Nuggets from the NSDL Annual Meeting at AAAS in D.C.
Opening Session: Kaye Howe, Boots Cassell, Lee Zia, and Daniel Atkins
“What NSDL does is to pull together the tools we all create so that someone teaching the third grade in North Dakota can do a good job for his students. And this year, we are at a point of convergence,” said Kaye Howe, NSDL Core Integration Executive Director. Howe spoke at the opening session of NSDL’s 2006 Annual Conference, where about 150 participants listened in the first-floor auditorium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science headquarters in Washington, DC. on October 19. 

Boots Cassell, chair of the NSDL Policy Committee talked about the breadth of community engagement in NSDL-related activities before introducing the five chairs of NSDL Standing Committees for brief overviews of their current plans. Laura Bartolo, Educational Impact and Evaluation Standing Committee; Paul Berkman, Sustainability; Kim Lightle, Content; Martin Halbert, Technology and; David Yaron, Community Services spoke for one minute each. For more information on NSDL standing committees please visit their web pages.

“NSDL is a nexus–a place to come together and sort out issues,” stated Lee Zia, NSF Program Officer for the National Science Digital Library Program. He encouraged Pathways and others to work towards implementing community sign-on, resolving metadata issues, and the use of common webmetrics technology in order to “tell the aggregated story of NSDL.”

Reminding participants that “It is an exciting time for technology and education” Zia introduced Dr. Daniel Atkins, NSF Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.

Atkins used an ancient scientific analogy to describe the activities his office must focus on. A Borromean Ring is a structure of three circles that are inseparable; remove one and the other two will fall apart. The three activities are “provisioning,” or the creation, deployment, and operation of advanced cyberinfrastructure networks; research and development to enhance the social and technical effectiveness of future cyberinfrastructure environments; and sponsoring “transformative applications” that will enhance discovery and learning.

Read a summary of Dr. Atkins’ presentation here. Slides from Dr. Atkins presentation are available here.

Closing Panel Discussion on Digital Library Sustainability: Opening Remarks, Paul Berkman; Panel: Kaye Howe, Kevin Guthrie, Laura Campbell, Chris Greer
Stating that, “Digital media is now the medium for communication into the millennia, Paul Berkman, Chair of the NSDL Sustainability Committee, offered support for formation of a Task Force on Digital Library Sustainability at NSDL’s Annual Meeting closing session. 

Kaye Howe invited panelists to share their perspectives on sustaining digital libraries while answering the question, “What was the demand you were trying to satisfy?” Kevin Guthrie, JSTOR, and president of Ithaka, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education; Laura Campbell, Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives responsible for the overall strategic planning for the Library of Congress, which includes development of a national strategy in cooperation with other institutions known as the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIP), and; Chris Greer, Program Director, Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation, where he is responsible for digital data activities, shared their remarks in a “power point free zone.”

Guthrie said that early JSTOR planning was a practical solution for storing back issues of journals that evolved into technology to drive the way the information was used. He stressed that any resulting cultural artifact had to have economic value coupled with ongoing access. His current organization ITHAKA incubates new organizations by researching sustainability for their communities and providing strategic information on sustainability issues.

Laura Campbell described the Library of Congress NDIIP initiative that will eventually create a “Universe of libraries to preserve and protect information over time.” In 2000 Congress invested 100 million with LOC to find out how to share long-term responsibility for managing and disseminating the intellectual heritage of this country that has high educational value. In 2010 LOC will report back to Congress with successful outcomes such as the American Memory Project. She noted that while the LOC focuses on the humanities, partnerships with NSDL STEM digital libraries could make it possible to imagine all types of educational information being openly available “like a public utility such as electricity.”

Chris Greer is committed to finding commonality in a problem space that contains a “flood of digital information and products that are both an end and a beginning for multiple groups and organizations.” 5 exabytes of data approximately equals “all words ever spoken by human beings,” according to Wikipedia. At a rate of 30 terabytes of data added per night, Greer predicts that the total amount of information globally will be 10 exabytes in 2007. Given that the human brain has just 200 megabytes of information, managing and making sense of all that must be accomplished through broad partnerships that will create a “digital data universe that will be understood by specialists and non-specialists.”

American Society for Cell Biology Launches Image and Video Library
http://cellimages.ascb.org
The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) now offers a source for peer-reviewed, high-quality visual and written resources from cell biology innovators: the newly launched ASCB Image & Video Library (IVL).

All IVL items undergo a rigorous review process similar to reviews performed by journals. As a result, users of IVL resources can be confident of the authenticity and importance to cell biology of the images, videos, digital books, and annotations on the website. Many IVL resources have profound historical value; others represent current depictions of myriad cell processes.

The IVL contains digital books in PDF format, JPEG2000 images, and videos in QuickTime format. The annotations provide a rich source of information that can be used as teaching and/or study aids. And the IVL supports the Open Access concept: All resources are freely available for educational and research purposes.