Materials Digital Library Pathway

Posted Thu, 07/29/2010 - 7:34pm by clowe
Grant Number: 
DUE-0532831
Target Audiences: 
Materials undergraduate and graduate students, educators, and researchers
Partners: 
A consortium initially involving NIST, Kent State University, MIT, University of Michigan, Purdue University, and Iowa State University. MatDL has begun pilot work with MRS and TMS, two important international materials professional societies, as well Sandia National Laboratories and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

MatDL Pathway logo

 

The Materials Digital Library Pathway (MatDL) provides stewardship of significant content and services to support materials education, research, and interactions between the two   This report summarizes MatDL’s services and provides an update of the MatDL outreach and collaborative efforts over the past year.

 

Services

  • In 2010, a new MatDL landing page was developed to better promote the range of services offered by MatDL.
  • MatDL Repository (http://matdl.org/repository) offers authoritative materials research and teaching resources including images, exercises, preprints, and interactive applets.
  • MatDL Wiki (http://matdl.org/matdlwiki) is a publicly accessible, expert-community-driven site for scientific communication and dissemination with emphasis on soft matter.
  • MatForge (http://matforge.org) is a workspace for open access, collaborative development of materials modeling and simulation codes. This service now includes a Redmine web interface for project management and tracking which provides advantages such as multiple projects support, the ability to define subprojects, and role based security. It is also compatible with many version control systems, offering users more flexibility to meet specific project needs. Educational code modules suitable for effective use with undergraduates are being developed based on research codes hosted on MatForge to support the integration of research and education.
  • Virtual Labs (http://matdl.org/virtuallabs) lessons and applets currently available on MatDL reinforce understanding of the concepts of states, energy, degeneracy, entropy, and free energy.
  • MatDL Teaching Archive (http://matdl.org/repository/community/matdl:1) facilitates collaborative development of core undergraduate MS teaching materials. 

 

Outreach

  • Invited presentation at the June 2010 University Materials Council (UMC) Workshop on Computational Materials Education
  • Invited presentation at the June 2010 MIT Sadoway 60 Symposium
  • Roundtable organizers for Translating Materials Research to Education at the 2010 Materials Research Society (MRS) Spring Meeting
  • Roundtable organizers for Integrated Computational Materials Research and Education and presentation at the at the 2010 Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) Annual Meeting
  • Bartolo serves on two Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS) Committees: Education and Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME).  She is also co-leading an ICME sub-committee on cyberinfrastructure.
  • Bartolo serves as Co-Chair of the CODATA Task Group on International Materials Data Exchange for Research & Education and will present at the October 2010 CODATA International Conference
  • Will present at the October 2010 Materials Science & Technology (MS&T) Conference

 

Collaborative Efforts

  • MatDL is partnering with The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS), a major, international, materials professional society. Beginning February 2009, TMS and MatDL have cohosted roundtables at TMS Annual Meetings that have included presentations on the MatForge service as well as individual projects hosted on Matforge. This outreach has helped MatForge to attract a number of new educational collaborators, such as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as well as research projects including Microstructure Builder administered by researchers at Los Alamos National Lab and Carnegie Mellon University; TheraPy administered by researchers at the Food & Drug Administration; and LAMMPS administered by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories.
  • A Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI)  Phase 2 grant, with ChemCollective, is supporting development of additional virtual labs which focus primarily on enhancing students’ conceptual understanding of economies of exchange phenomena related to dimerization and dissociation, but also include examples using lattice structure, binding energies, and thermal energy.
  • MatDL is collaborating with Cleveland State University and 12 university partners on a CCLI Phase 2 proposal to expand and disseminate work on materials failure cases.
  • MatDL is partnering with researchers at the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) to survey MS related universities, government labs, and government funded research centers about currently existing data management and education practices and where different directions in MS data practices, storage and education may best come together.