Digital Library for Learning Life Sciences

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The University of Missouri-Columbia, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the University of Illinois, and the Missouri Botanical Garden are collaborating on this pilot project to build a prototype core integration system for a national digital library for SMET Education. The technical infrastructure for the system builds on the NCSA distributed information retrieval system, EMERGE. This system is being extended to an adaptive and flexible distributed search engine for a wide variety of learning environments and resources, and is being tested on the rich plant contents of the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the NSF Plant Genome projects at the University of Illinois (Soybean) and the University of Missouri-Columbia (Corn). Seamless coordination with services is being offered on several learning environments, including NCSA's Biology Workbench 3.2. A digital repository, BLOE (Biological Learning Object Exchange), serves to collect and organize experiments, simulations, and projects from learners and teachers for collaborative learning. Additional project activities include studies of requirements of user services, management procedures, evaluation methods, and technical standards using various undergraduate and graduate programs of the two universities and the K-12 educational activities of the Missouri Botanical Garden.