New Collections Development Policy

NSDL’s Policy Committee has approved a new organizational document on collections development. 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.

Dr. Biology’s NSDL Podcast

Dr. Charles Kazilek, aka “Dr. Biology,” has been explaining life sciences to the general public for the last decade. He has also been making podcasts of half-hour interviews with scientists for the last several years. The 25th in the series describes NSDL, featuring interviews conducted at the Annual Conference with Kaye Howe and Carol Minton Morris from Core Integration; Lee Zia, lead program officer for NSDL at the National Science Foundation; and Samantha Katz, director of education and outreach at the American Academy of Biological Sciences and a staffer for the BioSciEdNet (BEN) Pathway. The podcast offers a lively introduction to NSDL, which Dr. Biology says is “as close to one-stop shopping for learning materials and activities as one can find on the Web today.”

Blog Posts and Dirty Water

A trio of computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University has designed an algorithm with an unusual dual purpose. It can identify how news spreads through the Internet, or how toxins spread through a water system. The Cascades Project is the creation of CMU professor Carlos Guestrin and graduate students Andreas Krause and Jure Leskovec. It uses the property of submodularity to analyze posts in 45.000 blogs, with the time stamps on each blog post determining where news items originated. It also determined the optimal number and placement of sensors for detecting the introduction and spread of contaminants in a municipal water supply. A video lecture explains the process. The team is now focusing on detecting pollution in lakes and rivers, and the optimal placement for stations in citywide wi-fi networks.