The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History will be the site of the launch of the NSDL SMILE Pathway featuring resources from the nation’s leading science museums on Nov. 1, 2009 at a panel discussion to be presented during the Association for Science-Technology Centers Annual Meeting.

The lighthearted SMILE logo can be seen in action at http://www.howtosmile.org.

The National Science Foundation’s NSDL program has funded a consortium of museums to aggregate the best learning activities offered by museums into a single repository to support informal science and mathematics education called SMILE – the Science Mathematics Informal Educator’s Pathway (www.howtosmile.org). SMILE is supporting informal educators and different-sized museums with varying backgrounds, experience, and infrastructure to easily contribute and share digital assets. Given its cost-effective strategy, SMILE is leveraging free and open source tools into its architecture, including NSDL EduPak components, as well as developing widgets that enable museums to customize SMILE tools and services into their own local websites. SMILE is testing a new metadata scheme to reflect diverse audiences served by museums who value fun, engagement, quality activities, and intergenerational learning in non-classroom settings.

The SMILE and NSDL panel, Sherry Hsi, Darrell Porcello, Scott Randol, and Susan Van Gundy, will share different aspects of the SMILE process that also have practical implications including distributed metadata development, online community contributions, digital library architecture, visual search, user interface design, and formative evaluation results. Panelists will discuss SMILE’s implementation, unveil post-launch plans, and solicit input. A presentation about the current organizational structure of the National Science Digital Library, how NSDL Pathways are supported, and seed grant opportunities will also be explained.