National Science Digital Library

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The logo of the National Science Digital Library

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is a free online library for education and research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Program was established by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2000 as a free online library which directs users to exemplary resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and research. NSDL provides an organized point of access to STEM content that is aggregated from a variety of other digital libraries, NSF-funded projects, publishers, and NSDL-reviewed web sites. NSDL also provides access to services and tools that enhance the use of this content in a variety of contexts. NSDL is designed primarily for K-16 educators, but anyone can access NSDL.org and search the library at no cost, although some content providers require a nominal fee or subscription to retrieve their specific resources.

[edit] Pathways

In addition to the main public library portal at NSDL.org, the library is accessible through a number of NSDL Pathways. These are NSDL projects that provide audience-specific views of selected NSDL resources (these specialized views are also known as portals). Pathway audiences may be grouped by grade level, discipline, resource or data type, or some other designation.

The Pathway projects are organizations and institutions that have a history and expertise in serving a particular, frequently discipline-specific, target audience. Pathway partners select appropriate resources and user services and act as reference librarians for their communities. The specific NSDL Pathways include:

Biological Sciences Pathway: Provided by BEN: BioSciEdNet at AAAS. BEN Collaborative partner organizations provide access to over 3,800 reviewed resources covering 76 biological sciences topics. BEN is managed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Registration is required.

Chemical Education Pathway: Provided by the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE). The ChemEd DLib collaboration will include collections of the JCE DLib and the ACS Education Division. An innovative element of the project will use tables of contents of textbooks to locate resources. ChemEd DLib will create new communities centered around different educational levels (such as high school, undergraduate), provide resources in different sub-disciplines of chemistry (such as physical), and different pedagogical areas (such as problem-based learning). Other project partners include the University of Wisconsin at Madison (JCE) and Carnegie-Mellon University (Chem-Collective project).

Computational Science Pathway: Provided by Shodor Foundation. Shodor provides curriculum development materials that include interactive activities and instructional materials for students, educators, and parents; workshops, online courses, and educational resources geared towards educators; and internships and workshops that provide students with resources in computational science.

Engineering Pathway: Provided by the National Engineering Education Delivery System (NEEDS) and TeachEngineering. The Engineering Pathway is a portal to high-quality teaching and learning resources in engineering, applied science and math, computer science/information technology, and engineering technology and is designed for use by K-12 and university educators and students. The K-12 engineering curriculum uses engineering as a vehicle for the integration of hands-on science and mathematics through real-world designs and applications that inspire the creativity of youth. Users may search over K-12 engineering lessons and activities, as well as other K-12 resources, by many criteria - including content focus area, grade level and educational standards. K-12 community resources include professional development opportunities and research findings. Higher education resources may be discovered by multiple criteria including discipline, audience, resource type, title, author/creator, special topics, or by selected collection. Higher education community resources include support for ABET accreditation, research and scholarship, curricula development and extracurricular activities for students. Additional features include outreach information and materials, diversity resources, professional society and career planning information, personalized workspace, and the ability to contribute and comment on resources. The Engineering Pathway's goal is to provide resources that help teachers, parents, faculty, and practicing engineers to inspire more of today's students to follow an engineering path as their way to understand and improve the world.

Materials Science Pathway: Provided by MatDL at Kent State University. The NSDL Materials Digital Library (MatDL) brings materials science research and education closer together. MatDL is exploring the various roles digital libraries can serve in the materials science community including: 1) supporting a virtual lab, 2) developing markup language applications, and 3) building tools for metadata capture. MatDL is being integrated into an MIT virtual laboratory experience.

Mathematical Sciences Pathway: Provided by the Math Gateway at the MAA. Math Gateway is an online resource published by the Mathematical Association of America. The site provides online resources for both teachers and students of mathematics that include: Convergence, a magazine that teaches mathematics using its history; the Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications (JOMA), a scholarly journal, plus; free classroom-tested and peer reviewed digital classroom resources.

Middle School Pathway: Provided by Digital Library Projects at the Ohio State University. The NSDL Middle School Portal provides access to selected online resources for instruction and professional development from the National Science Digital Library. Subject pathways in mathematics, science, and technology present topic lists that take an in-depth look at teachable concepts in science, math, or technology. Features include lively text and graphics along with background for teachers, interactive online activities, data analyses, and links to related topics.

Pathway to Multimedia Resources for the Classroom and Professional Development: Provided by Teachers' Domain at WGBH. Teachers' Domain is a multimedia digital library for the classroom that provides learning experiences in ways no textbook can. This ever-expanding library currently includes collections on Science (Life Science, Physical Science, Engineering) and Social Studies (The Civil Rights Movement, Brown v. Board of Education). Registration is required.

Pathway to Resources and Services for Community and Technical Colleges: Provided by AMSER at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. AMSER will consist of a focused metadata repository and a variety of integrated services designed specifically to enhance the learning experience of the community college students and the teaching capabilities of instructors at those institutions. AMSER is in development. For more information about AMSER, please e-mail info@amser.org

Physics and Astronomy Pathway: Provided by ComPADRE at AAPT: American Association of Physics Teachers. Through a partnership of authors and organizations ComPADRE acts as a steward for the educational resources used by broad communities in physics and astronomy by creating and sustaining a network of collections that provide learning resources and interactive learning environments. ComPADRE resources positively influence physics and astronomy students and their teachers in both individual and collaborative settings.

[edit] NSDL 2.0

In January 2007, NSDL released a new version of the library's main repository software. This new repository is built on top of the Fedora (software) middleware system, and provides a publicly documented API. In addition to supporting metadata records (catalog information) about library resources, the new repository supports arbitrary relationships among resources in the library. This allows for the creation of annotations and organizational structures within the library. The first application to make use of these new capabilities is Expert Voices, a library-integrated blogging system built on top of the WordPress. Further applications are in development, with the stated goal of creating both communities and context around the curated resources of the library.