Developing Metadata Frameworks for Earth System Education NSDL 2003 Annual Meeting October 14, 2003 Katy Ginger and Karon Kelly DLESE Program Center

Metadata Development Overview What is DLESE? Design principles Evolution of metadata frameworks Reflections

What is DLESE? A community-led effort funded by NSF A place to find quality resources about the Earth System A community center for anyone interested in learning or teaching about the Earth Geoscience node to NSDL

Key Design Principles User input central to every stage of library development Distributed development (community, data, collections, evaluation) Users as contributors Community-based governance

DLESE Versions V 1.0 V 2.0 V 3.0 Operational Library Quality collection 1000 recommended resources Teacher-friendly discovery Grade level Educational resource type Community Governance Working Groups Evaluation plan Enhanced Educational Features Reviewed collections Educational discovery services AAAS Benchmarks Nat’l Science Standards Geography standards Earth system vocabulary Community Community Center Community review Outreach & Diversity Formative evaluations DPC products and processes Collections Library use Georeferencing & Data Thematic collections Georeferenced discovery Spatial & temporal Earth system events Data Metadata extensions Describing for discovery Linking data with tools Third party-generated Large-scale data collections Community Teaching & Learning Center Multiple review mechanisms Outreach & Diversity Summative Evaluation

Why Metadata? Facilitate discovery Using criteria - resource type, grade level & standards For non-textual objects - geoscience images/data Across multiple audiences - vocabularies mapped to serve novice to experts Track rights information Support annotation of objects

Which Metadata Standard? Characteristics of collections Community needs Phasing of library/collection development Development stage of standards

DLESE’s Initial Metadata Path: IMS XML support Extensible to use own fields Mappable to Dublin Core Educational metadata Administrative metadata Classification/annotation metadata sections

Evolution to DLESE-IMS Streamline new field additions desired by the community Accommodate more detailed geospatial and temporal coverage Manage semantic differences resulting from interpretation and formatting Control when major version changes occur

Development of ADN Framework Partnership of ADL - DLESE - NASA Better temporal & geospatial fields Accommodate online and physical objects Enforce required metadata & controlled vocabularies Be OAI compliant - move from XML DTD to XML schema Differentiate intended audience (e.g. ‘tool for’ and ‘beneficiary’ fields)

Annotation Framework Outside the object metadata Based on NSDL proposed framework Added DLESE specific concepts Gatekeeper to DLESE Reviewed Collection Control user ability to add or read comments Annotations as links or actual text 2003

Collection Framework Organize collections and sub-collections Provide overviews of collections to users Contain technical data about collections for harvesting Track accessioning process 2003

Summary of DLESE Frameworks ADN – online and physical educational resources Annotation - reviews & comments Collection - collection characteristics News - time sensitive announcements SMS - AAAS benchmarks and strand maps

DLESE in NSDL Most DLESE collections transferred as individual collections in NSDL DLESE completes the collection records and acts as the point of contact Transformations using XSLT to NSDL-DC as OAI sets

Looking to the Future Defined versions and user expectations State education standards Earth system perspective Data and tools Metadata extraction

Reflections Best practices and quality assurance Support for legacy collections in non standard formats Be prepared to transform data Collection development goals – scope and selectivity and investment in metadata

Katy Ginger Karon Kelly