Glossary
Selected terms commonly used within the NSDL community of library buildersCore Integration (CI)
The Core Integration team of the National Science Digital Library manages library operations, coordinates partnership efforts, outreach and communications, collaborative co-development opportunities, and all fiscal, program, and project management functions of the NSDL. CI is a multi-institutional partnership of Primary Investigators and staffs at Columbia University, Cornell University, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).
Collections
Similar to museum and library collections, NSDL collections are organized arrangements of items. An NSDL collection may have been organized by a person or organization, or the collection may be gathered automatically by NSDL.
Collection Record
Record that describes the entirety of a collection using subject descriptors that pertain to the collection as a whole. Descriptive information is normally drawn from the collection’s website, or “about” pages, or may be contributed by the project itself.
CWIS
Collection Workflow Integration System. Software to assemble, organize, and share collections of data about resources, but conforming to international and academic standards for metadata.
Dublin Core (DC)
A simple set of metadata elements used in digital libraries, primarily to describe digital objects and for collections management, and for exchange of metadata. Metadata standard used in the core library.
Fedora
Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture. A framework for creation, management, and preservation of digital content. Used by the NSDL Data Repository.
Items
An item is a unit of a collection. It may be large or small, and it may itself contain parts or smaller units. Every item in NSDL is part of a collection. Typically, items are web pages, but they can also be images, video, datasets, and computer programs.
Item Record
Describes particular resources or groups of resources within a collection.
IMLS
Institute of Museum and Library Services. Independent federal agency that supports all types of museums, libraries and archives.
iVia
Software that provides expert guided web crawling, and can automatically generate basic Dublin Core records from text resources.
LOM
IEEE Learning Object Metadata, a metadata framework for describing digital resources.
Lucene
A Java-based, open source, full-featured search engine; utilized by NSDL.
MARC
MAchine-Readable Cataloging. One of the supported NSDL metadata standards. A data format developed by the Library of Congress that provides the mechanism by which computers exchange, use and interpret bibliographic information and its data elements make up the foundation of most library catalogs used today.
Metadata
Standardized descriptions of digital and physical resources, such as the title, author, subject, and text or multimedia format, that aid in searching for and understanding the resources. Usually defined as "data about data".
Metadata Record
The record of the metadata, information, for a resource. This is similar to the card in a card catalog system. This information is used by the search engine to find results for a query.
National Visting Committee (NVC)
The National Visiting Committee advises NSF and the Core Integration Team on NSDL strategic planning and operations.
NSDL
National Science Digital Library. A free online library which directs users to exemplary resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and research.
NSDL Data Repository (NDR)
A Fedora-based repository that provides a flexible structure of digital objects and relationships to represent resources. The central record of all resources known to the NSDL.
NSF
National Science Foundation. An independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 that promotes scientific progress and provides funding to federally supported basic research groups conducted by America\'s colleges and universities in the fields of mathematics, technology and science.
OAI
Open Archives Initiative. The goal of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is to supply and promote an application-independent interoperability framework that can be used by a variety of communities who are engaged in publishing content on the Web. Within NSDL, projects with standard metadata can expose their metadata for OAI harvesting by the NSDL on a regular schedule.
Pathways
NSDL Pathways are NSDL projects that provides 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.
Policy Committee (PC)
The Policy Committee acts on behalf of the community to coordinate committee activities and advise Core Integration, NSDL projects, and NSF on operational strategies and priorities.
Portal
An organized, coherent view of the resources available through NSDL. Although it looks like a typical web page, it is actually generated dynamically to present an aggregation of information for a specific group.
REST
Representational State Transfer. A web services architecture for networked systems that conforms to the W3C Web Architecture, and utilizes the semantics of Web standards, such as HTTP, URL, XML, HTML, etc. whenever possible.
Shibboleth
An Internet2 protocol used by the NSDL access management system to distribute identity verification (authentication) and cohort membership (authorization) to the administrators of distinct communities of users. In other words, the user’s “home” institution performs user identity and capability management.
SOAP
Simple Object Access Protocol. A lightweight protocol intended for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It uses XML technologies to define an extensible messaging framework providing a message construct that can be exchanged over a variety of underlying protocols.
Standing Committees (SC)
Permanent committees that perform ongoing functions. The five NSDL standing committees are: Community Services, Content, Educational Impact and Evaluation, Sustainability and Technology.
STEM
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
WSDL
Web Services Definition Language. An XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information.
XML
eXtensible Markup Language, schema used by OAI for metadata harvesting.