Digital Libraries and EDUCAUSE Live!

The collective expertise of digital libraries in making available the diverse literatures of science and artistic expression, in concert with the increasing sophistication of commercial partners and the development of distributed, interactive forms of publishing, require libraries to chart the engineering of new architectures for teaching, learning, and research. Digital libraries must work to forge the new collaborations required to enable and build these services.

Since 2000, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Core Integration team has been creating the infrastructure for a digital library of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics resources. That library now contains more than a million resources from approximately 100 collections. In this talk, Dean Krafft gives a short historical overview of the NSDL and describes the current NSDL community and participants. He then reviews the technical underpinnings of NSDL 1.0, a library built on metadata harvesting, and describes some of the challenges encountered. For the past year (2005-6), the project has been working on NSDL 2.0, a new version of the library built on the Fedora repository architecture. For the last part of the talk, Krafft describes this new library architecture and explains how it supports creating context for science resources, how it enhances the selection and use of library materials, and what these capabilities mean for the users of the NSDL.

People mean a number of different things when they discuss "digital library" activities, including scholarly communication and publishing, teaching and learning, content management, archives, technology, privacy, licensing, digital preservation, digital rights management, and infrastructure. In this session, we will cover some of these issues as well as specific projects now underway to address them.