November
2007
Same library, new home
Although most visitors to the Digital Library for Earth
System Education (DLESE) wouldn’t know it, the virtual
collection now has a new home at NCAR.
The DLESE Program Center, a UOP program since 2000, became
Digital Learning Sciences (DLS) in October, when the original
NSF grant for DLESE expired. It also modified its mission.
Users can still access the DLESE collection just as
before, however. CISL is housing the virtual library’s
cyberinfrastructure, while the NCAR Library manages
its collection development
and curation.
As the DLESE Program Center’s funding came to a close,
an advisory board of former DLESE steering committee members
and experts in geoscience education, information technology,
and library sustainability considered a variety of hosts
for DLESE. Because NCAR can provide cyberinfrastructure and
information management expertise and its educational
mission is well aligned with DLESE’s, the advisory
board recommended that the organization host the library.
“We recognized that keeping everything at a single
institution made sense,” explains Karon Kelly, DLS
director at UCAR. Tamara Sumner, associate professor at CU,
is executive director of DLS.
Not only is DLESE now preserved for the future, but Karon
emphasizes that it also serves as a sustainability model
for other digital libraries. “We think that our experience
could be valuable to other programs with short-term funding
that have widespread community interest and use, similar
to DLESE,” she says.
The new UOP program, DLS, is a collaboration between UCAR
and the Institute of Cognitive Science at CU-Boulder. Its
mission is to develop systems and services that enable science
and educational organizations—school districts, universities,
libraries, and publishers—to organize, manage, and
enrich online resources to improve learning outcomes. It
is also responsible for maintaining DLESE’s underlying
software.
The program, which includes a dozen UCAR staff, has a number
of projects on tap. These include helping Denver Public Schools
develop a curriculum customization tool that helps teachers
better meet the needs of diverse learners while also fulfilling
the district’s learning goals. Another project
is a collaboration with a consortium of libraries in Colorado
and Wyoming to develop and share institutional repositories.
“I’m really looking forward to developing programs
around our new mission and formalizing our relationship with
CU,” Karon says.
While Karon is responsible for the overall management of
DLS and its strategic and operational planning, Tamara
is taking the lead on strategy development and DLS’s
research program. With a joint appointment between CU’s
Institute of Cognitive Science and the computer science department,
she has experience with interactive learning environments,
digital libraries, and other information systems.•
On
the Web
More
about DLS
Access the DLESE collection
In this issue...
IPCC
contributors share in Nobel Peace Prize
Remembering
John Firor and Janet Roberts
Sunrise
test flight successful
Same
library, new home
A
firsthand look at disappearing sea ice
NCAR
launches Women in Science committee
Fantastic
forum
Staff
win awards for science, multicultural service
Just One Look
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