Reflections on NSDL by Frank Wattenberg
September 18, 2008 at 2:07 pm Brandon Muramatsu Leave a comment
“Computer Science”
In addition, Computer Science, the discipline and the community, is responsible for some of the successes of NSDL and its greatest failures. In the beginning much of the formal CS focus was on searching, metadata, reusability, portals, and harvesting. The underlying theme was that the resources were there and the problem was helping users find them. NSDL was just another “domain” for CS. Interestingly, the nonacademic CS community, has made the successes of the academic NSDL CS community less relevant while the academic NSDL CS community’s framing the problem as a matter of “harvesting” a crop that was just lying around waiting to be harvested doomed the effort from the beginning. Metadata efforts have had less impact than we expected; reusability, while incredibly important, has not posted many successes; and NSDL’s portal does not seem to have the traffic to generate support. Meanwhile Google’s successes – including, searching, realizing the potential of advertising revenue, cloud computing, and mash-ups – have upended the view of the Web we all held five and ten years ago. In the Army we often use the term OBE (overcome by events). Much of the academic CS NSDL effort has been overcome by events – rendered largely irrelevant.
NSDL can still achieve the goals we had in mind at the beginning but the focus must always be on the “books” – that is, the content – of the library. Quality does not come cheap and maintaining highly interactive quality is not automatic. We have spent a great deal of time and money on NSDL and now is a good time to review what we have done and chart a course for the future.
Entry filed under: Friends of NSDL. Tags: National Science Digital Library, NSDL, NSDL Reflections.
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