This section describes the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and four related scientific digital libraries, alongside a complementary community of practice in e-learning, MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching). These services are increasingly anchored and sustained by discipline-based entities as they move from a collection-driven approach to an emphasis on pathways to resources and community participation. Taken together, they serve the full spectrum of "K to gray" learners and educators.

Over the past six years, NSDL has distributed an estimated $125 million dollars in funding to more than 200 projects. While the discussion below concentrates primarily on NSDL's function as an aggregator, harvesting digital resources for discovery via a unified search and retrieval interface, it is important to acknowledge from the outset NSDL's leading role in facilitating research collaboration and engaging stakeholders across public, private, university, K-12, and government sectors in strategic planning for the effective delivery of digital services. NSDL serves a crucial function at the national-level by re-thinking digital library architectures (Lagoze et al. 2005), developing and promoting best practices (http://oai-best.comm.nsdl.org/), creating generic tools and service applications (http://nsdl.org/resources_for/library_builders/tools.php), conducting research into user needs (California Digital Library 2004, Hanson and Carlson 2005), and advancing techniques in large-project management and participant involvement (Giersch et al. 2004).

The SMETE Open Federation, launched with NSF NSDL Collection and Core Integration funding, includes among its membership more than forty organizations and digital libraries that share the common purpose of advancing digital libraries in science education. The other services discussed in this section are all members of SMETE. NEEDS, BEN, and DLESE are leaders in their respective communities-engineering, biological sciences, and earth science-in building effective digital library services. Although MERLOT's user community is multi-disciplinary, it is included in this section because of its prominent role in science education. It differs from most of the other services under review in this report in two important ways: (1) it is membership-based organization with a formal dues structure that dictates levels of participation and (2) it does not make its metadata freely available for OAI harvesting. MERLOT is particularly known for its peer-review practices and community-developing strategies.

4.3.1 NSDL: National Science Digital Library

Since its inception in 2000, the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) has made nearly 220 awards totaling more than $125 million dollars to develop the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). [[115]] The four major funding streams are defined as follows:

• Pathways [replacing "Collections" in FY04] projects are expected to provide stewardship for the content and services needed by major communities of learners.
• Services projects are expected to develop services that support users, resource collection providers, and the Core Integration effort and that enhance the impact, efficiency, and value of the library.
• Targeted Research projects are expected to explore specific topics that have immediate applicability to collections, services, and other aspects of the development of the digital library.
• Core Integration coordinates and manages the core library, develops the library's central portal and infrastructure, and engages and supports the NSDL community.

NSDL's initial emphasis on Collections has shifted over the past two years to configuring and integrating digital resources into sustainable services by anchoring them in established communities of practice thereby "enabling learners to 'connect' or otherwise find pathways to resources appropriate to their needs" (Zia 2006). Collections' funding peaked in 2002 when there were 35 projects, accounting for 68 percent of the total NSDL budget. By 2005, NSDL funding was about equally distributed between Core Integration and the three project tracks, with Services receiving an estimated 28 percent and Pathways, 18 percent of new project funds. To date, Pathways are under development in the biological sciences, physics and astronomy, computational science, middle school teacher resources, materials science, mathematical sciences, engineering, multimedia resources for the classroom and professional development, and resources and services for community and technical colleges. [[117]] In FY06 proposals will be accepted for the Pathways track only or "for supplemental funding from existing projects to extend or enhance their services, collections, or targeted research activity so as to enlarge the user audience for NSDL or improve capability for the user." [[118]] Two projects under review in this report, BEN (BiosciEdNet) and SMETE/NEEDS are exemplars of NSDL Pathways. In addition, DLESE, funded by NSF's Directorate for the Geosciences, serves as an NSDL Earth Science node.

NSDL's 2005 annual report [[119]] identifies five areas where it is concentrating its efforts to improve education, eaer audience for NSDL or improve capability for the user." [[118]] Two projects under review in this report, BEN (BiosciEdNet) and SMETE/NEEDS are exemplars of NSDL Pathways. In addition, DLESE, funded by NSF's Directorate for the Geosciences, serves as an NSDL Earth Science node.

NSDL's 2005 annual report [[119]] identifies five areas where it is concentrating its efforts to improve education, each with representative project case studies:

• Evaluation, the continuous process of measuring the impact of NSDL activities on learning.
  • Case Studies: Teachers' Domain, The BEN Portal, Kinematics Library
• Classroom Resources, the nuts-and-bolts work of putting new tools into teachers' hands.
  • Case Studies: Starting Point, TeachEngineering, Instructional Architect
• Technology, the massive effort to build and grow a hidden grid that holds digital libraries together.
  • Case Studies: FEDORA Holds Everything, AMSER and CWIS, Searching for Math Formulas (Wolframs Functions)
• Community Building, encouraging learning groups to use the NSDL to pursue their questions.
  • Case Studies: Virtual Math Teams, CHEM Collective, Interactive from SHODOR, Environmental Resources Library
• Informal Learning, the extension of NSDL resources to libraries, museums, and publications.
  • Case Studies: OCKHAM, Scientific American Online, Exploratorium Online

Collections in NSDL

According to NSDL's online collection policy, "NSDL is a collection of other digital library collections." Collections may consist of a single resource or thousands of resources. All NSDL resources are associated with at least one other external collection in order to associate them with a "responsible organization or project." Collections and resources are selected by NSDL Program-funded Pathways and Collections Projects and by the NSDL Director of Collection Development. In addition, collections and resources are recommended by a team of volunteer recommenders (mostly science librarians), NSDL community members, and also the general public. These recommendations are checked against the selection criteria and approved by the Director of Collection Development for inclusion in the NSDL.

There are two broad selection criteria that are intended to be inclusive in order to allow a spectrum of quality and review:

• appropriate to fulfilling the mission of NSDL
• matches the subject scope of NSDL

NSDL collections contain freely available and restricted-use resources. When access is limited, the collection should have open access metadata describing the resources.

As of May 2006, there are 660 collections accepted into NSDL of which 121 have item-level records. [[121]] Twenty NSDL collections account for 92 percent of the estimated 1.2 million item records. (Lagoze et al. 2006a report about their experience in harvesting from 114 NSDL collections via OAI; 37 collections come from only eight providers.) The top twenty data providers range in size from arXiv.org with nearly 340,000 items to DLESE with 7,200 items. The four largest collections also figure among the top twenty in OAIster: arXiv.org, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) OAI Repository, CITIDEL (the Computing & Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library), and Wolfram Functions. [[122]] Of the 88 collection projects funded via NSDL (representing 64 unique collections) from FY00 to FY03 an estimated 75 percent of them have item-level metadata in NSDL. On balance, NSDL-funded collections represent a very small portion of the NSDL content: CITIDEL with more than 100,000 records, followed in size by DLESE with 7,200 items-the remaining circa 46 NSDL-funded collections have 3,000 or fewer records.

Publisher Partnerships in the NSDL [[123]]

In its work over the past two years, the Core Integration (CI) team has proceeded from the premise that in order for the NSDL to become a resource of choice, used frequently by a broad range of teachers and students on a national scale, it is necessary to engage the interest and participation of the scientific textbook and software publishing community. This community includes both non-profit and for-profit organizations that control a substantial percentage of the high-quality educational science materials currently being produced for teachers and their students.

In this effort, the CI team took steps to engage this community in a collaborative and productive manner, so as to ensure that the NSDL becomes a strong and valued partner rather than a competitor to the traditional science publishing community. Science publishers possess assets that will become critical to the future success of the NSDL, including an efficient and stable mechanism for acquiring and peer-reviewing high quality content from scientists and science teachers; an effective system for editorial development, design, and production of this content; excellent market research and evaluation mechanisms; established models for contracts, licenses, copyright, and intellectual property management; and a reliable system for marketing and sustainability. In addition, many of these publishers work with vendors who provide technical infrastructure and support for schools.

Through its access management and publisher relations efforts, the CI team has established a formal means to engage the science publishing community, including a means to enable controlled access to their content. These activities will ensure that the NSDL reaches its full potential as a functional, valued, and highly used resource, and serves as a model for partnerships with other collaborators in the future.

As of May 2006, NSDL CI has established relationships with 18 science publishers. Many of these have begun to supply metadata for their materials which then appears in the NSDL central portal interface. The publishers include:

• American Mathematical Society
• American Physical Society
• Bedford, Freeman, and Worth
• BioOne
• Blackwell Publishing
• Cambridge University Press (book and journal programs)
• Elsevier Books
• Houghton Mifflin Company
• John Wiley and Sons
• McGraw-Hill
• National Academy Press
• Nature Publishing Group
• Oxford University Press (book and journal programs)
• Pearson Education
• Scientific American
• Springer Science+Business Media
• Tom Snyder Productions (software division of Scholastic)
• Tool Factory (educational software)

Since the 2003, NSDL has developed access point to its content by audience: K12 Teachers, Librarians, NSDL Community, University Faculty, and First Time Users.

Table 19 summarizes the widely varying results retrieved in a search for resources relevant to University Faculty about Astronomy. Browsing by topic identifies 68 collections relevant to Astronomy. A keyword search retrieves more than 11,000 resources. The University Faculty portal contains one "top pick" relevant to Astronomy. A search of the Virtual Reference Desk, AskNSDL question-and-answer archives and resources (requires registration and log-in) compiled by an NSDL reference desk librarian, locates 12 collections relevant to Astronomy (but the list does not include the Physics and Astronomy Pathway found through the University Faculty portal). In addition to blogs, Web sites and other types of resources, AskNSDL has 68 archived questions from users related to Astronomy.

Given the diversity of these sample results, users should be encouraged to experiment with different search, browse and navigational functions to see which best suit their needs.

Search Features

In 2003, NSDL offered both simple and advanced search features. Simple search relied on keywords with the ability to limit by Type of Resource (Collections, Items, News, Exhibits, Collections with reviews, Items with reviews) or by Resource Format (Text, Image, Audio, Video, Interactive Resource, Data), whereas advanced searches allowed Boolean commands limited to keyword anywhere, keyword in content, title, author/creator/contributor, subject and format/genre. In response to user feedback, NSDL simplified its approach and now offers a single search box for keywords with the option to limit the search by Resource Format (same as above) or Grade Level (Graduate, College, High school, Intermediate elementary, Middle school, Primary elementary). In spring 2006 NSDL added an option to Search resources (i.e. educational resources) or Search NSDL.org (i.e. NSDL community sites or the NSDL.org site). As of this writing, these labels are under review and additional information describing the options will be added once approved.

Search Tips explain that searches are not case sensitive and that quotation marks should be used around phrases. Boolean commands are no longer available, nor is there any explanation whether or not there is automatic ANDing of search terms (a common feature of most general search engines) or truncation (or other wildcard functions).

Results are returned ten per page with brief annotations and links to "View all related information" (provides item and collection-level metadata, as available) and "Include/Exclude results like this" (enables filtering by collection). Users can navigate to previous or next pages but cannot sort results or jump to different page results. When the revised Web site went live in late October 2005, a standard feature was added so all NSDL.org pages can be emailed via the "Email this page" link in the footer. However, there are no post-processing features to save or export results by other means. When a search does not produce any results, users are advised to consult the search tips, browse the collections, or check back as NSDL collections continue to grow. In March 2006, NSDL implemented "Did you mean" spelling suggestions. A search for "crystalography," suggests the corrected spelling, "Did you mean," crystallography.

Search Results

When conducted in late January 2006, a sample search for the keyword <crystallography> produced curious results (Table 20). Without deploying any search delimiters, the basic term query returned 633 results. Filtering the results to exclude the collection of the first retrieved item, reduced the result set to 616 resources. When the link "search within this collection" (e.g., DLESE) is used, the results increased dramatically to 7,175. Beginning anew with the search term, <crystallography,> but limiting by grade level, produced a wide range of results, with 20,373 hits at the high school level. [[124]] Given the proviso that not all resources contain format metadata and, therefore, relevant results may be excluded, it was alarming to retrieve much higher and wildly different returns when the format delimiter was invoked-e.g., over 700,000 texts and 34,000 images pertaining to crystallography, when the keyword search retrieves 633 resources. Based on Brogan's query of early February 2006, it became apparent that NSDL was combining all keyword appearances (i.e. through OR operators) rather requiring the presence of both words (i.e. through AND operators). NSDL modified its newly implemented search interface and corrected these errors on the production site in mid-February 2006. The results of the identical search conducted after the modification are dramatically different.

However, as NSDL officials explain, determining how "boosting and filtering" occurs is not entirely straightforward; in the many cases where the data provider or collection does not provide resource-type information in their metadata, relevant results may be lost from the search and the results are narrow. Even so there are still other problems apparent in this new sample search. The 12 results for Graduate-level resources contain three apparent duplicate references to Reciprocal Net. Users have to link to another screen to find out if all three are from the same source or not. Two seem identical (despite different NSDL OAI identifiers); the third is an article discussing Reciprocal Net that appeared in a NSDL Whiteboard report. Moreover, Reciprocal Net is tagged for three grade levels "graduate, undergraduate, grades 10-12" yet only shows up in the "Graduate" search. In early April 2006, NSDL reinstated the collection icons in search results pages allowing users to see the collection in which the resource resides, which helps to address some of these issues.

NSDL's New Resource-Centric Fedora Architecture [[125]]

NSDL's conversion to a Fedora repository marks a major transition from a metadata-centric to a resource-centric data model and search service. According to NSDL developers:

Digital libraries need to distinguish themselves from web search engines in the manner that they add value to web resources. This added value consists of establishing context around those resources, enriching them with new information and relationships that express the usage patterns and knowledge of the library community. The digital library then becomes a context for information collaboration and accumulation - much more than just a place to find information and access it. (Lagoze et al. 2005)

Traditional structured metadata plays a role in such information contextualization. However, it exists as a component of a resource-centric model, rather than being the focus of the information model itself. (Lagoze et al 2006a, 3)

• 1. a communications or system failure either at the data provider's server or with the NSDL's OAI harvester
• 2. OAI protocol violations
• 3. invalid XML data, XML schema non-compliance, or SML, URL or UTF-8 charactering encoding (Lagoze et al 2006a, 5)

The new architecture is intended to model resources rather than metadata and permit the provision of richer information, including context and less-structured metadata. The infrastructure is also making possible a number of new NSDL applications described by Lagoze and his colleagues:

• Expert Voices - a collaborative blogging system that enables such capabilities as Question/Answer discussions and resource recommendations and annotations. http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/?css=larger
• On Ramp - a system for the distributed creation, editing, and dissemination of content from multiple users and groups in a variety of formats. http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org/docs/nsdl_arch_overview.pdf#search='on%20ramp%20nsdl'
• Instructional Architect - a system that enables teachers to identify, choose and design lesson plans, study aids, homework using online learning resources. http://ia.usu.edu http://ia.usu.edu
• Content Assignment Tool - a tool to align NSDL resources to state and national education standards. [[126]] http://www.cnlp.org/documents/casaa-web/casaa.html

Sustaining NSDL Collections and Services

Faced with the prospect of diminishing NSF funds, NSDL is increasingly turning its attention to strategies that will sustain its efforts and integrate them into established library services. NSDL's Sustainability Standing Committee Chair, Paul Arthur Berkman outlines four components of NSDL, each requiring its own strategies, if the NSDL is going to survive as a collaborative, coordinated effort where the sum is greater than its parts.

• Program Sustainability involves strategies to facilitate long-term collaborations among projects, uses, sponsors, federal agencies and other stakeholders that share in the progress of the NSDL.
• Project Sustainability involves the public-private-university-government strategies to support the creation, maintenance and evolution of collections and services in the NSDL.
• User-Community Sustainability involves the networking, outreach and engagement strategies that are necessary to grown the community of users, members and sponsors who will support the NSDL into the future.
• Technical Sustainability involves coordination among technology developers and the overall program to develop the NSDL in a persistent, functional, and visionary manner.

In 2004 NSDL began to publish "sustainability vignettes" in the Whiteboard Report for specified projects. The seven vignettes issued to date represent a range of multi-faceted approaches to continuation. [[127]] The Math Digital Library, for example, is creating new value-added services in close consultation with members of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). According to MathDL's vision, new components-for example, MAA Reviews, Classroom Capsules, online MathDL books and meeting and workshop software-would be free to members but non-members would be required to subscribe or pay a usage fee. Similarly, MathDL's Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications (JOMA) may transition to a member-only benefit, requiring others to pay for access. In brief, MathDL's sustainability plan hinges on a combination of support from MAA and from direct income streams. Another NSDL project, Teacher's Domain, sponsored by WBGH, is seeking "collaborative partnerships and strategic alliances," along with the expectation that its courses will become self-funded through licenses to educational institutions and organizations.

The NSDL Sustainability Standing Committee is developing a decision-tree exercise, designed to help principal investigators determine if and how to sustain their NSDL projects. Alternative decision paths branch out from responses to questions about the project's sustainability objectives, its relevance, institutional support, and market opportunities-resulting in recommendations to discontinue the project as unsustainable or to consider open-source community, not-for-profit or for-profit corporation resolutions.

Several other initiatives, addressing user-community and technical sustainability, merit discussion. Effective October 1, 2003, the California Digital Library (CDL) received a two-year NSF grant to develop and enrich the NSDL by determining how to best integrate it into academic library services. In an effort to support the development of NSDL's long-term business plan, the grant provided for a market assessment to determine user needs and expectations of high-quality science online resources. Through focus groups, interviews, and a comparative review of user-specified high-quality science resources (e.g., HighWire, Scirus, PubMed, CiteSeer), CDL market research revealed:

• Limited prior awareness of NSDL; lack of differentiation vs. other government science Web sites (e.g., Science.gov).
  • N.B. In May 2006, NSDL announced that Science.gov had added NSDL to its collection. According to the announcement in NSDL's Whiteboard Report: This means that users can search all the science databases and more than 1,800 science Web sites at Science.gov (http://www.science.gov/), plus the 1.1 million records of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education resources at NSDL, with just one click. [[128]] (See Figure 27 below.)
• Strong resistance to institutional subscription model, especially in current California K-12 funding climate.
• Most participants see more value in the NSDL collection as a classroom teaching aid for K-12.
• Academic libraries see limited value in another Web science portal, but would be willing to consider paying for deep integration with their existing search tools.
• Mixed levels of interest in personalization and publishing tools. (California Digital Library 2004, 1)

CDL's recommendations are annotated below with checkmarks to indicate areas of subsequent progress ("o" indicates not implemented as of mid-May 2006):

• NSDL should provide free, open access to its basic collection through a public Web portal that provides basic metasearch features and a browsable subject hierarchy.
  • Browsable subject hierarchy instated.
• Improve current NSDL portal by improving visibility of search, creating browsable subject hierarchy in HTML, and a clear statement of purpose and intended audience.
  • NSDL has developed five entry points geared towards different audiences.
• Encourage K-12 classroom use by providing access to lessons plans, subject guides, and interactive features; consider partnering with established K-12 content providers.
  • These features are available via the ASKNSDL service.
  • Content Assignment Tool aligns national and state educational standards to resources.
  • Several Pathways partners are addressing this, e.g., WBGH's Teacher's Domain, AAAS's Biological Sciences Pathway (via BEN portal), Engineering Pathway (merger of NEEDS and TeachEngineering) and the Middle School Pathway (Ohio State University).
  • Established partnership with the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) to deliver 11 NSDL Online Science Web seminars through June 2007.
• Explore development of value-added services for academic libraries, including:
  • o MARC record export
  • o OpenURL support
  • o Integration with other federated search platforms
  • o Mapping of controlled vocabularies (e.g. MeSH-type thesaurus)

• o Citation linking
• o Abstracts
• o "Smart parsing" of search terms (e.g., cell biology > "cell biology")
• o Suggest related terms based on search input
• o Search history
• Ability to rank search criteria: NSDL removed rank from search results based on user testing. Results are sorted based on rank.
• Image search tools (e.g., Browse, "NSDL At a Glance")
• "Search within these results": beta version in place on the development server, not in production.
• Personalized views of the collection
• Community features (e.g., discussion forums, listservs, RSS for registered users) (Features list from CDL 2004, 20; annotated with check-marks by author)

Other major services, for example Science.gov, are starting to integrate NSDL resources into their search capability.

Finally, the OCKHAM Initiative (described in section 3.2), led by Emory University and Oregon State University, aims to establish "an extensible framework for networked peer-to-peer interoperation among the NSDL and traditional libraries." To this end, it is developing a suite of tools (middleware) to help integrate NSDL collections and services into traditional library service environments while also creating a current awareness alerting service and a registry to facilitate machine-to-machine and end-user discovery of digital library services. This is vital to the future effective interoperation among existing NSDL collections. In addition, NSDL and DLF are working together to establish and promulgate Best Practices in Shareable Metadata as discussed earlier in this report.

Leveraging Individual Project Activities and External Relationships

This description of NSDL concentrates in large part on its Core Integration activities as an aggregator of STEM collections and services. NSDL, however, makes many other valuable contributions to advancing STEM teaching and learning by leveraging partnerships between individual projects and national partners. This is particularly evident in NSDL's involvement in the promoting educational achievement standards and professional development workshops. To cite one prominent example, the NSDL Achievement Standards Network (ASN), developed with NSDL funding by Jes & Co. (http://www.jesandco.org/), will provide hands-on learning standards systems for every state. The NSDL resource records are part of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) 2006 Tool Kit (http://www.setda.org/content.cfm?SectionID=265), developed in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education. The initiative includes tools, technologies and best practices that enable states to manage electronic versions of their academic standards, align resources and assessments consistently using open and interoperable methods, and embed standards seamlessly in all manner of learning and assessment systems and systems of accountability.

4.3.2 SMETE: Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education Digital Library

The SMETE Open Federation continues as a membership organization launched with NSF NSDL Collection and Core Integration funding whose "primary mission is to establish universal access to academic excellence in SMET education." The Federation has more than forty partners including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI), and OCLC as well as other digital libraries dedicated to science education (including all of the services under review in this section) and a dozen universities and corporations. SMETE helps to develop leading-edge technologies to share among its members while also maintaining a collection of premier learning materials.

SMETE collaborated with the Exploratorium, in San Francisco, California, to create the Exploratorium Digital Library, a collection of high-quality teaching resources and activities (http://www.exploratorium.edu/educate/dl.html) that is also integrated into NSDL. SMETE has also provided technology services to other digital libraries including BioSciEdNet (BEN, http://www.biosciednet.org/portal/), MathDL (http://mathdl.maa.org/), and the Digital Chemistry (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kubinec/). SMETE resources are cataloged to meet the requirements of the IEEE Learning Object Metadata Standard and SMETE has developed tools to transform local application profiles (e.g., from LON-CAPA, http://www.lon-capa.org/ and the Michigan Teacher Network, http://mtn.merit.edu/) to normalized application profiles. SMETE collaborates with MERLOT on peer reviews. [[132]]

In addition to supporting search queries by keyword, author/creator, title, and publication date range, the user interface offers various options to limit searches by more than 20 different types of learning resource (e.g., case study, dataset, lesson plan); grade level (primary education to post-graduate and vocational training to professional development); and eight specific collections (e.g., ACM Women in Computing, Math Forum, Michigan Teachers Network, NEEDS). Searches can be restricted to peer-reviewed materials. Search results are returned with briefly annotated entries including a search score. Each result is clearly branded according to its platform (e.g., PC, MAC, Web); cost (e.g., free or $); availability of reviews; and native collection. Registered users can create a profile and save resources in a workspace. User information can be shared to identify other community members with similar interests.

The results' screen provides users with related terms to extend the search as well as the ability to conduct a federated keyword search in partner collections. The partner collections include NSDL, MERLOT, and NEEDS. A technical report available at SMETE explains its strategy for adopting a SOAP-based SMETE Search API to implement federated searches across heterogeneous collections. [[133]]

4.3.2.1 NEEDS: National Engineering Education Delivery System

The American Society for Engineering Education in partnership with seven leading engineering schools (e.g., UC-Berkeley, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Colorado School of Mines) is creating a unified K-gray engineering pathway, under the auspices of NSDL. NEEDS, a digital library for engineering education, will merge with TeachEngineering (Resources for K-12) to establish a single comprehensive portal for engineering. Both NEEDS and TeachEngineering (TE) are highly regarded by their respective communities. Through its annual "Premier Award" courseware competition, NEEDS is a national leader in stimulating and evaluating high-quality engineering courseware targeted for undergraduate teaching. It has translated the award selection criteria into best practices in courseware design, helping to promulgate high standards of excellence. Through the combined expertise of NEEDS and TE, they expect to:

• Significantly and sustainably grow high-quality resources;
• Align the unified curricular materials with appropriate undergraduate and K-12 educational standards;
• Grow the participation of content providers and users;
• Enhance quality control and review protocols for content; and
• Expand gender equity and ethnic diversity components by cataloging and reviewing curricular resources created by female-centric and minority-serving organizations.

• Browse curriculum (TE)
• Search resources/curriculum by Keyword, Grade Level, Educational Standard (TE), Required Time (TE), Cost (TE), Learning Resource Type (NEEDS), Title (NEEDS), Author (NEEDS), Review (NEEDS), Series (NEEDS), Host Collection (NEEDS), Publication Year (NEEDS)
• Personal workspace (MyTE, NEEDS Workspace)
• Reviews for resources/curriculum
• OAI server that exports NSDL Dublin Core metadata for harvesting
• Recommendation system (NEEDS)
• Web service for search through SOAP (NEEDS)
• Metathesaurus to suggest related search terms (NEEDS)
• RSS feeds of new resources (NEEDS)
• Online cataloging (NEEDS) [[134]]

4.3.3 BioSciEdNet (BEN) Collaborative

In fall 2005 the BEN Collaborative, led by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) with a dozen founding-partner professional societies, received NSF NSDL funding to expand into a Biological Sciences Pathway for educators at the high school and undergraduate levels. [[135]] Over a four year period, the Pathway funding will enable BEN to increase the number of: collaborators from which it aggregates resources from 13 to 22; digital libraries it helps professional society members to develop from 6 to 13; and cataloged resources in the BEN metadata repository from 4,000 to 27,000 items. With more than 100 professional organizations in the life sciences, BEN's core content aims to jump-start teaching introductory biology courses by unifying resources that are otherwise highly fragmented and widely dispersed.

The Pathway builds on BEN's successful track record as a portal manager providing database development, resource cataloging, metadata validation software tools, and Web trend reporting for professional societies. BEN's Learning Object Management (LOM) cataloging system has seven components:

• General
• Lifecycle
• Technical
• Educational
• Rights
• Classifications (subject taxonomy and pedagogic use taxonomy)
• Metadata

In addition to developing digital libraries with common technical standards that contribute resources to the BEN portal, BEN partners promote best practices for pedagogy, authentic assessment and the development of multidisciplinary biological sciences resources. A shared online workspace facilitates communication among collaborators. BEN relies on NSDL's technical architecture for integration of its resources into the NSDL Data Repository as well as access to NSDL's new applications (e.g., Expert Voices, Content Alignment Tool).

To ensure quality control of learning object resources, BEN partner societies are expected to establish a peer review framework that specifies the review timeline, criteria, ranking, and types of reviewers involved in evaluating each type of resource. Examples of the peer-review processes created by its constituent professional societies are available from BEN's Web site. [[137]] While the number of BEN resources is relatively low at present, it is one of the few NSDL projects with a coherent cohort of peer-reviewed individually tagged lesson plans and classroom activities. As January 2006, BEN's inventory of 4,111 resources included:

• AAAS (220 lesson plans and multimedia resources)
• ABLE (66 Lab Exercises and Manuals; 2 Teaching Strategies )
• AIBS (184 teaching and learning resources)
• APS (501 teaching and learning resources)
• APSNet (57 Plant Disease Lessons and articles)
• ASBMB (39 articles and interactive resources)
• ASM (1141 teaching and learning resources)
• BSA (948 annotated images)
• ESA (192 teaching and learning resources)
• FUN (20 journal articles)
• HAPS (266 journal and newsletter articles)
• NHM-Access Excellence (206 teaching and learning resources)
• STKE (317 reviews, perspectives, and multimedia resources)
• SOT (9 teaching and learning resources) [[138]]

In four years time, BEN expects to have established 45 college and university faculty representatives around the country who are trained to provide assistance to prospective BEN contributors and users. BEN operates under the aegis of a Coordinating Council that includes representatives from the AAAS and four professional societies as well as a national Advisory Board comprised of college and university educators.

4.3.4 DLESE: Digital Library for Earth System Education

Funded by NSF's Directorate for Geosciences, the DLESE Program Center (DPC) operates under the aegis of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. DLESE plays a leadership role in bridging the education and research components of geoscience cyberinfrastructure (Marlino et al 2004).

The goals of the DLESE Program Center are to:

• develop and provide library infrastructure tailored to specific geoscience education needs;
• enable distributed collections and services to act as an integrated whole;
• provide interoperability services with other library efforts (e.g. NSDL );
• support community capacity building by providing tools, components, and services that enable the development of high-quality collections of teaching and learning resources;
• conduct ongoing library operations; and
• offer broad-based community support. [[140]]

What are they seeking?

DLESE maintains two primary collections. Resources in the "DLESE Community Collection" (~7,100 items) meet basic guidelines in terms of subject relevance and functionality. [[143]] The more selective "DLESE Reviewed Collection" [[144]] is composed of resources (~670 items) that have been evaluated against seven criteria:

• 1. scientific accuracy;
• 2. pedagogical effectiveness;
• 3. completeness of documentation;
• 4. ease of use for teachers and learners;
• 5. ability to inspire or motivate learners;
• 6. importance or significance of the content, and
• 7. robustness as a digital resource. (Kastens et al. 2005)

Users can browse DLESE's collections by subject, resource type, and grade level.

As illustrated in the figure above, each collection has a bar graph, charting the number of resources as well as a collection annotation and link to the collection's scope and policy statement.

Text searches can be filtered by grade level, resource type, collection, and educational standard. At present, DLESE has the ability to search by National Science Education Standards (NSES) and by National Geography Standards (NGS). The National Geography Standards organize learning concepts under six broad topical categories: Environment and society, Human systems, Physical systems, Places and regions, the Uses of geography, and the World in spatial terms, for a total of 18 individual standards. The NSES are hierarchical and permit users to choose grade level, broad topic, and learning goal. For example:

• Grades 9-12
  • o Earth and space science
    • § Energy in the earth system
    • § Geochemical cycles

DLESE makes innovative use of its "Community Review System" to create customized reports for teachers that assess the effectiveness of digital learning resources in their classrooms (Kastens and Holzman 2006). The Introductory Geoscience Virtual Textbook was created as a test bed for the CRS individualized teacher report system, utilizing DLESE resources to teach students about basic concepts in Earth science. [[147]] Both students and the instructor write reviews of the digital resources based on the seven criteria noted above for "reviewed resources" and then the DLESE CRS creates a report aggregating and comparing the data from the instructor's and student's perspective. Examples of various types of reports generated by the CRS are available at DLESE's Web site. [[148]]

Since the 2003 DLF report was issued, DLESE's information technology infrastructure has evolved into a service-oriented architecture (SOA), with improved interoperability capabilities that extend its reach through Web service and JavaScript APIs (Weatherley 2005) (see http://www.dlese.org/dds/services/). The Center for Ocean Science Education Excellence (COSEE, http://www.cosee.net/), for example, has embedded a custom DLESE search in their Web portal that is implemented using the DLESE Search Web Service and the My NASA Data portal utilizes a custom search page implemented with the JavaScript API (http://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/DLESE_search.html). In addition to these, DLESE services and APIs are being used to deliver DLESE resources interactively to users of GLOBE, NASA S'COOL, the GEON portal and several other institutional Web sites and portals.

The California Digital Library is harvesting DLESE's OAI records and integrating them into a geosciences portal tailored to the users of the UC campus libraries. DLESE is also a Principal Investigator (PI) Institution in GEON, a network building cyberinfrastructure capacity in geoinformatics for research (GEON) and educational (DLESE) purposes.

GEON is based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with support for "intelligent" search, semantic data integration, visualization of 4D scientific datasets, and access to high performance computing platforms for data analysis and model execution -- via the GEON Portal. http://www.geongrid.org/

Custard and Sumner (2005) report on their research to "Using Machine Learning to Support Quality Judgments" about digital resources and collections. NSDL and DLESE were used as a test case for their research to determine if a set of "indicators could be used to accurately classify resources into different quality bands and to determine which indicators positively or negatively influenced resource classification." According to the authors, "The results suggest that resources can be automatically classified into quality bands, and that focusing on a subset of the identified indicators can increase classification accuracy." In the future, collection curators may rely on these "next generation cognitive tools" to support their qualitative decisions about which digital resources to acquire.

Publications and presentations by members of the DLESE community are listed in the bibliography maintained at the DLESE Web site. [[151]]

4.3.5 MERLOT: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching

Those new to MERLOT have several options to familiarize themselves with its services and features. From MERLOT's Web site, users can access a brief video introduction (replete with faculty testimonials), listen to a presentation about MERLOT co-sponsored by the TLT Group, watch an interview with MERLOT's Executive Director, Gerry Hanley, or listen to his longer video presentation, "Sharing Learning Objects: Serving MERLOT to Higher Education." [[153]] In summarizing what makes MERLOT work effectively, Hanley emphasizes these characteristics:

• We create a common means to individual ends.
• You get more than you give.
• You have a fair share in decision-making and participation.
• We hold true to academic values.
• We provide visibility, accountability and sustainability.
• You trust us to deliver high quality services.

• higher education institutions
• non-profit institutions (professional societies and digital libraries)
• corporations

• Affiliate: joint advocacy but low-level of cooperation, requires an application or MOU
• Project-level: collaborate in MERLOT initiatives and pay $6,500 annual fee (for campuses or negotiated rate for other organizational types) with in-kind support required for projects.
• Community: participate in MERLOT leadership and collaborate on projects; pay a $25,000 with $50,000 to $100,000 in-kind support required for leadership and initiatives.
• Sustaining: lead a MERLOT initiative, participate in MERLOT management and pay a $50,000 annual fee plus $250,000 in-kind support required.

Since 2003, MERLOT has expanded its international outreach and content through strategic alliances in Canada, Europe and Australia. CLOE, the Co-operative Learning Object Exchange led by the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) is now a major sustaining partner alongside the California State University. The ARIADNE Foundation for the European Knowledge Pool, a distributed network of learning repositories, has become a MERLOT partner. In addition, MERLOT, ADRIADNE and EdNA, the Education Network Australia of learning repositories, each offer federated searches across their collections individually or collectively. [[156]] They are also all members of the consortium, GLOBE (Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange), along with eduSourceCanada and the National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Japan. [[157]]

MERLOT has also strengthened its corporate partnerships, which include O'Reilly Media and Sun Microsystems, three learning management systems (ANGEL Learning, Blackboard/WebCT, Desire2Learn) and two library systems (Ex Libris Ltd. and Sentient Learning). [[158]] These partnerships result in mutually beneficial services such as the seamless integration of MERLOT resources via Blackboard and ANGEL. [[159]] A similar service with WebCT will be available in July, 2006. As a matter of principle, MERLOT only signs non-exclusive agreements with vendors. It has assigned different values to its functions as follows:

• Basic Search - gratis
• Basic RSS feeds - gratis
• Advanced Search - nominal fee
• Customized RSS feeds - negotiated fees
• Federated Search - negotiated fees
• Other Services - negotiated fees

In July 2005, MERLOT inaugurated JOLT: Journal of Online Learning and Teaching as a peer-review, open access vehicle to promote the scholarship of technology-enabled teaching and learning in higher education. JOLT serves as another forum in which the MERLOT community can express and examine issues of common concern.

MERLOT offers various avenues for users to keep abreast of recent developments besides its "What's new" page, quarterly email newsletter the Grapevine, and press releases. It supports syndication (RSS), and from the home page, users can quickly link to the most recently added resources (225 items), new member profiles (845), and peer-reviewed resources (26) contributed in the last thirty days.

MERLOT's basic user interface is the same as reported in 2003, but there a number of new or previously unrecorded features. The Advanced search functions permit users to limit their queries by a number of unique qualifiers going well beyond subject, material type, technical format, language, audience and cost. These include: learning management system compatibility (Blackboard/WebCT, Desire2Learn), iPod items, Section 508 compliant items (conform to minimal disability access standards), copyright restrictions, and availability of source code. In addition searches can be restricted to peer-reviewed resources (further refined by minimum rankings), member comments (further refined by user rankings), availability of assignments, and author snapshots. Author snapshots utilize the KEEP Toolkit developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to produce an illustrated synopsis (e-portfolio) of the educator's rationale, motivation, and impact on teaching and learning in developing the resource.

It is worth noting that some of these filters restrict the results to a very limited sub-set. For example, whereas 85 to 90 percent of the resources have been reviewed by faculty, only about 15 percent actually have published "peer reviews" in MERLOT (<2,000 items). [[160]] According to MERLOT representatives the comparatively low proportion of peer-reviewed resources is attributable to a combination of factors including the amount of time required by faculty, the author's consent, and the quality of the material. Consequently, resources deemed of lesser interest do not receive MERLOT Peer Review. Results can be sorted by five different variables (title, author, date entered, rating, item type). It is possible to conduct sub-searches within the result set.

In addition to federated searches across ARIADNE and EdNA's learning object repositories, MERLOT offers two subject-based federated searches: physics (covering MERLOT Physics and ComPADRE-Digital Resource Collections for Physics and Astronomy Education developed as a NSDL Pathway) and teaching and technology (covering MERLOT resources and the University of Carolina's Professional Development Portal). Currently in test is a federated search from the MERLOT Information Technology portal into IEEE Computer Society's extensive digital library (http://www.computer.org/). A new version of the MERLOT Web site is currently under development and planned for release at the MERLOT International Conference in August, 2006.

4.3.6 Current Issues and Future Directions

Each in their own way, these services face organizational challenges to increase content and usage. NSDL is developing "pathways"-exemplified by NEEDS and BEN-to focus resources for particular audiences and coalesce services across sectors. NEEDS is merging with TeachEngineering to serve the full spectrum of K-12 to lifelong learners. BEN has excelled at developing models for transforming smaller organizations to become contributors to digital libraries. DLESE is developing tools to support distributed cataloging of multiple collections and different metadata frameworks. MERLOT is bringing in new international and corporate partners. This cohort has developed a number of effective marketing and outreach vehicles to secure and extend their user base:

• NSDL now offers more interactive communications features from its Web site and is organizing more teacher workshops;
• NEEDS offers digital repository services to other organizations; oversees the Premier Award to recognize outstanding courseware, and displays monthly theme pages;
• BEN is developing a faculty campus representative program;
• DLESE's supports a distributed, Web-based cataloging tool and is working with NSDL and Syracuse University to incorporate state and national standards into its database; and
• MERLOT inaugurated JOLT: Journal of Online Learning and Teaching as a peer-review, open access vehicle to promote the scholarship of technology-enabled teaching and learning in higher education.

An essential ingredient to their success is offering quality assurance of content, one aspect of which is peer review. The user interfaces of SMETE/NEEDS, DLESE and MERLOT support filters to peer-reviewed items. However the actual proportion of such items is relatively low. A search limited to peer-review resources returns only 25 results in SMETE or NEEDS. Less than 15 percent of MERLOT's are peer-reviewed, whereas only 700 of DLESE's 12,000 resources are part of its reviewed collection. Although BEN has made considerable gains (310 percent increase since 2003), peer-reviewed resources constitute less than 15 percent of its database as well. This suggests that peer-review in the digital realm is still at an early stage of acceptance and is not well-integrated into faculty traditions and reward systems. According to an NSDL study underway by Alan Wolf, "The science faculty that he studies claim to trust neither peer review nor community vetting; instead, they simply rely on their own personal judgment in every case of using an OER [online educational resource], or they consult with a trusted colleague" (Harley et al. 2006, 166) [[161]].

These services also face the challenge of meeting the diverse needs of an expanded user base, particularly those that attempt to span the K to grey clientele. Research studies sponsored by NSDL among others reveal considerable differences by education sector in terms of what teachers need to integrate digital resources into their pedagogy California Digital Library 2004, Hanson and Carlson 2005, Harley et al. 2006). NSDL's pathways are intended to target resources and services to particular audiences, but it remains to be seen if these services can effectively serve diverse and sizeable constituents which have widely varying needs and operate in different conditions. NSDL, in particular, notes the "great diversity in evaluation methods and tools across 190+ NSDL digital library projects." This is corroborated by the CSHE study which reports that six NSDL collections included in their review "used almost completely different metrics to describe themselves and their use" (Harley et al. 2006, 157).

While these services are making strides to integrate their resources into other services (e.g., NSDL's incorporation into academic library portals and science.gov; MERLOT's federated search system and partnerships with WebCT/Blackboard; DLESE's partnership with GEONgrid), it remains to be seen how they will join up with other national and international communities of practice formed around e-learning technology platforms and e-learning frameworks. How do their efforts mesh, for example, with international efforts to make content object repositories interoperable such as CORDRA (Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture, http://cordra.net/) or the IMS Global Learning Consortium (http://www.imsglobal.org/) (Kraan and Mason 2005)?

Finally, financial sustainability is a major challenge, cited particularly by NSDL and MERLOT, but also evident in responses from the other services. Through the efforts of its Sustainability Standing Committee, NSDL is tackling this issue by formulating a decision-tree and providing its constituent projects with information about establishing marketing and business plans; however, NSDL as a whole-like other services in this report-attest to the need for more public and private funding options. The California Digital Library's market assessment of NSDL suggests that "academic libraries see limited value in another Web science portal, but would be willing to consider paying for deep integration with their existing search tools" (California Digital Library 2004, 3). Even MERLOT, which has a fee-based membership structure, identifies the challenge of "high demand, but limited resources." Nor can MERLOT count on maintaining its current membership base. The CSHE study of "Use and Users of Digital Resources" notes that while MERLOT (alongside a handful of other services) "could function on an existing base of support, budgetary volatility encouraged them to continuously watch for new funding opportunities" (Harley et al. 2006, 147).

At present, we have the opportunity to reintegrate the cultural record, connecting its disparate parts and making the resulting whole available to one and all, over the network. . . . Like most grand challenges, this one can be simply stated: make it possible for people to explore the totality of our accumulated global cultural heritage, now scattered throughout libraries, archives, or museums. ACLS, Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities & Social Sciences, 2005

The eleven services under review in this section serve as exemplars of ways in which librarians, archivists, educators, and scholars are collaborating to build digital collections and tools in support of cultural heritage and humanities scholarship. The discussion begins with two services that bridge the cultural divide by presenting collections and content from libraries, museums, and archives in a unified way. Cornucopia, sponsored by the Museums, Archives & Libraries Council (UK), serves as a single point of access for resource discovery, based on 6,000 collection-level descriptions from 2,000 institutions in the UK. Since the 2003 DLF report appeared, Cornucopia began to make its collection metadata available via OAI and SOAP. Further, it served as a model for a new project in the US led by the University of Illinois, namely the IMLS Collections and Content gateway to digital projects funded by the IMLS National Leadership Grant Program. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent grant-making agency of the federal government whose mission is "to lead the effort to create and sustain a 'nation of learners'" (http://www.imls.gov/).

Both projects use the RSLP (Research Support Libraries Programme) Collection Level Description (CLD) Metadata Schema which enables consistently formatted descriptions to be created and linked through parent-child relations and association relationships (as depicted in Figure 32), building on entity relation models for collection descriptions (Healey 2000, 2005) [[162]]. In addition, these projects are informed by NISO's (National Information Standards Organization) "A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections" (2^nd edition, 2004) and the NISO Metadata Initiative, described in the next section of this report. [[163]]

The DLF's Digital Collections Registry, which is maintained also by the University of Illinois, is briefly described before turning to three services included in the 2003 DLF survey: the Library of Congress's American Memory, the Sheet Music Consortium, and the Collaborative Digitization Program's (formerly Colorado Digitization Program) Heritage West (formerly Heritage Colorado). These represent various models of fostering cooperative digital collections and aggregating at the international, national, and regional level.

Two pilot projects-The American West and DLF Aquifer-sponsored by the California Digital Library and the Digital Library Federation respectively, are starting to put into practice many of the lessons learned from previous collaborative projects. They are pooling digital content and building tools and services targeted to particular audiences. Meanwhile, Emory University's capstone initiative, SouthComb, leverages its prior digital initiatives including AmericanSouth covered in the 2003 DLF survey, to create a scholarly portal for Southern Studies.

Two scholar-driven projects round out this section. Since 2003, the Perseus Digital Library (PDL) has rebuilt its text system, released a new Web site, and launched a named entity browser. It plans to migrate its core data to the Tufts Institutional Repository in order to concentrate on research and development activities. Once PDL research applications prove viable, they will move to the IR's production server. Finally, NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) represents a new scholar-driven model of aggregating peer-reviewed work and presenting it for use along with a suite of interpretative digital tools. Led by Jerome McGann, the John Stewart Bryan University Professor at the University of Virginia and editor of the acclaimed Rossetti Archive, NINES has garnered endorsements from five disciplinary societies and a host of other influential humanities computing organizations and projects.

4.4.1 Cornucopia

Developed by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), Cornucopia is a searchable database of some 6,000 collection descriptions emanating from 2,000 cultural heritage institutions in the UK. In spring 2004 Cornucopia migrated to a new software system and realigned almost all of its data structure to conform to the RSLP (Research Support Libraries Programme) Collection Level Description Metadata Schema (Turner 2005). The new system enhanced Cornucopia's functionality. Contributors can now edit and enter their collection data through a Web-based direct entry client; moreover, Cornucopia's data became available for OAI harvesting and Web service access. This enables interoperability among cultural heritage sites in the UK. For example, the People's Network Discover Service (http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/discover/) is harvesting Cornucopia data and making it searchable as one component of an aggregation harvested from an increasing number of cultural heritage sources. MLA's longer term vision is to provide integrated access to a wide range of data from the cultural sector, in which Cornucopia figures prominently.

As Cornucopia expands to incorporate more heterogeneous resources from an expanded institutional (e.g., including many more library collections) and user base, UKOLN undertook a strategic review of indexing options. A series of reports issued in September 2005 and January 2006 present comparative analyses of alternative thesauri, name authority files, and controlled vocabularies; recommend preferred indexing conventions for Cornucopia; and outline action plans for implementation. Among the key recommendations are to use the UK Archival Thesaurus (UKAT) for subject indexing and to abandon Cornucopia's current place indexing and use certain sections of the UNESCO Thesaurus instead. The time browsing page will be overhauled and new audience values and collection strength information added. New "Contributor Guidelines" give examples of how to assign appropriate index terms for subjects, places, time periods, names, audience levels, and collection strength based on UKOLN's findings. [163b]

Cornucopia's search and retrieval features have improved since 2003; however, in view of the new indexing recommendations, the description of its current functionality is provisional. Collections can be browsed by seven categories: time, people, place, subject, culture (e.g., Ancient Greece, Jewish, Maya, Viking), and institution. The user interface supports hierarchical, faceted browsing by subject. There are 21 broad subject categories (e.g., Education, Events, Information and Communication). In advanced search mode, users can narrow a collection title search by time period, place, type of institution (library, archive, or museum), or county. Alternative keywords are suggested to expand the search, based on the UK Archival Thesaurus. Results are returned with brief annotations, and link to full records that include (a) a collection summary, (b) location details (directory information about the institution), and (c) additional collection information; in some instances, there are links to the item via the institution's catalog. The "collect me" feature allows users to gather and save search results during a session for printing or emailing.

In addition, users can perform a search by postal code to locate collections in a particular location or conduct a search within or across three other Web services, including Cecilia: Find Music Collections in the UK and Ireland; Darwin Country; and Google. At present, no explanations are given to users about the coverage of the other services. However, Cecilia is a database of some 1,800 collection descriptions of music resources held in 600 libraries, archives and museums in the UK and Ireland (http://www.cecilia-uk.org/). Darwin Country, a partnership of several regional museums, focuses on the history of science, technology and culture in the West Midlands during the 18th and 19th centuries; it is affiliated with the UK's "Curriculum Online" initiative. [[164]] Among other features, Darwin Country enables the exploration of artifacts consisting of nearly 12,500 historic images (http://www.darwincountry.org/).

Besides Cecilia, various other digital projects in the UK have chosen to use Cornucopia's software and will provide their own user interfaces. They include:

• The Concert Programmes Project
  • This collaborative project, with Cardiff University as the lead institution, will create an online database of holdings of concert programmes held in libraries, archives and museums in the UK and Ireland, providing access to a vital source of information about musical life from the eighteenth century to the present day.
  • http://www.cph.rcm.ac.uk/Concert%20Programmes/Pages/Home%20Page.htm
• Inspire
  • The ultimate aim of Inspire is to create seamless access across over 4000 public, 3 national, almost 700 higher education libraries, as well as special libraries and those in further education colleges and schools, and to build an effective interface to resources for learning with museums, galleries, archives and other organisations and services.
  • http://www.inspire.gov.uk/index.php
• DiadEM
  • A regional initiative funded by the MLA and Libraries and Information East Midlands to create collection level descriptions (CLDs) of the special library collections in the East Midlands.
  • http://www.inspire.gov.uk/pdf/DiadEM%20description%20for%20INSPIRE%20website.pdf
• The Egyptologists Subject Specialist Network (SSN), which will be a forerunner for several other SSNs http://www.mla.gov.uk/website/programmes/renaissance/Subject_Specialist_Networks/

4.4.2 IMLS Digital Collections & Content (DCC)

A collaborative initiative led by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library and Graduate School of Library & Information Science, this gateway is intended to bring greater visibility and utility to digital collections funded by the IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services). The DCC serves as both a registry of collection-level descriptions of National Leadership Grant (NLG) projects and a metadata repository of item-level records from a subset of these collections. In its next phase of development (funded through 2007), the DCC expects to add a sample of digital collections funded via IMLS to State Library Administrative Agencies in support of the Library Services Technology Act (LSTA).

Integral to the development of the DCC, the principal investigators are testing the assumptions of the NISO/IMLS Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections (2004), namely how the registry and repository might serve as "infrastructure components" with "the potential to facilitate the reuse of digital content in new and different ways - by enabling more effective search and discovery across multiple collections and among and between individual information objects that will allow com