Landscape Change Imagery: preparing a DLESE-ready and easily searchable resource

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Landscape images are a powerful tool for doing and teaching Earth surface science because they provide a personal and human-scale linkage to geologic processes and the geography of place and time. However, in order for such imagery to be useful, it must be easily findable by those who wish to use it both in and out of the classroom. this proposal provides support targeted directly toward increasing the ability of scientists and educators to find landscape imagery for use in both formal and informal science education as well as scientific research. The work builds directly on the education, research, and outreach success of the Landscape Change Program (uvm.edu/perkins/landscape), a 10,000+ image web-based archive that has been developed over the past 6 years with NSF support The work will prepare the existing image archive for inclusion in the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) as a collection as well as to create, test, and refine finding aids for the Landscape Change Program archive itself. This project builds on work done with imagery over the past six years that has catalyzed both formal and informal science education from K-12, to college, graduate school, and beyond. Specifically, this work will support the standardization of metadata and image descriptions in the database so that the information can be harvested for inclusion as a collection in DLESE. The work will improve the ability of users to find any one of the 10,000+ images within the Landscape Change Program archive by redesigning the current search page and by annotating images in such a way that Goggle-type web crawlers, and thus image and text searches, are more likely to find individual images.