NSDL Core Integration at Cornell

Overview

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is a long-term program of the National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education to enhance all aspects of education in science, mathematics and engineering. It includes more than 150 projects that are supported by the NSF, together with numerous other digital library collections and services.

In 2000, the NSF funded six short-term projects to demonstrate ways to unite these components into a coherent digital library. One of these projects, Site for Science, was at Cornell. A year later, the NSF selected three of the demonstration projects to form a Core Integration team for the entire NSDL. The three are Cornell University, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and Columbia University. 

This web page summarizes the Cornell contribution to the Core Integration team.

• For general information about the overall NSDL program, see the NSF's Overview.

• For more information about the Core Integration effort, see the About section of the NSDL portal.

• For other NSDL projects at Cornell, see The NSDL at Cornell.

• The Whiteboard Report is an online newsletter about the NSDL.

The Cornell team

   Dean Krafft, Principal Investigator
   William Arms, Co-principal Investigator
   Diane Hillmann, Co-principal Investigator
   Carl Lagoze, Co-prinicpal Investigator
   John Saylor, Co-principal Investigator
   Rosemary Adessa
   Tim Cornwell
   Elly Cramer
   Pavel Dmitriev
   Naomi Dushay
   Dean Eckstrom
   Carol Minton Morris
   Susan Moskwa
   Lynette Rayle
   Eddie Shin

Former members of the team, including the Site for Science prototype, are: Donna Bergmark, Stoney Gan, Christopher Ingram, Richard Marisa, Anat Nidar-Levi, Jon Phipps, and Herbert Van de Sompel.

Major activities at Cornell

Technical structure

The technical architecture for the NSDL is derived from the Site for Science prototype. It is based around a central metadata repository, which supports a spectrum of interoperability and a single library with many portals.

The Cornell team operates the metadata repository, and the NSDL main portal.

Collections and metadata

The NSDL strategy is to offer collections a steadily expanding choice of options for metadata formats and methods to provide metadata to the repository. Early efforts have made extensive use of the work of the Open Archives Initiative. The NSDL is one of the pioneers of large-scale metadata harvesting and techniques for accommodating varied metadata standards.

Outreach

The NSDL is, par excellence, a collaborative project. In addition to internal collaboration, the Core Integration team works with several subcontractors, more than 100 other NSDL-funded projects, the NSF and numerous other publishers, digital libraries and associations. For this purpose, the Cornell team operates the NSDL communications portal and is active in the editorial team of the Whiteboard Report.

Selected publications

William Y. Arms, Diane Hillmann, Carl Lagoze, Dean Krafft, Richard Marisa, John Saylor, and Carol Terrizzi, and Herbert Van de Sompel, A Spectrum of Interoperability: The Site for Science Prototype for the NSDL. D-Lib Magazine, 8(1), January 2002.

Carl Lagoze, and others, Core Services in the Architecture of the National Digital Library for Science Education (NSDL). Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, July 2002.

William Y. Arms, Naomi Dushay, Dave Fulker, and Carl Lagoze, A Case Study in Metadata Harvesting: the NSDL. Library HiTech Vol. 21, no. 2, 2003.

Naomi Dushay and Diane I. Hillmann, Analyzing Metadata for Effective Use and Re-Use. Proceedings of the 2003 Dublin Core Conference, Seatle WA, 2003.