EIESC Committee Meeting at the NSDL Annual Meeting 2003

Held October 15 at the Capital Hilton.

Meeting Notes
Wednesday, October 15, 2003, 1.30 pm-3.40 pm.
Washington, DC

Notes taken by Mimi Recker

********EIESC Meeting Presentation -- unavailable

1. NSDL annual/progress Report (Tammy Sumner)

Tammy discussed the role the Standing Committee (SC) took in the NSDL annual/progress report. The importance of reports in communication, and as reference and outreach documents was stressed.

She also reminded the SC of the initial questions that has driven the work of the SC over the last 2 years, and how these fed well into the report:

1. How are people using library?
2. How are collections growing?
3. How are distributed library building and governance processes working?
4. What processes are needed to answer these 3 questions?

• Should SC participate in this report building process?
• How to coordinate volunteers in a production process?
• How should other SCs get involved?

Recommendation
The SC recognizes the need to pull together its work in some readable account that is disseminated to necessary audience. Whether it appears in NSDL report is a separate issue. Need a more standardized process for coordinating SC work with Core Integration (CI) outreach group.

Mimi Recker will represent the EIESC in developing such processes with CI and Policy Committee.

2. NSDL Collections Assessment (Judy Ridgway)

2003 Collections Assessment report

Judy presented on goals, methods, findings, and current status of assessment study. See the working group’s report on EIESC site.

Discussion
A key difficulty is that all libraries are using different controlled vocabularies in important collection and item-level metadata fields (including resource type, subject, audience). SVM machine learning algorithm is promising in inducing a crosswalk. Work is ongoing in this area. Could this approach improve search engine performance because it provides query expansion?

Qualitative Study
Correlate what people are searching for and map to what is currently in the library. Can help focus collection development. SVM ML technique again might be useful.

Recommendation
Judy should press forward!

3. 2003 NSDL PI survey (Sarah Giersch)

2003 PI Survey report

Discussion

• Who defines expectations for participation and collaboration for NSDL projects?
• Should it be in NSF RFP? Who defines collaboration?
• Who defines incentives and benefits to collaborate?
• Is collaboration essential for library building?
• If so, it should appear in RFP; and should it be measured?
• Should CI publish info on what they will support?
• Are there case studies of successful collaboration that can be disseminated?
• Do we want to do this survey again?

Recommendations

• a. Add explicit language to NSF RFP to set expectations for collaboration for participating in NSDL community building. Include in RFP review criteria. Tammy, Ann, Sarah, and Flora to work on justification for this addition and language.
• b. A discussion is needed on how to measure quality of informal and formal collaboration.
• c. Ask EIESC group for feedback on report; make clear what aspects of report need feedback; identify action items as a result.

4. Elections

Flora McMartin briefed on election process. Sarah and Tammy’s term ends December 31. Term is 2 years. Two volunteers for slates: Anita Coleman (University of Arizona) volunteers to serve as chair. Laura Bartolo volunteers to serve as co-chair.

Anita Coleman

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Resources and Library Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, which I joined in 2001. I have worked on a couple of NSF digital library projects - Alexandria Digital Library (ADEPT) and NSDL Geo-Technical Rock and Water Resources (GROW) Digital Library. Additionally, I also serve on the DLESE Steering Committee. My research and teaching interests revolve round information organization and information behaviors in the context of learning. From the White Paper in 2000 where five levels of evaluation were identified to the change in the committee name from merely evaluation to Educational Impact & Evaluation, and the goal of building a shared vision for evaluation as an integral activity in the NSDL through the development of metrics, instruments, and toolkits, the progress made is commendable. To be involved in continuing this work, as Chair, is both an honor and a challenge to which I look forward. Thanks for your consideration and support of my nomination.

Laura Bartolo

Laura M. Bartolo is an Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Kent State University. She serves the NSDL as PI of the MatDL project, a collaboration among KSU, the Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, MIT, University of Michigan, and University of Colorado at Boulder. The project is building an ongoing materials science collection so that students, educators, and researchers alike would have immediate, reliable access to high-quality digital resources, reducing the delay of new knowledge from the laboratory into the classroom.

Her responsibilities as PI include guiding the direction and formative evaluation of the overall project as well as conducting research into the automated characterization of heterogenous materials information suitable for students, educators, and researchers. Her research interests include metadata, networked information discovery and retrieval, and multidisciplinary scientific information. As a member of the EIESC committee she contributed to preparations for the Evaluation Workshop. She is Co-Chair of the Materials Markup Language Coordination Consortium and Co-PI on the GREEN project. Bartolo received her MILS from State University of New York at Buffalo.

Received nomination and seconds for slate.
This will be followed by email elections.

5. Developing a strategy for evaluating the educational impact of the NSDL (Mary Marlino)

2003 Educational Impact Workshop report

Additional information and annotated bibliography available on the workshop website.

Discussion
What about quantitative data? Some of these are available in annual report. Requires coordinated library instrumentation, which is hard.

Recommendations

• Announce existence of evaluation bibliography and methods paper drafts to other SCs and in WhiteBoard report.
• Need plan to disseminate findings from evaluation efforts.
• Tracking/evaluating library usage is important (not just at NSDL portal) -- but hard.

6. Closing

A strong vote of appreciation was expressed to the outgoing SC chair and co-chair, Tammy Sumner and Sarah Giersch.

Meeting closed at 3.40pm.