Building a National Science Digital Library Dean Krafft, Cornell University

2 What is the NSDL?  An NSF-funded $20 million/year program in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education  A digital library describing over a million carefully selected online STEM resources from over 100 collections (at  A core integration team (Cornell, UCAR, Columbia) working with 9 “pathways” portals and over 200 NSF grantees  A large community of researchers, librarians, content providers, developers, students, and teachers

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4 NSDL Pathways Projects Middle School Portal for Math and Science: Ohio State Applied Mathematics and Science Education Repository (AMSER): U of Wisconsin-Madison The Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD): Shodor Education Foundation The Math Gateway: Math Association of America Teachers’ Domain Pathways to Science: Rich Media Resources for K-12 Teachers: WGBH - Boston BioSciEdNet (BEN) Pathway: AAAS, et al ComPADRE Pathway: American Physical Society, et al A Comprehensive Pathway for K-Gray Engineering Education: NEEDS Coalition, UC Berkeley, et al. Materials Digital Library (MatDL): Kent State, et al.

5 NSDL Publisher Partnerships  American Mathematical Society  American Physical Society  BioOne  Blackwell Publishing  Cambridge University Press  Elsevier Books  Houghton Mifflin Company  John Wiley and Sons  National Academy Press  Nature Publishing Group  Oxford University Press ― US Book Program  Scientific American  Tom Snyder Productions ― division of Scholastic  Tool Factory ― educational software

6 NSDL History  : Papers and workshops on creating a national STEM education digital library  Fall 2000: 6 Core Integration Pilots funded; 13 collection & 9 services grants;  Fall 2001: Unified CI funded; 18 collection & 14 services grants  December 2002: NSDL.org launched; 35 collection & 11 services grants  Fall 2003: 22 collections & 11 services  Fall 2004: First 4 Pathways grants

7 NSDL 1.0  Create a “union catalog” of Dublin Core metadata records for STEM resources  Harvest those records from collections using OAI-PMH (openarchives.org)  Store records in an Oracle DB and re-serve qualified DC through OAI-PMH  Build a search index using metadata plus full- text of available content pages  Create a web portal at nsdl.org for K-gray access to NSDL resources

8 NSDL 1.0 Lessons  Rather than one portal for everyone, support communities with common interests: Pathways now provide discipline and area-specific portals  Metadata is expensive: unlike traditional libraries, e.g. through OCLC, digital collections have very “mixed quality” metadata, with unusual and inconsistent coding  On the good side: Oracle DB and OAI-PMH server scaled successfully to over 1 million catalog records

9 NSDL 1.0 Lessons continued  OAI-provided collections need 3 types of expertise: domain (resources & pedagogy), metadata (vocabulary & formatting), and technical (XML schema, UTF8, HTTP, OAI-PMH).  In many cases it took several months from first contact to successful OAI harvest, and the average harvest failure rate has stayed at 25%-50%, with only 23% of that transient failures  Incremental harvesting fundamental to efficient processing, but problematic: issues with persisting deleted records and recovering from partial harvests  Result: some automation, but high people cost

10 NSDL 1.0 Summary  Metadata Repository was quick to implement using known technologies, but  Limited model  Metadata-centric orientation  No content – only metadata  Limited relationships – collection/item  Limits on context, structure, and access  Severe limits on contribution and collaboration  One-way data flow: NSDL → Users

11 Going beyond the card catalog  Create an NSDL that guides not just resource discovery, but resource selection, use, and contribution  Supports creating “context” for resources  Presents resources in context: in a lesson plan; with ratings; correlated with education standards  Supports creating a permanent archive of resources  Enables community tools for structuring, evaluation, annotation, contribution, collaboration  Goal: Create a dynamic, living library

12 NSDL 2.0: NSDL Data Repository  Goals:  Architecture of participation: service-based, not a monolithic application/single user experience  Remixable data sources and data transformations  Harnessing (and capturing) collective intelligence  A free market of millions of inter-related resources (create the “long tail”)  Two-way data flow: NSDL ↔ users  Solution: Fedora-based NSDL Data Repository

14 Fedora: the NDR middleware  A Flexible, Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture  Open source project with $2.2 million in Mellon funding  Collaboration of Cornell and Univ. of Virginia  Key funded users include:  eSciDoc project (collaboration of the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe)  VTLS Corp., Harris Corp., Library of Congress  Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW)  Royal Library Denmark, National Library, and DTU

15 What is Fedora?  An architecture, toolkit, and implementation: middleware, not a vertical application  DSpace in contrast: a vertical application with a fixed workflow targeted at users  Stores arbitrary internal and external digital objects, disseminations (transformations and combinations), relationships among objects  Entirely SOAP/REST based, disseminations are URLs  XML data store; RDBMS cache; RDF triplestore supports relationship queries

16 Implementing the NDR with Fedora  Multiple Object Types: Resources (with local or remote content), Metadata, Aggregations (collections), Metadata Providers (branding), Agents, and Relationships: Structural (part of), Equivalence, Annotation, with arbitrary graph queries  Web services: disseminations are arbitrary recombinations and transformations of content  Authentication/Authorization: Collections and services can manage their own repository content  Network overlay architecture: A lens for viewing science content on the net, whether content is local, remote, or archived – it all has a repository-based URL

17 Network Overlay View User View API/UI Repository View with Relations & Annotations Resources on the Web

18 How should we use the NDR?  The NDR provides powerful capabilities for:  Creating context around resources  Enabling the NSDL community to directly contribute resources and context  Representing a web of relationships among science resources and information about those resources  How do we use it? Here’s one specific example …

19 Issues in STEM Education  Issue: Need to support scientific inquiry  Issue: Students need a better understanding of the processes of scientific research  Issue: Teachers are often under- prepared to teach science and math  Issue: Scientists need tools to make science and math research more available

20 Addressing the Needs  In Response: NSDL is building an educational tool that…  Models scientific inquiry and exposes the processes of scientific research  Promotes and facilitates conversations between research and education communities  Brings content expertise into the classroom to support under-prepared teachers  Allows scientists, teachers, and media specialists to collaboratively develop instructional context around NSDL resources

21 ExpertVoices

22 What is Expert Voices?  A system using blogging technology to:  Support STEM conversations among scientists, teachers and students  Tie NSDL resources to real-world science news  Create context for resources to enhance discovery, selection and use  Enable NSDL community members to become NSDL contributors: of resources, questions, reviews, annotations, and metadata  Expert Voices ≠ LiveJournal  Contributors are carefully selected, contributions are about science, the process of science, and education

23 Expert Voices As An Educational Tool  Topic-based discussion (e.g. tsunamis) with pointers to related resources  Research outreach (Criterion 2) – explaining and documenting NSF-funded research  Experts can add resources with topical context to the NSDL  Resources can be reviewed and annotated  Question/answer and discussion forum: scientist ↔ teacher ↔ student ↔ librarian

24 Broadening Participation: An Expert Voices Learning Scenario  “Hurricane Season Blog” run by a National Weather Service hurricane expert, an Earth Science teacher, and a school media specialist familiar with NSDL resources  Expert creates an entry for Hurricane Gertrude  “On track to hit Ft. Lauderdale in 72 hours”  “Currently undergoing eyewall replacement cycle”  “Expecting 15 foot storm surge”  Media specialist adds links to NSDL resources: Hurricane Hunters site, latest satellite photos, and USGS flooding and flood plain site (storm surge context)  Teacher makes connections to relevant standards and appropriate pedagogy for use by other teachers  Students experience engaging real-time, real-world applications of science lessons

25 Broadening Participation: An Expert Voices Outreach Scenario  NSF grantee: Bioluminescence researcher wants to make research K-12 accessible  Creates an Expert Voices conversation  Enables his students and researchers to document process and results – how science really works  Writes about publications and educational resources (e.g.  Adds these to the NSDL, creating audience-level metadata  Entries serve as annotations that create K-12 context for the college-level research

27 But Expert Voices is just the beginning…

28 Other applications in development  Educational Standards integration with Content Alignment Tool (Syracuse) and ASN standards database (JES & Co.)  OnRamp: an NDR-integrated multi-user, multi- project content management system  Instructional Architect: Create a lesson plan around NSDL resources (Utah State)  iVia-based Expert-Guided crawl: Tool for Pathways and others to turn websites into resource collections (UC Riverside)  MyNSDL: Bookmark and tag STEM education resources within and outside the NSDL

30 What does this mean for the user?  All these applications situate resources in context, aiding both discovery and use  Users become contributors, adding new resources, ratings, annotations, and organizational structure – frequently as a side effect of using the library  Specialized portals, tagging, and powerful relationship queries and filtering support user- specific “views” into the library

31 Summary  NSDL 1.0 created a large, production digital library of STEM resources for education.  NSDL 2.0 and its tools allow scientists, mathematicians, teachers, engineers, librarians, and students to create a unique web of context, contribution, and collaboration around the high-quality STEM education resources at the core of the NSDL.

32 Acknowledgements  NSDL NSF Program Officers  Lee Zia  David McArthur  NSDL Core Integration Team  UCAR: Kaye Howe, PI and Executive Director  Cornell: Dean Krafft, PI  Columbia: Kate Wittenberg, PI  Fedora Development Team  Cornell: Sandy Payette & Carl Lagoze  Univ. of Virginia: Thornton Staples This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.