Reflections on NSDL by Frank Wattenberg
September 18, 2008 at 2:07 pm Brandon Muramatsu Leave a comment
Quality assurance and broad authorship
One of the primary drivers behind the idea of NSDL was the uneven quality of materials on the Web. This tiger team should address that issue. In particular, it should consider two somewhat different approaches and make recommendations for how both might contribute to the NSDL mission.
- The traditional refereeing approach used by professional societies.
- Dynamic broad community authorship, as exemplified by the WikiPedia.
Membership on this tiger team should include people active in professional societies and active Wikinomicists.
Market Research
The most striking metric leading to the disappointment many of us feel with NSDL is simple – it is not being used. Our colleagues often don’t know about it and we, ourselves, rarely use it except when we are working specifically on NSDL itself. My personal belief is that this is due to the fact that NSDL has not successfully addressed the key goals of quality, accessibility, and maintainability and that the largely CS goals it has addressed have proved either largely irrelevant (e.g., harvesting and metadata) or have been (e.g., searching and portals) more successfully addressed by Google and others. The successes of NSDL are primarily at the collection level and many of its collections are widely used. We need to know more about what NSDL should do to address the real needs of STEM education. This tiger team should at a minimum
- Do a meta analysis of existing “market research.”
- Convene at least one national meeting and hold subject area sessions at meetings in different disciplines. Project Kaleidoscope meetings are another natural venue for such sessions. The membership of this tiger team should include representatives from professional societies who are able to convene such sessions within the tiger team timeline.
Technical challenges and opportunities
This is the CS tiger team. It should look at the title subjects in the context of the real needs of the “market.” Among the things it should look at are the Horizon Report produced by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE. (Google “New Media Consrtium Horizoin Report”.) This tiger team’s membership should include computer scientists from the academic and nonacademic communities, people active in the production of the Horizon Report, and STEM educators.
Entry filed under: Friends of NSDL. Tags: National Science Digital Library, NSDL, NSDL Reflections.
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