Building a National Science Digital Library

Dean Krafft, Cornell Universitydean@cs.cornell.edu

2

What is the NSDL?

An NSF-funded $20 million/year program in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education

A digital library describing over a million carefully selected online STEM resources from over 100 collections (at http://nsdl.org)

A core integration team (Cornell, UCAR, Columbia) working with 9 “pathways” portals and over 200 NSF grantees

A large community of researchers, librarians, content providers, developers, students, and teachers

3

4

NSDL Pathways ProjectsMiddle School Portal for Math and Science: Ohio StateApplied Mathematics and Science Education Repository (AMSER): U of Wisconsin-MadisonThe Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD): Shodor Education FoundationThe Math Gateway: Math Association of AmericaTeachers’ Domain Pathways to Science: Rich Media Resources for K-12 Teachers: WGBH - BostonBioSciEdNet (BEN) Pathway: AAAS, et alComPADRE Pathway: American Physical Society, et alA Comprehensive Pathway for K-Gray Engineering Education: NEEDS Coalition, UC Berkeley, et al.Materials Digital Library (MatDL): Kent State, et al.

5

NSDL Publisher Partnerships American Mathematical Society American Physical Society BioOne Blackwell Publishing Cambridge University Press Elsevier Books Houghton Mifflin Company John Wiley and Sons National Academy Press Nature Publishing Group Oxford University Press ― US Book Program Scientific American Tom Snyder Productions ― division of

Scholastic Tool Factory ― educational software

6

NSDL History

1996-1999: Papers and workshops on creating a national STEM education digital library

Fall 2000: 6 Core Integration Pilots funded; 13 collection & 9 services grants;

Fall 2001: Unified CI funded; 18 collection & 14 services grants

December 2002: NSDL.org launched; 35 collection & 11 services grants

Fall 2003: 22 collections & 11 services Fall 2004: First 4 Pathways grants

7

NSDL 1.0

Create a “union catalog” of Dublin Core metadata records for STEM resources

Harvest those records from collections using OAI-PMH (openarchives.org)

Store records in an Oracle DB and re-serve qualified DC through OAI-PMH

Build a search index using metadata plus full-text of available content pages

Create a web portal at nsdl.org for K-gray access to NSDL resources

8

NSDL 1.0 Lessons

Rather than one portal for everyone, support communities with common interests: Pathways now provide discipline and area-specific portals

Metadata is expensive: unlike traditional libraries, e.g. through OCLC, digital collections have very “mixed quality” metadata, with unusual and inconsistent coding

On the good side: Oracle DB and OAI-PMH server scaled successfully to over 1 million catalog records

9

NSDL 1.0 Lessons continued OAI-provided collections need 3 types of

expertise: domain (resources & pedagogy), metadata (vocabulary & formatting), and technical (XML schema, UTF8, HTTP, OAI-PMH).

In many cases it took several months from first contact to successful OAI harvest, and the average harvest failure rate has stayed at 25%-50%, with only 23% of that transient failures

Incremental harvesting fundamental to efficient processing, but problematic: issues with persisting deleted records and recovering from partial harvests

Result: some automation, but high people cost

10

NSDL 1.0 Summary

Metadata Repository was quick to implement using known technologies, but

Limited model Metadata-centric orientation No content – only metadata Limited relationships – collection/item Limits on context, structure, and access Severe limits on contribution and

collaboration One-way data flow: NSDL → Users

11

Going beyond the card catalog Create an NSDL that guides not just resource

discovery, but resource selection, use, and contribution Supports creating “context” for resources Presents resources in context: in a lesson plan; with

ratings; correlated with education standards Supports creating a permanent archive of resources Enables community tools for structuring, evaluation,

annotation, contribution, collaboration

Goal: Create a dynamic, living library

12

NSDL 2.0: NSDL Data Repository Goals:

Architecture of participation: service-based, not a monolithic application/single user experience

Remixable data sources and data transformations Harnessing (and capturing) collective intelligence A free market of millions of inter-related resources

(create the “long tail”) Two-way data flow: NSDL ↔ users

Solution: Fedora-based NSDL Data Repository

14

Fedora: the NDR middleware A Flexible, Extensible Digital Object

Repository Architecture Open source project with $2.2 million in

Mellon funding 2002-2007 Collaboration of Cornell and Univ. of Virginia Key funded users include:

eSciDoc project (collaboration of the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe)

VTLS Corp., Harris Corp., Library of Congress Australian Research Repositories Online to the

World (ARROW) Royal Library Denmark, National Library, and DTU

15

What is Fedora? An architecture, toolkit, and implementation:

middleware, not a vertical application DSpace in contrast: a vertical application

with a fixed workflow targeted at users Stores arbitrary internal and external digital

objects, disseminations (transformations and combinations), relationships among objects

Entirely SOAP/REST based, disseminations are URLs

XML data store; RDBMS cache; RDF triplestore supports relationship queries

16

Implementing the NDR with Fedora Multiple Object Types: Resources (with local or

remote content), Metadata, Aggregations (collections), Metadata Providers (branding), Agents, and Relationships: Structural (part of), Equivalence, Annotation, with arbitrary graph queries

Web services: disseminations are arbitrary recombinations and transformations of content

Authentication/Authorization: Collections and services can manage their own repository content

Network overlay architecture: A lens for viewing science content on the net, whether content is local, remote, or archived – it all has a repository-based URL

17

Network Overlay View

User View

API/UI

Repository View with Relations & Annotations

Resources on the Web

18

How should we use the NDR? The NDR provides powerful capabilities

for: Creating context around resources Enabling the NSDL community to directly

contribute resources and context Representing a web of relationships among

science resources and information about those resources

How do we use it? Here’s one specific example …

19

Issues in STEM Education

Issue: Need to support scientific inquiry

Issue: Students need a better understanding of the processes of scientific research

Issue: Teachers are often under-prepared to teach science and math

Issue: Scientists need tools to make science and math research more available

20

Addressing the Needs In Response: NSDL is building an

educational tool that…

Models scientific inquiry and exposes the processes of scientific research

Promotes and facilitates conversations between research and education communities

Brings content expertise into the classroom to support under-prepared teachers

Allows scientists, teachers, and media specialists to collaboratively develop instructional context around NSDL resources

21

ExpertVoices

22

What is Expert Voices? A system using blogging technology to:

Support STEM conversations among scientists, teachers and students

Tie NSDL resources to real-world science news Create context for resources to enhance

discovery, selection and use Enable NSDL community members to become

NSDL contributors: of resources, questions, reviews, annotations, and metadata

Expert Voices ≠ LiveJournal Contributors are carefully selected,

contributions are about science, the process of science, and education

23

Expert Voices As An Educational Tool

Topic-based discussion (e.g. tsunamis) with pointers to related resources

Research outreach (Criterion 2) – explaining and documenting NSF-funded research

Experts can add resources with topical context to the NSDL

Resources can be reviewed and annotated Question/answer and discussion forum:

scientist ↔ teacher ↔ student ↔ librarian

24

Broadening Participation: An Expert Voices Learning Scenario

“Hurricane Season Blog” run by a National Weather Service hurricane expert, an Earth Science teacher, and a school media specialist familiar with NSDL resources

Expert creates an entry for Hurricane Gertrude “On track to hit Ft. Lauderdale in 72 hours” “Currently undergoing eyewall replacement cycle” “Expecting 15 foot storm surge”

Media specialist adds links to NSDL resources: Hurricane Hunters site, latest satellite photos, and USGS flooding and flood plain site (storm surge context)

Teacher makes connections to relevant standards and appropriate pedagogy for use by other teachers

Students experience engaging real-time, real-world applications of science lessons

25

Broadening Participation: An Expert Voices Outreach Scenario

NSF grantee: Bioluminescence researcher wants to make research K-12 accessible

Creates an Expert Voices conversation Enables his students and researchers to

document process and results – how science really works

Writes about publications and educational resources (e.g. www.photobiology.info) Adds these to the NSDL, creating audience-

level metadata Entries serve as annotations that create K-

12 context for the college-level research

27

But Expert Voices is just the beginning…

28

Other applications in development Educational Standards integration with

Content Alignment Tool (Syracuse) and ASN standards database (JES & Co.)

OnRamp: an NDR-integrated multi-user, multi-project content management system

Instructional Architect: Create a lesson plan around NSDL resources (Utah State)

iVia-based Expert-Guided crawl: Tool for Pathways and others to turn websites into resource collections (UC Riverside)

MyNSDL: Bookmark and tag STEM education resources within and outside the NSDL

30

What does this mean for the user?

All these applications situate resources in context, aiding both discovery and use

Users become contributors, adding new resources, ratings, annotations, and organizational structure – frequently as a side effect of using the library

Specialized portals, tagging, and powerful relationship queries and filtering support user-specific “views” into the library

31

Summary

NSDL 1.0 created a large, production digital library of STEM resources for education.

NSDL 2.0 and its tools allow scientists, mathematicians, teachers, engineers, librarians, and students to create a unique web of context, contribution, and collaboration around the high-quality STEM education resources at the core of the NSDL.

32

Acknowledgements

NSDL NSF Program Officers Lee Zia David McArthur

NSDL Core Integration Team UCAR: Kaye Howe, PI and Executive Director Cornell: Dean Krafft, PI Columbia: Kate Wittenberg, PI

Fedora Development Team Cornell: Sandy Payette & Carl Lagoze Univ. of Virginia: Thornton Staples

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.