If you build a web site, they will come — as long as they know how to find you. Google and other search engines learn what is on the Internet by sending an army of “bots” to crawl through the web and send back reports on what they have found. The bots are programmed to notice certain kinds of web pages and ignore others. A new Expert Voices blog invites the NSDL community to improve the rankings of its web pages by sharing what they have learned about search engine optimization (SEO).

Last summer, NSDL staffers found that Google’s bots are unusually fond of NSDL’s Expert Voices blog pages (see the report). The bots often discover new Expert Voices posts within a hour of their posting. Even better, the discovery bot usually sends a second bot to crawl through the post in more detail, “digest” its contents (including web links), and send the results back to the master computer at Google headquarters. Why are the bots so fond of us? One reason is that the people at Google know that NSDL offers highly useful web resources for free. Another is that NSDL pages are often linked to other posts of similarly high quality. So we start with a big advantage.

Search engine optimization is a large and complex topic, but a few rules stand out. One is using a high-quality blog that links to your web pages. Another is using the right titles, tags, and descriptions in the HTML headers that accompany every web page. Bots see these things first, starting with the title. So if the title of the page does not specifically mention the key ideas in the page’s contents, the contents are likely to remain invisible to the bots. Following a few simple rules can dramatically improve the search ranking of a site, and our new blog is a good place to start learning those rules.

Our blog NSDL Road Reports was busy over Presidents’ Day Weekend. Correspondent Carol Minton Morris sent out a stream of dispatches from the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, including reports on the Plenary address from AAAS President Dr. David Baltimore, a speech by the President of Rwanda describing his country’s emphasis on teaching science and math, a call from the Union of Concerned Scientists to remove speech restrictions that are placed on Federally-funded research in the U.S., and a presentation revealing unexpected connections between shallow-water coral and deep-sea coral species. The blog also relays a progress report given by Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which has designed a $200 laptop computer that connects to the internet and is suitable for rough use. OLPC has begun distributing thousands of their miracle boxes to children in Uruguay, Peru, and more than 80 other countries. Check out Carol’s reporting from AAAS here.

The presenters in the NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar Series are a lucky bunch. They get paid to do what they love. In the blog Careers in Science, these scientists share their stories about what turned them on to scientific inquiry, what their training was like, and how they found the job of their dreams. The seven stories posted in the last five months contain hints about how to spot the next generation of scientists and make them happen:

* Look for Why Kids. “I was always one of those ‘why’ kids,” writes Christina Symons, a geologist for the Enduring Resources for Earth Science Education (ERESE) project. “Why is the sky blue? Why is that river flowing east and not west? Why is that rock shiny and this one so dull? Thanks to my parents who always encouraged and exemplified this inquisitive nature I grew to love science.”

* Watch for The Spark. Once the child is ready, the spark can happen almost anywhere. NSDL staffer Robert Payo, who coordinates the series with NSTA, remembers the mix of terror and fascination he felt whenever he stood before the huge mastodon on display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Craig Cramer says it happened wandering in the woods of upstate New York as a teenager. And Lynn Diener of the Chemistry Pathway remembers digging in her yard in Eastern Washington and coming across a mysterious layer of gray, powdery dirt. By the time she found out what it was, she was hooked.

* Add Professional Encouragement. Several presenters cited the influence of mentors who nurtured both their curiosity and their contacts.  Bethany Carlson of The Fun Works says that her childhood revolved around science fairs and that “majoring in anything else wasn’t ever a consideration.”  Rob LaSalle thought he wanted to study whales, and his advisor persuaded him that the best way to prepare for that was to study genetics.

* It’s a Noble Adventure.  Rob LaSalle ended up studying Drosophila fruit flies in Hawaii.  Christina Symons studied how the toxic metal Mercury travels through the environment in an effort to control its levels.  And during her first year of grad school, Lynn Diener spent six weeks on a Australian research vessel in the Southern Ocean mapping the sea floor.  Doesn’t that sound like more fun than law school?

Check out the stories and add your comments at the Careers in Science blog.

The heavyweight champion among Expert Voices blogs has returned for another semester. “Networks” is a course in economics, sociology, and information science at Cornell taught by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg. Its subject is how the social, technological, and natural worlds are connected, and how the study of networks sheds light on these connections. The class considers such subjects as how opinions, fads, and political movements spread through society; the robustness and fragility of food webs and financial markets; and the technology, economics, and politics of Web information and on-line communities. Each student is required to participate in updating the blog. The public cannot participate in the discussion but we can read the posts, and they are great reading. It is a fairly large course, and during the spring semester last year students produced over 100 high-quality reviews of various networks, written so ordinary folks can understand it. The first week of class this year has already yielded posts on peer-to-peer lending, Swarthmore College’s Genocide Intervention Network, and a recent article in a medical journal that likens obesity to a contagious disease that spreads within social networks. Check it out here. Then add it to your bookmarks or make it an RSS feed to your homepage.

A pioneer in the online delivery of educational resources has found a new home. Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation announced that the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) will maintain the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). DLESE is the leading resource for online geoscience education. It predates NSDL by one year and was a key player in NSDL’s origin and early years, sharing an office and several staff members. Its community-based governance structure served as the model for NSDL’s governance structure of working groups, committees, and an advisory council.

DLESE had previously been funded through a five-year grant from NSF. During that grant period (2002-2007), the DLESE archive and program center office were located at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which operates NCAR. NCAR’s library will now assume development and curation responsibilities for DLESE, and its Computational and Information System Laboratory (CISL) will provide systems and operational support. The agreement means DLESE’s popular collections will remain free, there will be no interruption in service, and the site will continue to grow and serve the needs of geoscience communities.

“DLESE was an early pioneer in NSF’s efforts to establish digital science libraries,” said Jill Karsten, program director for diversity and education in NSF’s Directorate for Geosciences. “Once again, the DLESE program is helping to lead the way in science education by identifying creative new strategies for sustaining library operations, and for keeping these important educational resources available to a global community of educators and students.” (read the press release).

Digital libraries nationwide are exploring ways to maintain continuity in a time of rapid technological change and uncertainties in funding. “Providing a long-term home for this important resource supports NCAR’s educational mission and fits with the NCAR Library’s plans to provide increased digital services to the broader scientific and educational community,” said Mary Marlino, director of e-Science and the library at NCAR. Leave your comment about DLESE’s new home at the Whiteboard Talkback blog.

Three court decisions and a new law made 2007 a very good year for teachers who want the freedom to use whatever they want in their classrooms. In a paper released last month, Jonathan Band explains recent legal decisions that permit extensive copying and display of copyrighted material on commercial sites because the uses involve “repurposing” and “recontextualization.” In Perfect 10 V. Amazon.com, a Federal Circuit Court ruled that a thumbnail-sized image of a copyrighted photograph is a “transformative use” and is therefore protected by the fair use privilege by the copyright act. Similar rulings were recently handed down in favor of an artist who re-used portions of a fashion photograph, and a publisher who reproduced copyrighted posters in a book. If such uses are allowed for commercial purposes, says Band, they are certainly OK for educators.  Band’s paper “Educational Fair Use Today” is available for free download at the website of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).

The year ended on a high note for researchers, when President Bush signed an appropriations bill containing a provision that requires the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide open public access to all of the research it funds. The victory caps a three-year lobbying effort by the Open Access movement but the battle is not over, according to a January 7 post on the website of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). New NIH research does not have to be published for a year, and the Association of American Publishers has vowed to fight the law. But the new rule is the first Open Access mandate for a major public funding agency in the US, so it’s a landmark.  You can weigh in on these new rules at our Whiteboard Talkback blog.

What is NSDL’s purpose? Here’s the official answer: “providing organized access to high-quality resources, materials, products, and services that support teaching, learning, and research at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).” Which digital resources are appropriate for NSDL’s collection, and which are not? Who owns these materials, who is responsible for their upkeep, and who decides whether or not something stays in or is thrown out? Answers to these and many other questions are in the NSDL’s new Collection Development policy. The document describes NSDL’s mission; the communities it serves; resource ownership, management, and description; the scope of collections; quality guidelines; responsibility for selection, accessioning and de-accessioning collections; and terms of participation. The new policy and the Contribute Resources and Collections page on nsdl.org are especially helpful for resource and collection developers, providing official answers to many basic “what” and “how” questions about NSDL and contribution to the library. You can download the document at our blog and leave your reactions at the blog Community Comment to NSDL Policy Drafts. A revised Privacy Policy is in the final stages of review and will be released soon.

A “good word attack” is what happens when a spam e-mail firm idenfies words considered “strongly legitimate” by spam filters, and uses strings of these words to attack e-mail in-boxes.  A paper describing the practice is noted in issue #126 of Whiteboard Report.  We went to our logs and found these recent good word attacks on the NSDL server:

Farm Patrick Their Sun-drenched Left
Window Aeroplane Alphabet Teeth Car-race Cycle Feather
Skeleton Button Eraser Umbrella Airforce
Bible Button Map Sun Backpack
Milk Bank Shoes Circus Saddle Radar Chess Board
Necklace Torpedo Butterfly Sandpaper Web Robot Girl
Robot Leather Jacket Clown Car Onion
Live Get Fresh-picked In The And
Desk Cappuccino Fork Chess Board Meat
Staircase Feather Insect Bathtub Milkshake
Bee Treadmill Meat Carpet Airforce
Prison Child Record Cycle Planet

These attcks make us wonder:  has Ezra Pound come back as a spammer?

Highlights of the 2007 NSDL Annual Meeting are captured in the blog Road Reports, including posts on Webmetrics, the use of digital learning resources by college faculty, what’s going on in the picture on the left, Lee Zia’s annual contribution of haiku, and this quote from Susan Jesuroga: “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. . . let’s see this stage as a moment to move beyond building the digital library to tacklng the ongoing question of how online resources and services can help educators find success in their instruction, assessment and professional development activities.” Check it out here.

A special issue of Whiteboard Report is loaded with information about the 2007 NSDL Annual Meeting, which will be held Tuesday-Thursday, November 6-8 in Arlington, Virginia. Here’s what we are expecting to see:

205 Registered Attendees
73 First-time Attendees
36 NSF program officers registered
117 Projects Represented
59 Registered Posters
34 Sessions
20 Hours of scheduled meeting time
49 Hours of potential meeting time if sleep is not a factor
5 Average Number of Annual Meeting Haiku.

You can also visit the Annual Meeting home page.

Hope to see you there!