The theme of the NSDL 2006 Annual Meeting Leveraging Accomplishments Into New Opportunities was chosen to highlight the ongoing rich exchange of ideas and information about how the NSDL community is expanding what it means to be a digital library through technical and educational collaborations. Conference presentations will focus on three topics that examine different aspects of the meeting's theme.

Positioning NSDL in Broader Contexts Sessions under this topic are intended to consider the library's role in the research, technology, education, and policy arenas as well as the impact on the library of trends in these areas.

Leveraging Project and Community Accomplishments These sessions will highlight community collaborations involving multiple NSDL projects, or between NSDL projects and other entities, that have achieved successes by capitalizing on shared technical innovations, content, educational strategies, and user networks.

New Opportunities for Collaboration Projects will share information about tools, services, strategies, and/or other results of investigations that are of potential benefit to the broader community.

For more information about how to participate in the NSDL Annual Meeting to be held in Washington, D.C. at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) October 18-20, 2006 please visit the Annual Meeting web site. Proposals for sessions are due on July 17, 2006.

The NSDL Annual Meeting Planning Committee is seeking volunteers to assist in the review of session proposals for the 2006 meeting. To volunteer as a reviewer for the 2006 NSDL Annual Meeting, please submit this form by July 7, 2006.
Related Link: http://teragrid.org/events/2006conference/

Carl Lagoze, Tim Cornwell, Naomi Dushay, Dean Eckstrom, Dean Krafft and John Saylor won the Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for their paper entitled Metadata Aggregation and "Automated Digital Libraries": A Retrospective on the NSDL Experience.

In presenting the paper Lagoze reviewed NSDL 1.0 architecture and workflow and emphasized that NSDL had found "low barriers" to participation were not low enough for many NSDL metadata providers. He also presented some surprising statistics: "A cross section of email (primary method of interaction with all providers) archives of 8 representative providers revealed over 2,700 messages, or around 170 messages per provider per year." The paper concluded that while the NSDL 1.0 architecture led to the successful deployment of a digital library, the human effort costs were inordinately high and the resource discovery benefits gained from the structured metadata were compromised due to quality and incompleteness.

Lagoze commented, "Our reaction in NSDL is to focus our efforts on the deployment of a FEDORA-powered NSDL 2.0 architecture that focuses on resource context rather than structured description."

Read Metadata Aggregation and "Automated Digital Libraries": A Retrospective on the NSDL Experience here.
Related Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0601125