NSDL Reflections

Reflections on NSDL by Frank Wattenberg

September 18, 2008 at 2:07 pm Brandon Muramatsu Leave a comment

The Tiger Team Topics and Charges

I propose a review process based on the work of a series of tiger teams whose members are drawn form a wide community and which have tightly focused charges and three month time lines. The tiger teams should be supported by NSF funds. As you will see below the tiger team charges will collectively be quite broad.

The tiger teams themselves should choose the membership of an editorial committee that will synthesize the reports of the tiger teams and their recommendations. The editorial committee should also have a three month timeline that would start with a meeting at which the full membership of the individual tiger teams presents their reports and end at a meeting during which the full membership of the individual tiger teams discusses and approves the final report and its recommendations. The work of the editorial committee should also be supported by NSF funds.

Long term “business plan”

This is the most important and the most controversial topic. Without a realistic long term business plan based on unconstrained and realistic discussion, NSDL simply cannot achieve its goals. The tiger team should address (but not necessarily decide among) at least four alternatives or combinations of alternatives.

• Large scale long term government funding.
• Self-financing based on a combination of subscription fees and advertising revenue. The key to widespread access is that a single modest cost subscription should provide access to the entire NSDL collection.
• Support by a consortium possibly including government, educational institutions, and private industry.
• An endowed foundation with a substantial initial endowment.

The membership of this tiger team should be very broad and include, for example, someone from the leadership of the Digital Promise project. Note that there are serious public policy issues that must be addressed including independence of content from political pressure and widespread accessibility. Must NSDL be free to users? Should it be international? Can and should it remain an NSF project? What is its relationship to other projects, like Digital promise?

Accessibility, reliability and maintainability of interactive content

This is the core of the “digital zoo” metaphor. We can still read books placed on the shelves of traditional libraries hundreds of years ago and, equally importantly, everyone can read the books on the New Books shelves. We can even take two books written at the same time from different shelves and read them together. Digitally, however, we live in a world inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel and its aftermath. Our hardware and software are not forward compatible, not backward compatible, and not even sideways compatible. The tiger team process is unlikely to solve this problem. It can, however, address the following issues.

• The over-arching issue is replacing the production and maintenance functions assumed by traditional publishers for traditional books in this new context of highly interactive digital content. This tiger team needs to address this issue directly. The discussion should include, for example, the level at which such functions should reside. With the current structure some functions might reside most naturally at the NSDL level, others at the Pathways level, and still others at the collections level. In traditional publishing authors do what they do best, write, and then publishers take over the responsibility for production and maintenance. In NSDL we often rely on the authors for production and maintenance, a job they often have little interest in, and less experience with, and a job that conflicts with their creation of new content.
• Standards and “best practices” for interactive content. This issue is closely related to the first one. There is considerable tension now between the burden of standards and best practices on what essentially are individual creator/producers and the accessibility, reliability, and maintainability of their products. NSDL discussions often include a distinction between free-flowing developmental collections and the “permanent” collections. In current practice, the frontier style of the developmental process has not lead to accessible, reliable, and maintainable permanent collections with substantial interactive content. We probably need two sets of standards and “best practices” – one set for creation and development and another for the “permanent collections” – and we need effective mechanisms for transitioning developmental content to production-quality, maintainable “permanent” content.
• Institutional mechanisms for accessibility, reliability, and maintenance. This is one place NSF could take immediate action even before the tiger team process is complete. This tiger team should recommend specific mechanisms – for example, one mechanism might focus on Java and certify and maintain Java-based interactive components for permanent collections. Another mechanism might focus on shareable software components. Another mechanism might focus on Open Source or cloud alternatives to expensive proprietary components, like Mathematica. A sufficiently robust long term business plan might also, for example, include access to proprietary components for all NSDL subscribers.
• Maintainability and access issues associated with game quality modeling and simulation. The membership of this tiger team should include people with experience in the commercial world with production and maintenance issues for digital content. It should also include people on the cutting edge of game quality modeling and simulation – for example, from the Federation of American Scientists – and from innovators in cloud computing.

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Entry filed under: Friends of NSDL. Tags: National Science Digital Library, NSDL, NSDL Reflections.