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Information for Prospective NSDL or other NSF grantees

Resource Center | Technical Network Services

As prospective grantees of the National STEM Education Digital Learning (NSDL) funding program (NSF 09-531), we welcome you to explore the information provided here in support of planning the submission of your grant. This information provides an introduction to available technologies and services with links to documentation and downloads, and contact information to help you understand how to work with NSDL Technical Network Services and with the NSDL Resource Center.

We also welcome grantees from other NSF funding programs who wish to contribute to or collaborate with NSDL as a dissemination mechanism for materials and services developed under their programs, such as:

• Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program
• Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST)
• Advanced Technological Education (ATE)
• Communicating Research to Public Audiences
• Discovery Research K-12 (DR-K12)
• Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering (REESE)
• Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER)

The National Science Digital Library is operated jointly by the NSDL Resource Center and NSDL Technical Network Services. Together with partner digital libraries known as Pathways, and other NSDL projects, NSDL provides multidisciplinary and multi-audience learning resources, services and tools in support of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education at all levels.

The NSDL Resource Center

The locus of transformation is in the community....

The NSDL Resource Center provides outreach, professional development, news and information services, partnership building, and needs and trends analysis supporting best practices development for the community of NSDL grantees - the former, current, and future recipients of NSF grants via the National STEM Distributed Learning (NSDL) funding program, as well as organizations, institutions and coalitions of STEM stakeholders interested in building partnerships and opportunities for collaboration with NSDL in support of STEM education, and for putting NSDL in the path of users and educators.

The NSDL Resource Center provides the following services at no cost to NSDL grantees, unless as specified:

• Outreach

  NSDL RC regularly attends and exhibits at annual conferences, and may engage in any combination of the following at these events: exhibit booth, collaborative informational or training workshop sessions, panel discussions, receptions. NSDL Pathways and other NSDL project PIs and staff often participate in collaborative workshops or assist in booth staffing. Travel to these events is an individual project expense and should be included in proposal budget planning.

  • American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) - February of each year
  • National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) - March/April of each year
  • National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) - June/July of each year
  • optional: Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) - October/November
  • optional: Association for Science Teacher Education (ASTE) - January

  • Annual Meeting

    Annual Meeting - NSDL typically conducts an annual NSDL PI meeting. This event is the major face-to-face meeting for the NSDL community, and is usually located in Washington, DC., enabling attendance by many NSF program personnel. It is recommended that prospective grantees include travel funds in their budgets for PIs or other key staff to attend this meeting. The meeting for 2009 is scheduled for November 17-19 - see the 2009 NSDL Annual Meeting website and additional information at NSDL's Community Corner blog site.

  • Pathways and other NSDL project collaborations

    There is an expectation for project and Pathways PIs to participate in NSDL community activities, including the annual meeting. The collaboration and participation level is higher for NSDL Pathways, where PIs participate in monthly one-hour teleconferences, attend annual Pathways PI meetings (usually in conjunction with the NSDL Annual Meeting), and may volunteer to participate in working groups on particular topics. NSDL regularly consults with, and seeks discussion and input from Pathways partners on a wide variety of issues. Prospective Pathways PIs should plan on a high level of active participation across the extent of their grant.

  • Workshops

    RC staff may participate in workshops conducted by Pathways or other organizations to provide NSDL overviews, demonstrate new technologies, and combine and leverage outreach efforts.

  • Resource Center website

    A dedicated RC website using the Drupal content management system as a platform is in planning, and is anticipated to be available in early summer 2009. The site will focus on STEM education and NSDL news, activities, and issues of interest to the NSDL community, utilizing Web 2.0 tools and services (newsfeeds, discussions, blogs, etc.) supporting community participation.

  • News and information

    Regularly updated NSDL community news and information is edited and distributed throughout the online NSDL.org network and beyond via Web 2.0 technologies from NSDL's Technical Network Services. Publications include the monthly NSDL Whiteboard Report newsletter, the weekly NSDL Homepage Highlight feature, the monthly Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears eZine, and over 50 community-contributed Expert Voices blogs with resource plug-ins to the NSDL Data Repository since 2006. To contribute news and information contact Carol Minton Morris at 607-255-2702; email.

  Contact Robert Payo or Eileen McIlvain for more information.

• Professional development

  • Brown Bags

    NSDL conducts monthly hour-long recorded web conferences on a variety of topics, using the ReadyTalk conferencing platform. These events are by invitation, sent 2-4 weeks prior to the scheduled Brown Bag. Recordings and presentations are available in an archive of past presentations. Contact Robert Payo or Eileen McIlvain for more information.

  • NSTA Web seminars

    NSDL collaborates with the National Science Teachers Association to provide monthly web conferencing professional development opportunities using the Eluminate platform. These are scheduled on weeknight evenings so that teachers may more easily participate. Contact Robert Payo for more information.

  • Publisher and higher education initiatives

    NSDL maintains and builds its relationship with the scholarly publishing community; collaborating with Pathways and other NSDL projects to provide context for scholarly research works and connections to NSDL resources and collections. An example of this is the NSDL Classic Articles in Context series. Contact Mike Luby for more information.

• Partnership building

  The RC brokers collaborations with STEM stakeholders interested in utilizing NSDL technologies, services, tools, and resources in innovate ways. Such partnerships have resulted in leveraging the resources and services of NSDL and of partner efforts to broaden NSDL's reach and to foster capacity-building activities and professional development for K12 teachers and undergraduate educators. Contact Susan Van Gundy or Kaye Howe for more information.

• Evaluation

  Evaluation for the RC is conducted by co-PI Mary Marlino, who is currently engaged in an evaluation audit across Pathways and NSDL summarizing what has been accomplished to date, and serving as a foundation for additional evaluation activities in Years 2 and 3 of the Resource Center grant. The Resource Center also collaborates with Project Tomorrow for K12 data collection and trends analysis and reporting as part of its evaluation activities. Contact Mary Marlino or Susan Van Gundy for more information.

Technical Network Services

Providing technology, services and standards to create a dynamic information layer on top of library resources

Welcome to NSDL Technical Network Services (TNS). On behalf of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), TNS provides operational support, tools and services to NSDL, its community and other NSF grantees. TNS is a distributed organization led by Cornell University (PI Carl Lagoze) in partnership with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (Co-PI Michael Wright) and the University of Colorado at Boulder (Co-PI Tamara Sumner).

This letter is an introduction to some of the available technologies and services along with links to documentation, downloads, and contact information to help you understand how to work with NSDL and Technical Network Services.

Tools you can use and hands-on help for educational repository builders and managers: NCore, NSDL's platform for cyberlearning

The NCore platform is the set of tools, services and standards for interoperability that TNS manages and operates for NSDL providing the primary building blocks of NSDL's platform for cyberlearning. In addition, a number of NCore platform components are available as individual, downloadable, open-source software applications for use in your own solutions.

TNS offers its expertise in the areas of repository and service integrity, web interfaces, and digital library cyberinfrastructure operations and support. This letter describes the three ways that TNS offers support for NSF-funded projects; (1) collection ingest and maintenance, (2) infrastructure and library operations using NCore platform components including EduPak, and (3) consulting and training on tools, standards and web-service interfaces that are used by the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). (Note: web-service refers to a programmatic interface that allows application-to-application communication.) In addition, TNS is working with the NSDL community on the development of a model for long-term NSDL sustainability.

1. Collection ingest and maintenance: TNS helps NSDL grantees to prepare their collections of metadata for inclusion in NSDL and perform ongoing technical collections integration to support repository integrity. Collections may be hosted at NSDL (managed through the NSDL Collection System - see 2 below) or ingested through other mechanisms, specifically OAI metadata harvesting, through RSS and Atom feeds, or direct use of the Digital Repository API (see 2 below). Further details on how a project may contribute collections and/or individual resources can be found at http://nsdl.org/collection/.
2. Infrastructure and Library Operations: TNS manages the operational deployment and maintenance of the NCore platform, including EduPak, on servers at Cornell University for use by NSDL grantees. This deployed platform includes a set of tools, standards and web-services that an NSDL grantee can use directly and also underpins the NSDL.org web presence. A number of the NCore platform components are available for download for those who wish to install and use them locally.

   TNS provides software maintenance and upgrades of the platform to NSDL to meet community needs (through the process described in item 3 below), and technical support for components of the platform. A number of components are described below. Please visit the NCore web site for further overviews and use cases.

   • Digital Repository (DR) and API: The Digital Repository component, building on the open source Fedora repository software, manages digital objects such as resources, metadata and agents in accordance with an information model developed for NSDL. The DR provides an API (Application Programming Interface) that exposes the repository contents in the context of the NSDL information model through a set of web-services. TNS deploys and operates a central instance of this component as the NSDL Data Repository (NDR).

     To find more information and documentation, see: NDR documentation. This also provides information about downloading the DR software. For additional information and training opportunities about how to access NSDL's central repository, please contact Carol Minton Morris at 607-255-2702.

   • NSDL Collection System (NCS): The NCS creates and manages collections of metadata within a DR. The NCS is a flexible XML-driven tool that provides a full-featured metadata editor, collection workflow processes, and a role-based permission system in support of distributed and collaborative collections management. The NCS transparently writes metadata and collection-level information to a DR using the DR's API.

     TNS operates and maintains the NCS application on NSDL servers to enable NSDL collection developers to create and manage collections of metadata in the NDR (the NSDL centrally deployed DR) that describe educational resources such as learning objects, user-provided comments and reviews, scientific data sets, and other curricular components. This is the "hosted option" of NCS use. Alternatively, the NCS can be downloaded and installed locally if desired.

     NCS documentation and download information is available here: NCS documentation. For additional information and training opportunities please contact Karon Kelly at 303-497-2652.

   • Strand Map Service (SMS): The SMS provides a web service protocol supporting the construction of interactive knowledge map interfaces based on the learning goals articulated in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Benchmarks for Science Literacy and the learning progressions and strand maps published in the AAAS Atlas of Science Literacy. An example of a Strand Map Interface can be found at the NSDL Science Literacy Maps.

     Documentation about the SMS documentation is available here: SMS documentation. For additional information and training opportunities please contact Karon Kelly at 303-497-2652.

   • Content Assignment Tool (CAT): The CAT is a web-service that provides suggestions of national science education standards (NSES) assignments for educational resources. Users provide an educational resource's URL to the service and receive a set of suggested standards to which the resource may apply. This service is not available as a downloadable application at this time. It is available through the NSDL Collection System (described above) to support collection developers in assigning NSES to resources being cataloged.

     For additional information on using the CAT in the NCS, please contact Karon Kelly at 303-497-2652.

   • Expert Voices Blogging System (EV): Expert Voices is NSDL's blogosphere built with WordPress Multiuser. Plugins and themes have been created to help integrate the blogs with the library. NSDL grantees can request to have blogs in EV. To see examples of how NSDL community members are using NSDL blogs please visit NSDL Expert Voices.

     EV documentation information is available here: Expert Voices documentation. For further information on EV or to request a blog, please contact Laura Lusk at 607-254-5347.

   • EduPack: NSDL EduPak is an education digital repository solution bundle that provides a general platform for building digital libraries united by a common data model and interoperable applications. It is comprised of the Digital Repository, NSDL Collection System, and Digital Discovery System. This all-in-one, open-source digital library bundle provides educational digital library designers and builders with a dynamic, community-based solution to build on.

     For more information, please contact Karon Kelly at 303-497-2652..

3. Consulting and Training: TNS provides consulting, information and training to support the adoption and use of the NCore platform and related web-services, and to integrate community tools and services into NCore. To ensure that the integration of new tools and services into NCore underpins the National Science Foundation's cyberlearning and Web 2.0 visions, TNS has initiated open and transparent process to engage the NSDL community in identifying and assessing potential developments to NCore and related services and enable distributed collaborative contributions to library directions and technologies.

   For more information, please contact Karon Kelly at 303-497-2652.

Tell us about your educational project

To discuss your project's requirements please contact:
Carol Minton Morris, TNS Cornell University at 607-255-2702
Karon Kelly, TNS UCAR at 303-497-2652

Submit requests for general support.

Kind regards,
NSDL's Technical Network Services Team