The Establishment of the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE): From Books to Bytes

John T. SnowCollege of GeosciencesUniversity of Oklahoma

University of Reading31 March 2003

Outline

Definitions:

In The Beginning …

Collections

Support – Short term and long term

Current Status

A Few Usage Statistics

Continuing Issues and Challenges

Definition:What Is A Digital Library?

digital library: “A managed environment of multimedia materials in digital form, designed for the benefit of its user population, structured to facilitate access to its contents, and equipped with aids to navigate the global network ... with users and holdings totally distributed, but managed as a coherent whole.”

Mel Collier, International Symposium on Research, Development, and Practice in Digital Libraries 1997

Point: Role(s) of community are unclear, implicitly passive

Definition: What is DLESE?The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) is a community-owned and governed library offering high-quality electronic resources that foster learning about the Earth at all educational levels. When fully operational, DLESE will offer access to peer-reviewed teaching and learning resources, interfaces and tools to allow exploration of Earth data, services to help users effectively create and use educational resources, and an ‘intellectual commons’ facilitating sharing, collaboration, and excellence in Earth systems education.

Community owned and governed – Get involved, the library responds to changing user needs. About engaging users as contributors – DLESE seeks to support not only wide dissemination of existing materials, but creation of new materials. About scaling success – By fostering wide dissemination, DLESE seeks to scale local and regional successes to a national level. About providing a forum for sharing – Not only content, but ideas, enthusiasm, and support.

Point: Role of community is central! DLESE relies on its community to contribute educational resources and collections, to develop services that enhance the usefulness of DLESE, to participate in library governance and planning, and to contribute ideas and feedback on how to improve the library

Definition:National Science Digital Library

National STEM Digital Library (NSDL) “Building on work supported under the multi-agency Digital Libraries Initiative, this program aims to establish a national digital library that will constitute an online network of learning environments and resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education at all levels.”

Supported by NSF, Directorate of Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education

POINT: DLESE collaborates with the NSDL with the intent of acting as the Earth System Science node of the NSDL.

In The Beginning …1998 – 1999:

Geoscience Digital Library Project, NSFEstablishing a Digital Library to Support Education in Earth and Space Sciences, NSF, Portal

to the Future WorkshopArticulation of DLESE Community through Publication of Community Plan Formation, DLESE Governance Structure.

2000 Digital Library for Earth System Education: Implementing the DLESE Community Plan First Annual DLESE Community Workshop (Bozeman, MT)

2001 NSDL and AFGE NSF solicitation Implementation of prototype DLESE web site – August, Version 1.0

2002 DLESE Program Center: Providing Infrastructure for a Distributed Community Library NSF Geoscience Community SolicitationNSDL Solicitation

Collections

User-developed/user-contributed

Users as contributors

Value added by DLESE: Metadata (cataloging)

Tailored Search Engine

Collections

Case studies, lesson plans, maps, Earth data sets and imagery, visualizations, assessment activities, curricula, online coursesDistributed: all materials reside on originator’s serversIncludes tools and interfaces necessary for applicationSpecial Collections (named)

Collections

The Broad Collection provides both the widest possible range of resources, and a forum in which resource users can provide feedback to creators to iteratively improve the quality of individual resourcesThe Reviewed Collection provides the highest quality teaching and learning materials, and helps resource creators achieve academic career recognition.Community Review System – move from Broad Collection to Reviewed Collection

Support – Short term and long term

National Science Foundation

Professional Societies?

Foundations, NGO’s?

Publishers?

Current Status

Operational, but still a prototypeVersion 2.0 in 2003

Emerging Leadership Role in NSDL

IR search API

Data

Index and report data

Index

DCS

IndexXML

•Transform to ADN•Schema validation

•Generate annotation metadata

OAIharvester

XMLXMLXML

OAIprovider

Index

OAIprovider

XML•Transform to DC

Resource-to-ID mapper•Identify duplicate URLs found in a single collection•Map each resource (URL) to all IDs that exist for the resource across collections•Link checking service

DLESE v2.0

Collection-level metadata editor

User search

DDSCollectionmanager

1. Internal collectionbuilding and QA

2. Import external collectionsand review metadata

3.

4. 6.

11. Export via OAI-PMH

10. ODL search

9. Discovery

8. Collectionmanagement

5.

7. Index and report data

Collection-level metadata

XMLXML XML

Item-level metadata,review status metadata

XML

Data store

Developer’s Workshop(2/19-2/20)

Developer’s Workshop(2/19-2/20)

Review of 2002 (first full year of operation) …

A Few Usage Statistics

What’s Being ReportedEstimation of human interaction with library

Session: Same IP with less than 30 minute breakOverall Sessions, Main Services, Referrals

Data: Merge of logs from services hostedDPC, SERC (Carleton), LDEO (Columbia)

ExclusionsDeveloper machines (updated list)

• DPC, SERC, Montana, LDEO, AGI

Search engine crawlers (updated list)Machine-to-machine calls, e.g. OAI transfers

Search Engine ReferralReferring URL - URL from where user “clicked”

URL of page that contains a link to DLESE

URL of result page at a search engine (e.g. Google)

Logs can include referring URL

Identify referrals from main search enginesGoogle (80%), Yahoo (10%), Others (10%)

Single Hit Search Engine ReferralE.g., where Google user clicks from their result page to a DLESE page, then no further interaction with DLESE

Overall Sessions per Month 2002

0

2000

4000

6000

8000

10000

12000

14000

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May Ju

n

Jul

Aug

Sep Oct

Nov

Dec

Month of 2002

Ses

sio

ns

per

mo

nth

Overall Use

Overall Use(excluding singlehits from SE referrals)

Discovery (Search & Browse)

Sessions per Month for Select Service Areas

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May Ju

n

Jul

Aug

Sep Oct

Nov

Dec

Month of 2002

Ses

sio

ns

per

mo

nth News & Opps

(excluding single hits from SE referrals)

SERC (excluding single hits from SEreferrals)

CRS

Discovery

*CRS did not log referrals in this period

ObservationsDiscovery system is most popular service (as expected)

Other service areas have similar use levelsOff main home-page navigation

Excluding single-hit search engine referrals

Growth of CRSUsers moving between browse page and CRS

Impact of being indexed in Search Engines50% of traffic from search engine referrals

Consider Google a portal to DLESE

Design for users, design for search engines

Observations: Session Durations

After excluding single-hit search engine referrals70% of sessions view < 4 pages, duration < 1 minute

• Classic “search engine” behavior (ref. Menbar, Yahoo)

10% of sessions view > 10 pages, duration > 10 minutes

0

300

600

900

1,200

1,500

1,800

2,100

2,400

2,700

3,000

3,300

01

23

45

67

89

1011

1213

1415

1617

1819

2021

2223

Vis

its

Activity Level By Hour of the DayActivity Level By Hour of the Day

Hours

Organization by Top-Level Domain

Organization distribution35% .k12.xx.us, .edu

34% .net (includes ISP’s)

25% .com (includes broadband ISP’s)

3.5% .gov

2% .org

0.5% other

Final Comments on Useage

Added proxy to capture which resources a user goes to from DLESE results page

Similar approach to Yahoo

Statistics on resources chosen from results

Started end of January

Another set of use data.

Collection of usage data from services

Monthly collection and merging

AnalysisRequires significant time for interpretation

Continuing Issues and Challenges

Long-term fundingNecessary but not sufficient for success

Widening the Community – users and contributorsKey to long-term sustainability of collections and services

IP issues with potential supportersPrivacy issues with CommunityInteroperability with wider DL community, user platforms, NSDL, search engines such as Yahoo, Google

DLESE in the News