Don’t miss the Fall 2009  “All About Repositories” free web seminar series kick-off event on Sept 9 (TODAY). These highly successful webinars provide overviews of best practices, technology updates, and  key trend analyses for academic resources directors, IT managers, digital librarians, repository managers and developers, and curators. Join Mark Leggott, Valorie Hollister and Carol Minton Morris for the first web seminar in the fall “All About Repositories” series, “Easy-to-use DuraSpace Repositories Enabling Open Access: Islandora, DSpace and NSDL EduPak,” to take a look at simple repository solutions that enable open access to digital repository resources. The series is jointly sponsored by Sun, DuraSpace and SPARC. Register for this free web seminar today: http://www.education-webevents.com/.

To celebrate Open Access Week presenters will unpack three open access, out-of-the-box repository solutions that will help make your digital assets available to your community “ASAP.” Mark Leggott, University Librarian, University of Prince Edward Island will explain Islandora, based on the easy-to-use Drupal content management system with a Fedora Commons Repository Software on the back end. Valorie Hollister, DuraSpace Community Outreach for DSpace, will talk about DSpace Repository software used by more than 600 institutions globally. Carol Minton Morris, DuraSpace Marketing and Communications and NSDL Communications, will introduce NSDL EduPak 1.0, a lightweight version of the open-source digital library platform used to power the National Science Digital Library designed to meet the needs of national educational organizations and institutions focused on establishing specialized digital collections, conducting educational research, and providing teachers with pedagogical tools that require basic digital repository technology. Art Pasquinelli from Sun will give an overview on the Sun PASIG event Oct. 7-9 and pertinent technology developments relevant to the repository community.

The hardware you will need to establish an NSDL EduPak educational resources repository will vary depending on overall requirements. For example, decisions regarding how many objects and in what types of formats your repository will house, and what services your repository will provide impact hardware choices.

A basic hardware scenario might look like this for a use case for 1K repository resources with all EduPak applications installed:

•512 MB RAM and at least 500 MB of available disk space should be available for the evaluation application

•Testing is recommended for production deployment. Content types such as videos or music make a big difference in how much disk space is required

A note on estimating disk space: Based on the NSDL data, we’re seeing about .016 MB disk space per record.  That includes all filesystem and database storage.  With NCS and DDS in the picture, an increase of 50-100% to .024 - .032 could be expected.

Current installed versions of NSDL EduPak 1.0 on Linux VM Tomcat use about 290 MB of memory, based on before and after startup math. The java process itself is using 267 MB resident, 507 MB virtual memory. PostgreSQL is 7 and 100 MB, respectively.

You are an educational researcher within a specific STEM discipline who has developed 1,000 resources that are learning objects, which include lesson plans and curricula. To find out how your resources will be used in homes and classrooms you need to organize and make them available on the Web. The NSDL EduPak digital library services platform for education can help. By downloading the freely available EduPak platform which consists of three Web services: the Digital Repository (DR), the NCore Collection System (NCS) and Search, you have the ability to create a production-level technical digital library environment on your computer system for cataloging and sharing your resources.

Students using lesson plan components.

STEP ONE: Download EduPak 1.0 here and follow installation instructions: http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/Community:EduPak

STEP TWO: Begin cataloging resources using the NCS. You may find it helpful to follow the National Science Digital Library’s (NSDL) metadata guidelines available at http://nsdl.org/collection/metadata-guide.php.  This page provides helpful suggestions for those who are hosting their own web services as well those who are preparing collections for inclusion in the NSDL collection.

STEP THREE: Create a Web site that can search your resources. NCore Search allows you to customize the interface that will access this collection for the audience who will be using it.
Options for users such as textual and field-based searches (audience, subject, resource type or content standard), as well as geospatial search  can be integrated with Web 2.0 applications such as Google Maps.

STEP FOUR (optional): If your collection was originally hosted elsewhere and now you’d like to share it with NSDL, take a look at the Contribute Resource page (http://nsdl.org/collection/) which includes information on how to share metadata with NSDL (http://nsdl.org/collection/metadata-guide.php#share), this may include reworking the metadata of the collection, so that it can be harvested by NSDL.  When you use the NSDL DC metadata format, users who are searching NSDL will be able to find your information and records regardless of whether your collection is hosted through NSDL or not.

If you or your staff need additional training or if you would like to talk with someone please contact Karon Kelly at 303-497-2652.

Ithaca, NY, Boulder, CO  National educational organizations and institutions focused on establishing specialized digital collections, conducting educational research, or providing students, teachers and instructors with discipline-oriented pedagogical products and tools require basic technology to build educational digital repositories that support their work.  To help meet a national priority expressed by the National Science Board (NSB) in January 11, 2009 recommendations to the Obama Administration in which they stated, “Our national economic prosperity and security require that we remain a world leader in science and technology,” the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is pleased to announce the premiere release of NSDL EduPak 1.0. Specifically designed for education, EduPak packages technology for digital storage, access and workflow into a convenient bundle designed to to jump start the essential “behind-the-scenes” framework that enables innovation in teaching and learning. NSDL EduPak 1.0 information, documentation and downloads are available through NSDL (http://ncore.nsdl.org/index.php?menu=services&submenu=services!EduPak) and  Fedora Commons  (https://fedora -commons.org/confluence/display/EduPak/Home). Download EduPak 1.0 here: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/nsdl-core/edupak-1.0.zip.

NSDL EduPak 1.0 is a publicly available, lightweight version of NCore (http://NCore.nsdl.org), established in 2008 as an open-source digital library platform of technology and standards that create a dynamic information layer on top of library resources. Based on Fedora open source repository software (http://Fedora-Commons.org), NCore provides users, developers, information managers and decision-makers with systems for description, organization, interrelation and annotation of resources. Built using NCore components, EduPak is an all-in-one, open source, education digital repository solution bundle that provides a general platform for building digital libraries united by a common data model and interoperable applications. EduPak services include:NCore Digital Repository:

The NCore Digital Repository (NDR) uses Fedora open source repository software version 2.2.4 to model and manage digital objects such as resources, metadata and agents. Fedora provides digital object and repository administrative functions as well as flexible, extensible views of the repository and its digital objects via web services.

NCore Collection System:  The NCore Collection System (NCS) creates and manages collections of metadata within a DR. The NCS is a flexible XML-driven tool that provides a full-featured metadata editor, collection work flow processes, and a role-based permission system in support of distributed and collaborative collections management. The NCS transparently writes metadata and collection-level information to a DR using the NCore Application Programming Interface (API).

Search: The search application consists of the Digital Discovery System (DDS), which provides search and retrieval services for resources that reside in a DR. The service is optimized to support the rapid construction of audience-specific portals and applications and can be flexibly configured to search over any XML schema structure. A range of information retrieval features is available from the service including textual and field-based searches such as audience, subject, resource type or content standard. DDS also supports geospatial search capabilities and can be integrated with Web 2.0 services and APIs such as Google Maps.

NCore EduPak may be freely used to create a robust repository with search, harvest, and management components, or to boost current digital library systems. For more information or to download it, please visit: http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/Community:EduPak

Future Releases

NSDL EduPak 1.0 is the first release of an all-in-one educational technology package through the networks of NSDL and Fedora Commons open source developer communities. The next release of NSDL EduPak will feature an NCore Digital Repository (NDR) based on Fedora open source repository software version 3.0 content model architecture and a bug tracking system to support community participation and feedback in improving the platform.

We Want to Hear from You

Please submit general feedback, bug reports and queries here: http://nsdl.org/about/contactus/For additional information and training opportunities regarding the NSDL Collection System (NCS) or Search please contact Karon Kelly at 303-497-2652. For more information about the digital repository (DR) please contact Carol Minton Morris at 607-255-2702.

A series of small, focused NSDL Technical Summits will begin in 2009 to engage open source education technology developers from NSDL communities and others in designing features and improvements for future releases of the NSDL EduPak digital library services platform for education.

Training

To encourage adoption of NSDL EduPak and other NCore Tools and Services, a web seminar training program has been established to help NSDL grantees, NSF grantees and others understand the tools that are available through NCore, how to contribute a collection to NSDL, and how to create a portal to a digital library with EduPak.  Schedules for upcoming presentations and downloads of prior web seminars are available here: http://nsdl.org/pd/?pager=brownbag. For more information contact Karon Kelly at 303-497-2652.About NSDLIn 2000, the National Science Foundation created the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) to provide organized access to high quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. In addition to providing an organized point of access to high-quality STEM content, NSDL also provides open-access, non-proprietary tools to stimulate new ways to access and use scientific information in an easily accessible online environment.