Witnessing NSDL Annual Meetings over the years, I’ve seen a natural transition in the themes and topics that bubble to the surface. In the early days, a lot of conversation formed around the nuts and bolts of metadata standards, repository architectures and how best to search in a distributed environment. Now, the themes have moved from the focus of DL research questions to a more fundamental business question of how do we best serve the NSDL customer. The common threads include fundamental business ideas: be clear on your value add (emphasized by Julie Evans in Effective K-12 Outreach Strategies) and solve real problems (such as providing context around resources by including the implicit community knowledge of how to use these resources highlighted by Sean Fox in Network of Communities). As we transition from building the library to delivering real solutions into the classroom, we also find ourselves shifting our focus beyond the early adopters, who have found and embraced NSDL collections, to those educators who need more directed, hands-on help (underscored by Steve Weimar in Cultivating Teacher Use and Leadership.

But even transitions that represent a natural evolution can present their challenges. By providing more directed help, we find some of our efforts are less participant- or community-oriented (as noted by Steve). Technology in the classroom meant to open up the classroom environment can have the unintended consequence of decreasing the face-to-face opportunities with colleagues as teachers answer email during their open times (as noted by Julie). And for school librarians, Marcia Mardis (Engaging Educators with the NSDL) notes that increasing the reach of technology could even threaten librarian positions.

But like every transition, its worth honoring what the past gave us, while looking optimistically and realistically at what’s possible moving forward. We can re-examine the roles we defined for NSDL in the early days, shed some that are no longer necessary, and create new roles for the future. Obviously this meeting underscores that the important new role for NSDL is in solving real classroom needs while pushing the boundaries of applying technology in support of pedagogy. Sometimes the signs leading to solutions will be vague, no more than a shape on the edge of our vision. Other signs will be right in front of us. But, let’s see this stage as a moment to move beyond just building the digital library to tackling the ongoing question of how online resources and services can help educators find success in their instruction, assessment and professional development activities. Are we poised to answer that call?