全球智库信息集成服务系统

Audience

• NSDL and the pathways have shown considerable improvement in identifying the audience served.
• The NSDL portal shows strong audience engagement in terms providing capabilities for users to organize, comment on, contribute, and share resources.
• NSDL exceled in development of paradata, which document resource use in the aggregate, and in the collection and harvesting of annotation metadata, which consist of users' comments and ratings for resources.

Organization

• NSDL has a strong technical infrastructure, with a robust platform that is well suited to a metadata-based collection portal.
• The NSDL portal and pathways have visionary leadership, but evidence was less clear for staff in operational roles to support a transition from research to sustainable business organizations.
• Broad and diverse parent organizations and other stakeholders are a potential asset with respect to revenue for sustainability.

Collections

• The NSDL portal and pathways showed improvements in the authoritativeness of their collections, professional oversight of resource accessions, and basic search services.
• Accurate and complete metadata, alignment of educational standards to resources in metadata, and the expansion of usage metadata are significant contributions of the NSDL portal and some pathways, but few projects have shown how materials can be tailed to meet specific educational requirements or audiences.

Tools and Services

• Funding supported the development of a diverse array of tools and services.
• Although many NSDL projects created innovative products, there were redundant efforts across some projects, as well as gaps in the provision of needed tools and services.
• The degree to which products were integrated with the NSDL portal was variable.