NSDL Core Integration - Increasing Capacity and Engagement

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In this project the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Core Integration (CI) team is building capacity and engaging in partnership efforts across multiple dimensions of service to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in anticipation of the establishment of a managing entity for NSDL in early 2008. This work leverages two key NSDL developments: i) the NSDL Pathways strategy which scales library building via partnerships with discipline or audience-specific aggregators of content; and ii) the transition to a resource-centric data repository architecture for NSDL based on the open-source Fedora system. In implementing these collaborative social and technological strategies, CI has positioned NSDL as an educational cyberinfrastructure, which can deliver adaptive and scalable collaborative and technological services that leverage NSDL''s relationship-building capacity across trusted organizations and networks, and engage primary advocates for STEM education. Specific activities include: i) preservation of ongoing operations for the NSDL infrastructure (e.g. maintenance of core services, provision of collection development services and tools, conceptual browsing capability, standards-oriented resource discovery, and metadata quality and search and discovery improvements); ii) collaborative outreach and communications (partnership-building and cross-promotion and co-branding that multiplies dissemination efforts, including those of Pathways partners, professional societies, and educational publishers); iii) continued coordination of professional development across the NSDL community (e.g. increasing user ability to integrate digital resources into educational practice; training trainers; collections development; assisting other library builders to enhance discoverability; and developing models, policies, and best practices); and iv) supporting the embedding of NSDL in existing user workflows (e.g. expanding access to NSDL through existing user information channels such as school libraries, textbook publishers, NSTA web seminars, outreach events and conferences; and delivering tools and services to partner organizations that enhance user interaction such as collaborative wikis, the Expert Voices blogging environment, and implementation of the NSDL Data Repository (NDR) architecture).