Mary Marlino

Understanding educator perceptions of "quality" in digital libraries

The purpose of the study was to identify educators expectations and requirements for the design of educational digital collections for classroom use. A series of five focus groups was conducted with practicing teachers, preservice teachers, and science librarians, drawn from different educational contexts (i.e., K-5, 6-12, college). Participants expect that the added value of educational digital collections is the provision of: (1) high quality teaching and learning resources, and (2) additional contextual information beyond that in the resource. Key factors that influence educators perceptions of quality were identified: scientific accuracy, bias, advertising, design and usability, and the potential for student distraction. The data showed that participants judged these criteria along a continuum of tolerance, combining consideration of several factors in their final judgements. Implications for collections accessioning policies, peer review, and digital library service design are discussed.

Digital libraries and educational practice: a case for new models

Educational digital libraries can benefit from theoretical and methodological approaches that enable lessons learned from design and evaluation projects performed in one particular setting to be applied to other settings within the library network. Three promising advances in design theory are reviewed - reference tasks, design experiments, and design genres. Each approach advocates the creation of intermediate constructs as vehicles for knowledge building and knowledge sharing across design and research projects. One purpose of an intermediate construct is to formulate finer-grained models that describe and explain the relationship between key design features and the cognitive and social dimensions of the context of use. Three models are proposed and used as thought experiments to analyze the utility of these approaches to educational digital library design and evaluation: digital libraries as cognitive tools, component repositories, and knowledge networks.

The digital library for earth system education: building community, building the library

Science educators have called repeatedly for an information system that can effectively deliver quality educational materials in readily accessible formats, with a high degree of confidence in their usefulness, interest, and effectiveness [4]. In the past 18 months, the Earth system education community has begun development of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). Earth system educators and key agency officials at NSF and NASA have recognized that the convergence of information and learning technologies , the maturation of basic digital library research, and the increasing ubiquity of the Web in classrooms has made the DLESE both possible and timely. Representatives of the Earth system education community came together in August 1999 to institute a governance system and an operational arm (the DLESE Program Center, or DPC) to design and develop a community-sponsored and community-owned digital library [3]. DLESE will serve the unique needs of Earth system educators and learners at all academic levels , in both formal and informal settings, by providing: Interfaces and tools to allow student exploration of geospatial materials and Earth data sets. Though a wealth of Earth data exists on the Web, much of it is difficult for educators to use. DLESE will provide student-friendly access to a wide variety of archived and real-time data sets. Rapid, sophisticated access to collections of peer-reviewed teaching and learning resources. Earth science educators have been frustrated in attempts to find high-quality teaching resources appropriate for their teaching style and educational level on the Web in a timely manner. This resource discovery challenge is being met with the creation of metadata schemas, controlled vocabularies, and cataloging best practice recommendations , all informed by community participation [2]. Services to help users effectively create and use materials. A full array of digital services and human-mediated services for both users and contributors to the library is critical to the vision of DLESE as an active organization that both builds and serves its community. A community center to facilitate sharing and collaboration. DLESE will serve as an intellectual commons for the global Earth system community by being the primary contact for educators, learners , and citizens who seek reliable information about the Earth. A federated collection of holdings. DLESE is being designed from the beginning to support resource discovery across a diverse, federated net

Meta-Design of a Community Digital Library

The community digital library has emerged as a recent evolution in the development of digital libraries. A community digital library is distinct through having a community of potential users define and guide the development of the library. In this article, we present how the geoscience community has worked to develop The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) in the light of recent work in the area of meta-design, the design of the design process. The development of DLESE is described utilizing a conceptual framework developed from the analysis of a variety of open source projects.

Data curation education in research centers

New data skills are critical to the progress of 21st century science to ensure that data are properly selected and stored and can be readily discovered, accessed, and used over time. The Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC) program will establish a model for data curation graduate education that enriches students learning and expertise through onsite training at a data intensive scientific research center. Doctoral students will conduct research and masters students will develop as professionals in the real world of research, guided by both science and data mentors. DCERC is also aligned with research and development activities in the current NSF DataNet projects, providing students with opportunities to interact with working groups and learn first-hand about R & D advances and outcomes.

Finding and using data in educational digital libraries

THREDDS (Thematic Real-Time Earth Distributed Data Servers) services catalog geophysical data and other data services to support discovery and use by researchers. THREDDS, however, doesnt support data discovery and use by learners and educators (i.e. novices). Educational digital libraries, like DLESE (Digital Library for Earth System Education) provide rich metadata descriptions that are effective in helping novices locate and use most types of learning resources. DLESE, however, doesnt provide a way for novices to discover geophysical data in immediately usable forms. The VGEE (Visual Geophysical Exploration Environment) supports novices discovery and use of geophysical data by linking THREDDS services with educational curricula and learner-centered data tools. The curricula are cataloged in DLESE and so can be discovered in educational settings. These curricula then guide novices to the appropriate tools and illustrate meaningful use of the data. More generally, by coupling data to curricular documents, text-based discovery tools (e.g. search engines) can be extended to data.

Faculty Workshop on Using Instructional Technologies and Satellite Data for College-Level Education in the Atmospheric and Earth Sciences

An education-oriented workshop for college faculty in the atmospheric and related sciences was held in Boulder, Colorado, during June 1997 by three programs of the University Corporation for Atmosp...

Research Center Insights into Data Curation Education and Curriculum

The need for the data curator role is being recognized in new institutional settings as research funding agencies internationally extend data archiving mandates to cover more types of research grants. This paper identifies categories of skills required for data curator from the perspective of data professionals within an atmospheric and Earth system science research center. We illustrate how the data curation tasks performed within a research center environment range across a spectrum of required skills. We use this spectrum to discuss implications for data curation education more broadly.

Data citations within NCAR/UCP

Federal agencies, professional societies, and research organizations in the geo-sciences are moving towards requiring researchers to formally cite data that led to a given research result. This trend promotes transparency in research by offering a direct pathway to the data so the research can be validated or easily carried forward from a known starting point. Such ������data citations������ also raise the profile of data, that is, they promote data as being as valued and rewarded in scientific settings as peer-reviewed publications. This paper is the product of an inter-divisional working group created to study, promote, and implement citations to NCAR/UCP digital resources. The paper describes how citations to NCAR/UCP digital resources could make our research products more accessible, and provides a number of recommendations for creating citations and assigning web-accessible identifiers to digital resources.

The Digital Library for Earth System Education: implementing the DLESE Community Plan

Over the past year, geoscience educators, librarians and information technologists have made substantial progress in initiating the construction ofa Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). Two major efforts, the Portal to the Future Workshop and the Geoscience Digital Library (GDL) project, have established a vision for the library, a governance process to enable community ownership, management, and construction, and have begun development of a testbed collection, discovery system, and user interface. The DLESE Community Plan lays out in detail the need for this facility, a community vision for its goals and priorities, and a strategy for initial construction of the library. From this initial work, two conclusions emerge as paramount in moving forward with the library. First, it is essential that development of the library community and the building of the technological infrastructure for the library go hand in hand. Second, the library will be most effectively built as a highly coordinated, but distributed community effort. In this way, the full range of talents in the community can be leveraged and rapid development of the library is possible. This paper briefly reviews our technical accomplishments to date and outlines their plans for further development. Progress and plans can be charted in the following three areas: 1. Community-centered design and use case development 2. Discovery system, metadata, and collection testbeds 3. System architecture and interoperability.