NSDL Community Corner

We hope you all enjoyed the 2009 Annual Meeting! The energy and ideas from the wide variety of topics often spilled out of the sessions to animated conversations in the hallway. Beyond the findings and lessons learned presented in the sessions, one could see the wheels churning and the connections being made for future collaborations. Always a gratifying sight for those of us who work to put on this meeting.

We are slowly getting the presentations and linking them on the community site through the schedule page. If you were a speaker and haven’t yet sent your presentations, please get them in to Robert Payo.

I also want to remind you to take a moment to complete the Annual Meeting Survey. We do use your feedback in planning the next meeting, so every comments counts!

And finally, thanks to all of you in the community who came, shared, discussed and connected. The meeting represented the best at what a thriving community is all about.

We’re just a week away from the NSDL Annual Meeting, and the buzz is reaching a crescendo (or maybe it’s just the loud voice in my head reminding me of all the things left to get done!).

We’re looking at a great set of presentations, and do make sure to save some calories for the poster reception. Good food and topics like educational data mining, mobile learning, metrics and a question we all wrestle with, is there an educational advantage to NSDL?

Here are the things you don’t want to miss:

Tuesday, the opening plenary from 5-6:00 PM followed by the poster reception.

Wednesday at 8:30 AM, the panel on cyberlearning, where we intend to reinforce the theme for our meeting.

Thursday closing plenary at 12:15 PM on issues of sustainability.

And of course, don’t miss the opportunity to connect with your colleagues, both old and new, during the breaks.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Will your digital resources and services survive and thrive? This was the central question driving the Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability. We are pleased that Kate Wittenberg, formerly with the NSDL Core Integration group and now the Project Director of Client and Partnership Development for Ithaka, will walk us through sustainability options and obstacles facing projects such as NSDL at the closing plenary on November 19.

And remember that registration and poster submission closes on October 19, so hurry on in to get your seat reserved!

The new NSDL Community Site is up and running, complete with Annual Meeting Registration and information about the meeting. You will have to create a login for the site to register for the meeting, and the steps for registering can be found in the Whiteboard Report.

You can also go directly to the Annual Meeting pages for more info about the meeting without logging in or registering.

We’re finishing up the program schedule and will have that posted within a week, after all the presenters have been notified. It’s shaping up to be a great set of sessions that really underscore NSDL’s movement from library to learning.

We’re also developing an Orientation Brown Bag to be held in early November for all new projects and staff. So, stay tuned for more details on that.

Great response from the community! Thanks to all of you who scurried to meet our tight deadlines and submitted your talks. We have 46 submissions and the top categories are Services and Technology and Collection Development. The Committee will be reviewing these and we’ll be back out to you as soon as humanly possible.

Topics range from concrete examples of how to mine different sources of web usage data to middleware to help improve the accessibility of NSDL to the blind.

The registration site and poster submission pages with be released mid-September, and we’ll be back out to you all when they are ready.

Selected full text articles from the Journal of Materials Education (JME) are being promoted and made freely available on the NSF supported National Science Digital Library (NSDL), Materials Digital Library Pathway (MatDL) to encourage broad dissemination and readership. These papers are part of a special JME issue which includes manuscripts from the Fall 2007 MRS Forum on Materials Science Education.