The Establishment of the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE): From Books to Bytes John T. Snow College of Geosciences University of Oklahoma University of Reading 31 March 2003

Outline Definitions: In The Beginning … Collections Support – Short term and long term Current Status A Few Usage Statistics Continuing Issues and Challenges

Definition: What Is A Digital Library? digital library: “A managed environment of multimedia materials in digital form, designed for the benefit of its user population, structured to facilitate access to its contents, and equipped with aids to navigate the global network... with users and holdings totally distributed, but managed as a coherent whole.” Mel Collier, International Symposium on Research, Development, and Practice in Digital Libraries 1997 Point: Role(s) of community are unclear, implicitly passive

Definition: What is DLESE? The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) is a community-owned and governed library offering high-quality electronic resources that foster learning about the Earth at all educational levels. When fully operational, DLESE will offer access to peer- reviewed teaching and learning resources, interfaces and tools to allow exploration of Earth data, services to help users effectively create and use educational resources, and an ‘intellectual commons’ facilitating sharing, collaboration, and excellence in Earth systems education.

Community owned and governed – Get involved, the library responds to changing user needs. About engaging users as contributors – DLESE seeks to support not only wide dissemination of existing materials, but creation of new materials. About scaling success – By fostering wide dissemination, DLESE seeks to scale local and regional successes to a national level. About providing a forum for sharing – Not only content, but ideas, enthusiasm, and support. Point: Role of community is central! DLESE relies on its community to contribute educational resources and collections, to develop services that enhance the usefulness of DLESE, to participate in library governance and planning, and to contribute ideas and feedback on how to improve the library

Definition: National Science Digital Library National STEM Digital Library (NSDL) “Building on work supported under the multi-agency Digital Libraries Initiative, this program aims to establish a national digital library that will constitute an online network of learning environments and resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education at all levels.” Supported by NSF, Directorate of Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education POINT: DLESE collaborates with the NSDL with the intent of acting as the Earth System Science node of the NSDL.

In The Beginning … 1998 – 1999: Geoscience Digital Library Project, NSF Establishing a Digital Library to Support Education in Earth and Space Sciences, NSF, Portal to the Future Workshop Articulation of DLESE Community through Publication of Community Plan Formation, DLESE Governance Structure Digital Library for Earth System Education: Implementing the DLESE Community Plan First Annual DLESE Community Workshop (Bozeman, MT) 2001 NSDL and AFGE NSF solicitation Implementation of prototype DLESE web site – August, Version DLESE Program Center: Providing Infrastructure for a Distributed Community Library NSF Geoscience Community Solicitation NSDL Solicitation

Collections User-developed/user-contributed Users as contributors Value added by DLESE: Metadata (cataloging) Tailored Search Engine

Collections Case studies, lesson plans, maps, Earth data sets and imagery, visualizations, assessment activities, curricula, online courses Distributed: all materials reside on originator’s servers Includes tools and interfaces necessary for application Special Collections (named)

Collections The Broad Collection provides both the widest possible range of resources, and a forum in which resource users can provide feedback to creators to iteratively improve the quality of individual resources The Reviewed Collection provides the highest quality teaching and learning materials, and helps resource creators achieve academic career recognition. Community Review System – move from Broad Collection to Reviewed Collection

Support – Short term and long term National Science Foundation Professional Societies? Foundations, NGO’s? Publishers?

Current Status Operational, but still a prototype Version 2.0 in 2003 Emerging Leadership Role in NSDL

IR search API Data Index and report data Index DCS Index XML Transform to ADN Schema validation Generate annotation metadata OAI harvester XML OAI provider Index OAI provider XML Transform to DC Resource-to-ID mapper Identify duplicate URLs found in a single collection Map each resource (URL) to all IDs that exist for the resource across collections Link checking service DLESE v2.0 Collection-level metadata editor User search DDS Collection manager 1. Internal collection building and QA 2. Import external collections and review metadata Export via OAI-PMH 10. ODL search 9. Discovery 8. Collection management Index and report data Collection-level metadata XML Item-level metadata, review status metadata XML Data store Developer’s Workshop (2/19-2/20) Developer’s Workshop (2/19-2/20)

Review of 2002 (first full year of operation) … A Few Usage Statistics

What’s Being Reported Estimation of human interaction with library Session: Same IP with less than 30 minute break Overall Sessions, Main Services, Referrals Data: Merge of logs from services hosted DPC, SERC (Carleton), LDEO (Columbia) Exclusions Developer machines (updated list) DPC, SERC, Montana, LDEO, AGI Search engine crawlers (updated list) Machine-to-machine calls, e.g. OAI transfers

Search Engine Referral Referring URL - URL from where user “clicked” URL of page that contains a link to DLESE URL of result page at a search engine (e.g. Google) Logs can include referring URL Identify referrals from main search engines Google (80%), Yahoo (10%), Others (10%) Single Hit Search Engine Referral E.g., where Google user clicks from their result page to a DLESE page, then no further interaction with DLESE

Overall Sessions per Month Jan FebMar Apr May Jun Jul AugSep OctNov Dec Month of 2002 Sessions per month Overall Use (excluding single hits from SE referrals) Discovery (Search & Browse)

Sessions per Month for Select Service Areas Jan FebMar Apr May Jun Jul AugSep OctNov Dec Month of 2002 Sessions per month News & Opps (excluding single hits from SE referrals) SERC (excluding single hits from SE referrals) CRS Discovery *CRS did not log referrals in this period

Observations Discovery system is most popular service (as expected) Other service areas have similar use levels Off main home-page navigation Excluding single-hit search engine referrals Growth of CRS Users moving between browse page and CRS Impact of being indexed in Search Engines 50% of traffic from search engine referrals Consider Google a portal to DLESE Design for users, design for search engines

Observations: Session Durations After excluding single-hit search engine referrals 70% of sessions view < 4 pages, duration < 1 minute Classic “search engine” behavior (ref. Menbar, Yahoo) 10% of sessions view > 10 pages, duration > 10 minutes

Organization by Top-Level Domain Organization distribution 35%.k12.xx.us,.edu 34%.net (includes ISP’s) 25%.com (includes broadband ISP’s) 3.5%.gov 2%.org 0.5% other

Final Comments on Useage Added proxy to capture which resources a user goes to from DLESE results page Similar approach to Yahoo Statistics on resources chosen from results Started end of January Another set of use data. Collection of usage data from services Monthly collection and merging Analysis Requires significant time for interpretation

Continuing Issues and Challenges Long-term funding Necessary but not sufficient for success Widening the Community – users and contributors Key to long-term sustainability of collections and services IP issues with potential supporters Privacy issues with Community Interoperability with wider DL community, user platforms, NSDL, search engines such as Yahoo, Google

DLESE in the News