/DICE/.

December 2001--One Core Integration task is to operate an NSF-wide Communication Portal for the NSDL communities, both users and developers. This is being set up at http://comm.nsdlib.org/, with support provided by Elly Cramer who is developing an NSDL collaborative software system at Cornell. The NSDL Communication Portal (CP) is based on the SourceForge system, which also provides tools for managing software development projects. The Core Integration team is currently establishing Workspaces for the principal NSDL activities. In addition, the portal allows any group associated with the NSDL to have its own Workspace. Current CP Workspace examples include the NSDL Project Atmospheric Visualization, independently managed by Christopher Klaus. This Workspace is being used to develop and distribute open source code to improve atmospheric visualization codes. The project goal is to make these codes easy to modify for use on other datasets as well as more useful for education and research with the ARM dataset at www.nsdl.arm.gov. During the past year an interim portal has been operated at http://www.smete.org/nsdl/index.html, by Brandon Miramatsu and colleagues. This portal is being phased out and its contents will be made accessible through the new NSF-wide Communication Portal. Many thanks to Brandon and his team for their excellent work over the past year. From NSDL Program Director Lee Zia, 'My colleagues and I here at NSF certainly appreciate the energy and time that have gone into the facilitation of discussions that have already brought us so far in the NSDL Program. Of course the events of the fall made for additional challenges, and I really appreciate the flexibility and adaptability that Gerry Hanley, Alice Agogino, and Brandon Miramatsu and their colleagues demonstrated in keeping things going.'

December 2001--The Dublin Core Education Working Group met in a breakout session on October 22, 2001 during the DC Workshop in Tokyo to review work accomplished to date and to chart the 2001-2002 work agenda. A PowerPoint presentation with a proposed Working Group agenda was used to guide the discussion during the breakout session. After a brief review of the history of the Working Group by the co-chairs, Jon Mason and Stuart Sutton, the participants were briefed on the formal recommendations for education-specific elements and element qualifiers that the Usage Board issued at its meeting at the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) in May in Dublin, Ohio including: an 'Audience' element, a 'Mediator' qualifier for the 'Audience' element, and a 'Conforms To' qualifier for the 'Relation' element. All three of these recommendations now officially exist in the DCMI 'terms' namespace. Work is underway to update documentation at the DCMI web site. For more information visit the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) web site.

December 2001--The Interactive University (IU) project at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the SMETE Open Federation, won the 2001 Educause Award for Exemplary Practices in Information Technology Solutions: Community Partnerships. The award was presented on 30 October 2001 at the Educause Conference in Indianapolis (http://www.educause.edu/conference/e2001/). The award citation reads: 'The UC Berkeley Interactive University Project: A Model for Large-Scale University and K-12 Partnership'.

December 2001--The United States National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United Kingdom Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) wish to establish a joint programme of activities in US and UK universities. Four exemplar projects of up to £1.5million / US$ 2.1 million each over three years will be funded to demonstrate how the education process for undergraduate students can be transformed using innovative applications of emerging information technologies and Internet resources. The objective of this joint NSF/JISC programme is to bring about a significant improvement in the learning and teaching process by fusing state of the art digital and internet-based services, rapidly expanding global digital content of all forms and emerging applications in undergraduate education. We particularly wish to examine how integrating recent technical developments with digital content will improve the learning experience of students and provide new models for the classroom across a number of disciplines. Steve Griffin from the Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2 (DLI-2) program at NSF http://www.dli2.nsf.gov will attend the NSDL All-Projects meeting next week and will be available to talk with interested parties.

December 2001--This past Spring IMLS convened a Digital Library Forum to discuss networked digital libraries, including issues of infrastructure, metadata, thesauri, and other vocabularies, and content enrichment. John Saylor, Cornell CI.Tech and Director, Cornell Engineering Library, is a contributor to the reports below, and has been appointed to the IMLS Digital Library Forum. Forum discussions led to the development of the following reports: 1. 'Report of the IMLS Digital Library Forum on the National Science Digital Library Program,' produced jointly with representatives of the National Science Foundation's Science, Math, Engineering and Technology Education digital library project (otherwise known as the National Science Digital Library, or NSDL program) http://www.imls.gov/pubs/natscidiglibrary.htm 2. 'A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections,' which identifies core principles and related information resources for the creation of high-quality digital collections, objects, and metadata.http://www.imls.gov/pubs/forumframework.htm IMLS requests comments on the reports. Please access the press release issuing the reports at: http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/110601-1.htm --from Primary Source.

December 2001-- http://comm.nsdlib.org/logo/Big tiffs, small gifs, or request a custom logo size and format.

December 2001-- http://comm.nsdlib.org/logo/Big tiffs, small gifs, or request a custom logo size and format.

December 2001--http://newslettermaker.comm.nsdlib.org/index.php Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. --Virginia Woolf.

December 2001--http://www.scitechresources.gov A new science and technology site is being developed by National Technical Information Service (NTIS).

December 2001-- Co-editors are Kay Howe, Deputy Director, Core Integration, NSDL, Cathy Manduca, Outreach Coordinator, Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE), and Carol Terrizzi, Communication Director, Cornell CI.TECH. Please send NSDL research news and notes of interest of 100 words or less to Kaye kaye@ucar.edu, Cathy cmanduca@carleton.edu, or Carol at clt6@cornell.edu. Back issues are available online at http://newslettermaker.comm.nsdlib.org/index.php

December 2001--'The NSLD T-shirt'--pick yours up when you register for the All-Projects Meeting in Washington, D.C. December 2-4 (agenda above):Whiteboard Report is published monthly by the Core National Science Digital Library Project at Cornell, and includes information from NSDL projects and programs nationwide. Para leer este mensaje en español vaya:

December 2001--Intelligent agents offer users guided access to highly personalized resources. Use AOL Instant Messenger to talk to the 'SmarterChild.'