Collaborative Research: The DLESE Community Services Center

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To support greater and more effective use of the Digital Library for Earth System Education, a collaborative project involving Colorado State University, Carleton College, Montana State University, and Natrona County School District, will create the DLESE Community Services Center (DCSC). The primary goals of the DCSC are to: (1) increase the current user and contributor base to include greater numbers of K-12, informal, and college educators and students, (2) diversify the DLESE user and contributor base to include rich and robust representation of ethnic, cultural, and differently-abled groups, and (3) improve the ability of users and contributors to easily find, adapt, and use high quality digital resources in their classrooms, laboratories, and communities. To achieve these goals the PIs will develop: (a) a series of exemplars to document the needs and use patterns of diverse groups of potential users, (b) professional development and outreach services to support use of DLESE, informed by the exemplars as the basis of both targeted and broad based outreach and professional development activities, and (c) on-line community services, including a pilot program for providing users and contributors with help desk and related web-mediated services. All programmatic efforts will be supported by formative evaluation methods, and research results will contribute to a greater understanding of the impacts of digital libraries in science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. The DCSC will work closely with the DLESE Evaluation, Data, and Collections Centers, the DLESE Program Center, as well as diverse audience groups to insure that DLESE services are of the highest quality, meet the needs of current and future DLESE users, and are sustainable.