Third Annual Meeting December 2002

Welcome  2002 Annual Meeting  Initial Library Launch

What is NSDL?  A partnership of NSDL-funded projects  A library of exemplary collections and services with practical educational value  A center of innovation in digital libraries applied to education  A community center, focused on digital- library-enabled science education

What’s Ahead This Morning  Interactive session  Meet your table  Find a scribe

Opening Reflections Lee Zia NSDL Program Director, NSF

“Where are we, and where are we going?”  Thank you(s)  Purpose  Progress  Prospects

Pre-NSDL (FY98-99)  Applications and testbeds focusing on undergraduate education  Multiple projects exploring aspects of the current program

FY00-02 Award Information  354 proposals (~ $225M), 105 awards (~ $63M)  In Collections, Services, Targeted Research: 80 proposals in FY00, 103 in FY01, 156 in FY02 !!  56 projects in Collections, 32 in Services, 10 in Targeted Research  Core Integration project - “technical and organizational glue”  13 NSDL projects co-funded by MPS ($3M), 11 co- funded by GEO ($1.7M), one co-funded by BIO ($100K)

Project Characteristics  Current content domains include: various engineering disciplines, life sciences, physics, mathematical sciences, geosciences, chemistry, materials science, anthropology, computer science, plus multiple cross-disciplinary collections  Thematic projects growing: e.g. video collections, services for targeted audiences, etc.  Increased involvement of professional societies  Nascent private sector and publisher involvement  Numerous formal collaborative projects  28 with explicit pre-K to 12 links, 19 with strong potential for application to the pre-K to 12 sector

Additional Information  - Communications Portal - user and developer exchange and community building  - Main Portal D-Lib Magazine articles:  - a look at the “big picture”  - FY02 awards  - FY01 awards  - FY00 awards

NSDL Program in FY03  Proposal deadline mid-April 2003 (anticipated)  Letters of intent mid-March 2003 (anticipated)  Next solicitation expected: early January 2003 (refer to site below)  (contact point)  (links to background reports and related projects)

Collections: The Whys and Hows for the NSDL Len Simutis Director of the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse And member of the Policy Committee

Collections: Why?  Archival and “just in case” repositories  Specialized audiences and needs  New collaborations around shared resources—scalability, sustainability  Digital content in a digital context— post-bibliographic world  Be a part of something new, but not quite sure what it is

Collections—How  Define user requirements, match resources to audience needs  “islands” of specialized collections  Up and running first, retrofit, export, cross-walk as needed  Maintain, build on uniqueness of resources and audiences

Collections: What ENC has learned  Learning objects require greater cataloging skills and time  Standards have been adopted, but not understood operationally  Plan, design, do, redo, redesign, redo…  Too easy to avoid the big picture, other players

Collections: What’s Next?  NSDL not a library, but a fundamental element in the transformation of educational infrastructure  Islands sink, networks bind  The educational object is the building block—research and services transform the objects in the collections

Collections: The Big Picture  Interoperability is key to sustainability— for collections and the overall NSDL  Have to find better ways to learn from each other  Have to find better ways to contribute effectively to services and research tracks  Re-search in a digital world

Collections Discussion For the collection builders: What difference has participating in NSDL made for you, and what difference have you made to NSDL? In general: What do you see as the biggest challenges in building collections currently?

Services Mimi Recker Utah State University And PI on Instructional Architect

The Instructional Architect Mimi Recker Jim Dorward David Wiley NSF DUE Utah State University

NSDL service tool  The Instructional Architect facilitates the discovery, selection, and use of NSDL resources for creating a personalized, permanent, and annotated collections for instruction  Audience: K-12 teachers seeking to integrate high-quality Web resources in instruction

Instructional Architect MDR DL smete.org NSDL Search Interface Create account Search & gather Create & Organize Publish Annotated learning objects for instruction (web pages) NLVM Instructional Architect

Emergent themes from our NSDL work  Evaluation as research  Resource granularity and the ‘reuse assumption’  If we build it, will they come?

Evaluation as research  How to evaluate a multi-disciplinary, collaborative project with an evolving social and technical surround?  How to involve teachers and students as co-participants and researchers?

Granularity & the ‘reuse assumption’  Assumptions about resource granularity?  How to tap into economies of reuse?  What is the ‘right’ grain size?

If we build it, will they come?  Rich diversity in ‘we’ and ‘they’  NSDL will be used in innumerable and unknowable ways -- none wrong

Services Discussion For the service builders: What difference has participating in NSDL made for you, and what difference have you made to NSDL? In general: What do you see as the biggest service needs for NSDL currently?

Targeted Research Rick Furuta Texas A&M University And PI on Walden’s Path Project

The Walden’s Paths project PIs: Richard Furuta and Frank M. Shipman Texas A&M University  Metadocuments as Communicative Artifact to Enable Use of a Research Digital Library in Undergraduate SMET Education (DUE ). 9/1/00- 8/31/03.  Design and Evaluation of Maintenance Tools for Distributed Digital Libraries (DUE ). 9/15/01-9/14/03.

Project components  Walden’s Paths System  Organize, contextualize, and present materials selected from throughout the World-Wide Web  Walden’s Path Manager  Assist the maintainer of collections of Web- based resources by flagging significant change to collection items

Walden’s Paths System Off the path traversal Returning to the path On the path traversal

Walden’s Paths reader Original Web page Navigational controls Annotation

Reader’s path traversal

Off the path…

Path authoring On-line (Web) interface External (off-line) interface

Walden’s Path Manager  Web-based collections (paths, bookmark lists, …)  You can choose materials for collections but cannot control what happens to those materials subsequently  Requires ongoing maintenance to counteract change

Change can be easy to detect… …but hard to understand  Page not found/site not found/site unreachable  Is this condition temporary or permanent?  Has the material moved somewhere else? Where?  Are there reasonable substitutes for this material?  Page has changed  Is this a change I care about?  Do care: changes that change the rhetorical purpose of the page; reuse of URLs for other purposes…  Don’t care: pages that are supposed to change (e.g., weather, news), grammatical corrections, ephemeral material such as site counters, …

Walden’s Path Manager  Determine what kinds of changes to Web pages are perceived to be significant  Develop new heuristics and adapt existing ones that reflect perceived change  Provide tools that support collection managers in managing changes within their collections

Path Manager’s user interface

Walden’s Paths  Project Web pages  View example paths  Create and view your own paths using the Web-based on-line authoring tool (registration required)  Download the Walden’s Paths system components (prototype versions) for hosting on your own computer

NSDL and targeted research  Walden’s paths—initiated targeted research track in the first round  NSDL presents an opportunity for a research program to refine novel techniques given the benefit of a clearly-identified use domain  Advantage to NSDL is that the techniques are already tested and accepted within their specialized research communities, although not necessarily ready to be deployed as a product  Targeted research keeps NSDL in touch with future technologies and techniques  By encouraging applications in its significant and interesting testbed NSDL helps to influence topics in its research areas  Targeted research provides the basis by which NSDL can adapt to the future, through partnership with specific research areas, rather than as a passive consumer

Walden’s Paths  Project Web pages  View example paths  Create and view your own paths using the Web-based on-line authoring tool (registration required)  Download the Walden’s Paths system components (prototype versions) for hosting on your own computer

Research Discussion How would you like the results of the targeted research projects to be fed back into the NSDL so that you can take advantage of this information? Where do you see the biggest area of need for research?

Break Please reconvene by 10:20