The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) has been a functioning digital library since 2002 when, among other developments, the Nova Scotia Drama League agreed to transfer the “NSDL.org” domain name. During the Education session at the recent Joint Conference on Digital Libraries on June 17, 2008, Richard Furuta, Texas A&M University, chaired a series of presentations that highlighted aspects of NSDL’s technical infrastructure and work with educational discipline communities. Later a panel of NSDL users and developers led a discussion entitled, “NSDL: Past, Present, Future” that focused on how NSDL has fulfilled its mission “to provide organized access to high quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education,” and what direction NSDL will take in the future.

Paul Conway, University of Michigan, moderated the “NSDL: Past, Present, Future” panel that featured Dave MacArthur, GoH LLC, Kim Lightle, Ohio State University, Kathleen Koch, NSDL Middle School Portal, and David Yaron, Carnegie Mellon University.

Dave McArthur credited Lee Zia, NSDL’s NSF Program Officer, with guiding the project from it’s inception in 2000 and reminded the audience that the NSDL was not always the way it looks now at NSDL.org. Basic infrastructure and technical standards were developed in the early start-up phase from about 2000-2003. NSF provided funding for collections and research. NSDL Core Integration and NSDL projects developed library services. The first iteration of a web site at NSDL.org was launched. “Getting the stuff up and running” was the task at hand and work with teachers and students was postponed as the Library of educational resources continued to build. The NSDL library research track was significant as a continuation of Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 1 and Phase 2 (DLI1 and DLI2) research. About 40% of NSF-NSDL funded projects contributed to content, services and community building at NSDL.org in this early phase.

From 2004-2007 NSDL was refurbished and reorganized with the launch of new infrastructure based on Fedora open source repository software. The Collections track morphed into a new track called Pathways, which emphasized leveraging NSDL for different Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) discipline communities. During this phase 70% of NSF-NSDL funded projects contributed directly to NSDL.org. Outreach and communications efforts increased as NSDL moved beyond prototyping and into classrooms. More projects went into the field and gathered data about how NSDL was being used.

Currently, using the tools and services that power NSDL, NCore technology and standards for creating a dynamic information layer on top of library resources, provides STEM education projects with a “grand and deep” opportunity for personalization. McArthur pointed out that a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation for implementing a specialized educational digital library system for a big urban school district might cost about $2M. Using NCore brings the cost down to about a quarter of that.

Kim Lightle has been associated with NSDL since 2000. “We view NSDL as a platform,” said Lightle, “We have been able to do amazing things with very little money using NSDL technology and services.”

She demonstrated examples from the NSDL Middle School Portal (MSP) that has been online for three years. Last month the MSP recorded 85,000 page views. “Using NSDL tools brings a high Google ranking to all content,” Lightle explained. “We are in the business of providing context around significant science and math themes by harvesting, highlighting, and repackaging content in our Explore in Depth online publications.” All 2,500 NSDL resources that have been augmented by MSP have been put back into the NSDL data repository so that others may benefit from additional resource information.

MSP hosts several NSDL Expert Voices blogs and features the RSS from their blogs on their web site: http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/connectingnews/;

http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/middle-school-math-science/,and; http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/polar/.

Some postings are ‘quick takes’ on popular topics that are noted on analysis of search logs–Middle School Portal editors write short items based on what people are looking for and feature the RSS feed from the blog on their homepage.

Additionally NSDL outreach services and access to professional personnel have made it possible to create an entire online magazine–Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears–that would not have been otherwise possible financially or logistically.

Kathleen Koch explained that she has made use of Middle School Portal (MSP) resources in the large, urban North Carolina school district where she helps coordinate curriculum development for teachers in 32 middle schools. Urban schools have many challenges–providing support for young and new teachers, and achieving teacher retention are among them. At each grade level students learn integrated science and math and teachers often lack content expertise. Koch, who is a classroom teacher, is trying to make their jobs easier by providing resources for instruction. Using district access to commercial Riverdeep education software, she links MSP resources. “Teachers think this is ‘one-stop shopping,’” she says.

“Making learning relevant during a tricky age (early teen years) is key because they lose interest quickly,” she said.

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Dave Yaron, an associate professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University and Principal Investigator for the NSDL Chem Collective project (read Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article here), believes that digital libraries can help solve the problem of uninteresting and rote curricula at high school and undergraduate levels because digital libraries are cognitive tools that help novices construct expert mental models. By the time he retires, he would like to see some evolution with respect to changes teaching and learning methods, particularly in chemistry education “from the bottom up”.

Yaron believes that certain educational practices will increase the use of digital libraries in high school and undergraduate classrooms:

- Changing math procedures that have been defining what chemistry is so that the ChemCollective Virtual Lab Simulator, for example, is relevant as a teaching tool (7,000 teachers have seen it; 200 are using it; a handful have contributed to improving the tool).

- Developing more scenarios like Mixed Reception about how chemistry (and other scientific discipline-related activities) are related to events in the real world.

Related NSDL JCDL 2008 Papers:

From NSDL 1.0 to NSDL 2.0:Towards a Comprehensive Cyberinfrastructure for Teaching and Learning, David McArthur, Lee Zia

NCore: Architecture and Implementation of a Flexible, Collaborative Digital Library, Dean Krafft, Aaron Birkland, Ellen Cramer