June 2004 -- The Fedora Project has been awarded $1.4 million over a three year period. This new funding has been granted to Cornell Computing and Information Science and the University of Virginia to advance the open-source Fedora project . The project is directed by Sandy Payette at Cornell, and Thornton Staples at Virginia.

The Fedora project evolved out of Cornell research in digital library and repository architecture led by Carl Lagoze and Sandy Payette (DARPA and NSF funding 1998-2001). The open-source Fedora software was developed over the past three years with funding from the Mellon Foundation and is being adopted nationally and internationally by institutions developing digital libraries, document archives, content management systems, and educational applications. The newly funded phase of Fedora will focus on distributed repository issues including preservation, performance, distributed searching, and workflow.

NSDL Director Kaye Howe has announced that Fedora will be implemented as the NSDL content management system supporting distributed library building. Information about Fedora/NSDL development led by Dr. Elly Cramer at Cornell can be found at http://cms.comm.nsdl.org
Related Link: http://cms.comm.nsdl.org

June 2004 -- Following up on the Senate staff briefing held in Washington, D.C. on May 20, NSDL Director Kaye Howe and Communications Director Carol Minton Morris met with staff from Congressman Sherwood Bohlert's, House Science Committee Chair, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's offices to offer additional information about NSDL's work with our users, the educational community. Both offices have expressed an interest in NSDL as an "educational utility" and a national resource in science education.

Howe has stated, "We have pledged public education to each other in this country." She presented ideas for how we might work together to further demonstrate the educational utility of the NSDL as the new bridge between math, science, and education matching resources with teachers and schools to renew that pledge in the 21st century.
Related Link: http://nsdl.org

June 2004 -- Karen Henry comes to the NSDL with an extensive background in the health care, telecommunications, and web services industries. She is currently capturing information about all NSDL technical work items and production level services to strengthen and expand NSDL's operations capabilities. She looks forward to working collaboratively across digital library services, web technologies, and research activity groups to facilitate a dynamic and reliable NSDL production environment. Please contact Karen at if you have questions about NSDL production services.
Related Link: http://nsdl.org

June 2004 -- The EIESC met at JCDL recently. Members in attendance agreed to coordinate a fact-finding effort from all NSDL Standing Committees for the EIESC. Sarah Giersch is providing leadership and is looking for volunteers to work with her in developing a survey and process for completion of the study .
Related Link: http://nsdl.org

June 2004 -- The SSC has launched a series of discussions and activities around five integral aspects of developing a long-term plan for NSDL viability. Project (collections and services) sustainability involves the public-private-government funding strategies to extend support for projects currently funded by the National Science Foundation. User-community sustainability has to do with networking, outreach and engagement strategies necessary to grow the community of NSDL users, members and sponsors who will support the NSDL into the future. Program sustainability involves communication strategies that facilitate long-term collaborations among and between projects, users, and the overall program. Technical sustainability looks into coordination with the Technology Standing Committee to implement the NSDL in a persistent and functional manner. SSC Organization is a crosscutting sustainability feature of the SSC having to do with NSDL program vision, components, stakeholders and their dynamic interaction. The SSC timeline will be posted online within the month. Contact Paul Berkman, SSC chair, with questions at .
Related Link: http://nsdl.org

Open Source Internet Resource Discovery and Metadata/Full-Text Generation Service
The LITA Internet Portals Interest Group and Open Source Software Interest Group are co-sponsoring a presentation at ALA on Saturday 6/26, 10:30-12:00 in room PEA-Florida BR 1. "Data Fountains" is a cooperative Internet resource discovery, metadata generation and selected, full-text harvesting service of value in building Internet resource collections for libraries and virtual libraries. It incorporates new approaches in automated and semi-automated Web crawling and classification thus providing machine assistance and time and labor savings to collection builders. Recently funded by an IMLS National Leadership Grant, the project and its progress will be described in depth. Data Fountains is a project of the Library of the University of California at Riverside and its collaborators.

NSDL is collaborating with UC Riverside in developing an automated metadata generation and augmentation service for use in NSDL production systems.
Related Link: http://infomine.ucr.edu/Data_Fountains/

June 2004 -- An update on program and logistics for the next NSDL all-community meeting is now available at http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org/.

Meeting Dates: Monday, Nov 15 - Wednesday, Nov 17
New Projects' Orientation: Afternoon of Sunday, Nov 14
Location: Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois
Meeting Theme: Designing Strategies for Success
Call for Proposals: June 4, 2004 at http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org
Proposal Deadline: August 6, 2004
Presenter Notification: August 20, 2004
Meeting / Poster Registration Available: June 25, 2004
Hotel Reservation Deadline: October 15, 2004
Meeting / Poster Registration Deadline: October 22, 2004
Related Link: http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org

June 2004 -- NetDay will share some new additional results of Speak Up Day for Students (2003), as well as some preliminary results of Speak Up Day for Teachers (2004), and announce exciting future plans for the Speak Up Day initiative on Tuesday, June 22 at 12:30 -1:30 PM at the National Education Computing Conference (NECC), Morial Convention Center 252, New Orleans, LA.
Related Link: http://www.netday.org/

European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) 2004
http://www.ecdl2004.org
September 12-17 2004, University of Bath, UK
Full papers, panels, tutorials, and workshop proposals: April 5, 2004
Posters and demonstrations: May 19, 2004
Final submission date: June 11, 2004
Related Link: http://www.ecdl2004.org

MathFest 2004: MAA's Annual Summer Meeting
http://www.maa.org/mathfest/
August 12-14, Providence, RI
Registration deadlines: June 30, early bird; After June 30, regular

228th ACS National Meeting
http://www.chemistry.org/
August 22-26, 2004, Philadelphia, PA
Registration opens June 1, 2004

2004 ALA Annual Conference
http://www.ala.org/ala/events/eventsconferences.htm
June 26-29, 2004
Registration will be available on site.

ASEE 2004 Annual Conference and Exposition
http://www.asee.org/conferences/annual2004/default.cfm
June 20-23, 2004, Salt Lake City, Utah
Registration will be available on site.
Related Link: http://www.maa.org/mathfest/;http://www.chemistry.org/

http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/infocommons.contentsexsum.html
"The Internet offers unprecedented possibilities for human creativity, global communication, and access to information. Yet digital technology also invites new forms of information enclosure. In the last decade, mass media companies have developed methods of control that undermine the public's traditional rights to use, share, and reproduce information and ideas. These technologies, combined with dramatic consolidation in the media industry and new laws that increase its control over intellectual products, threaten to undermine the political discourse, free speech, and creativity needed for a healthy democracy."--Nancy Kranich, Senior Research Fellow, Free Expression Policy Project
Related Link: http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/infocommons.contentsexsum.html

http://nclb.ecs.org/nclb/
A one-stop shop for policymakers, staff and the public for learning the day-to-day status of how state policies match up with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requirements. Information in this database represents state laws, departmental regulations, board rules, directives and practices related to 40 requirements across seven major sections of NCLB legislation. These baseline data, compiled by ECS researchers in conjunction with state policymakers and their staff, will be updated frequently as policies change.
Related Link: http://nclb.ecs.org/nclb/

http://www.rupress.org
The Rockefeller University Press (RUP), a not-for-profit scientific publisher, announced that it has completed digitizing the entire backfiles for its three research publications, and will make them freely available to all. RUP, based in New York, publishes THE JOURNAL OF CELL BIOLOGY (JCB), THE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE (JEM), and THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY (JGP). The archives will feature full-text, searchable PDF versions of all articles dating back to volume 1, issue 1 (1955 for the JCB; 1896 for the JEM; and 1918 for the JGP). --Library Journal Academic Newswire, June 10, 2004
Related Link: http://www.rupress.org

http://notabug.com/kahle/
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/cases/kahle_v_ashcroft.shtml#002043
Kahle v. Ashcroft is a lawsuit that challenges changes to U.S. copyright law that have created a large class of "orphan works." Orphan works are books, films, music, and other creative works which are out of print and no longer commercially available, but which are still regulated by copyright. Because the copyright system contains no mechanisms to create and maintain useful records of copyright ownership, people who would like to distribute or use these orphaned works -- digital libraries, or creators who would like to include the work in their own creative expression -- often are unable to clear rights. The copyright system thus denies public access to these orphan works, without creating any countervailing benefit either to authors or the public at large.
Related Link: http://notabug.com/kahle/;

NSDL Focus on Education is now available on line. NSDL Focus on Education highlights NSDL activities and opportunities of particular interest to educators in formal and informal settings. To receive NSDL Focus on Education please subscribe at whiteboard-focus_on_ed@comm.nsdl.org. Back issues are available online at .
Related Link: http://content.nsdl.org/wbr/foe/Issue.php