Tuesday, May 23, 2006

National Science Digital Library This background information about the NSDL was mentioned in Peter Suber's Open Access News. The webcast lecture is worth hearing and the NSDL is certainly worth visiting. _____JH ____________ Background on the US National Science Digital Library. Dean Krafft, Building a National Science Digital Library, a webcast lecture and PPT slides from the Educause webinar series, delivered May 8, 2006. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) From the summary: Since 2000, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Core Integration team has been creating the infrastructure for a digital library of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics resources. That library now contains more than a million resources from approximately 100 collections. In this talk, Dean Krafft will give a short historical overview of the NSDL and describe the current NSDL community and participants. He will then review the technical underpinnings of NSDL 1.0, a library built on metadata harvesting, and describe some of the challenges encountered. For the past year, the project has been working on NSDL 2.0, a new version of the library built on the Fedora repository architecture. For the last part of the talk, Krafft will describe this new library architecture and explain how it supports creating context for science resources, how it enhances the selection and use of library materials, and what these capabilities mean for the users of the NSDL. By noemail@noemail.org (Peter Suber). [Open Access News] 10:03:38 AM    COMMENT []

MIT OCW April Newsletter The latest MIT OpenCourseWare Newsletter includes updates from MIT and OCW-affiliated institutions such as Utah State University, Japan OCW, and others (including the latest, Vietnam OCW). ______JH _____ "MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is pleased to announce the publication of 25 new courses as part of our Spring 2006 course publication cycle. With the conclusion of our Spring 2006 publication cycle, we now offer open access to the educational materials from 1400 courses total ..." 8:40:18 AM    COMMENT []