Electronic Encyclopedia of Earthquakes

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0085511HenyeyThe objective of this project is the creation of an Electronic Encyclopedia of Earthquakes (E3), which will function as an integral part of the NSF Digital Library Initiative. The lead organization in this project is the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), in collaboration with California Universities for Research in Earthquake engineering (CUREE) and the Incorporated Research Institutes in Seismology (IRIS). The one-year pilot phase of this project will result in an operational framework with an initial set of entries; the enlargement of this collection is planned to then efficiently follow in a subsequent phase. The project name, Electronic Encyclopedia of Earthquakes, accurately describes the product of this project: The information will be electronic in form, communicated via the World Wide Web. Rather than only reading text, the user will be able to access data sets and to manipulate, visualize, and analyze the data in individualized ways. For example, the student or instructor will be able to select from a library of earthquake ground motion records and play a given record in combination with a structural model to experiment with the concept of dynamic response. The Electronic Encyclopedia of Earthquakes is related to a traditional printed encyclopedia in that it is entry-based, consisting of a series of topics, each dealt with as independent explanations and sets of information and yet also cross-referenced. The root meaning of "encyclopedia," the circle of knowledge, also applies, because the expanse of the topics will cover the earthquake subject in cross-disciplinary fashion. Earth sciences, engineering, physics, and mathematics are the four basic fields of knowledge to be included, with some treatment of impacts on human systems of earthquakes. Entries and data sets are provided that will allow the instructor or student to tie different topics together in an individualized, inquiry-based way, or to complete the circle, without encountering artificial divisions along traditional disciplinary lines. Thus, "encyclopedia" is an accurate description of this product, rather than "primer," because the goal here is to provide clearly organized, dynamic information that allows the learner to discover many different paths through the subject matter, or to create new knowledge, and not to meter out one idea or piece of information at a time in a pre-determined sequence. The third term, "earthquakes," is largely self-explanatory, except to note that E3 will not be limited to individual earthquakes, though specific major earthquakes will be included as entries and will be used to illustrate broader concepts. To balance the broad range and open-ended nature of the entries with the need for an instructor or student to quickly co-locate information found under different headings that is appropriate to their inquiry, threads of related content will be tagged and linked to provide continuity for a given likely level of user. For example, the content that will be mapped out to show high school teachers what may be useful for their physics courses is different than in the case of a college-level engineering or geophysics class where the same topic is treated in greater depth. The information will be layered in terms of its complexity or implied prerequisite knowledge: A primary (glossary), secondary (precis), and tertiary (in-depth information) framework will be used. A large amount of information exists in this field that can be adapted for this collection, but a common problem is that the Web user often encounters a large volume of low quality or irrelevant data in the process of eventually finding the content they desire. The layered framework and the encyclopedic idea of cross-references, along with a commitment to quality control to ensure high academic standards, have been designed to overcome this problem.