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.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) created the National Science Digital Library/Distributed Learning (NSDL) program in 2000. Between 2000 and 2011, NSDL awarded more than 250 grants to support the development of resources, collections, and technical tools and services for teachers and learners in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. NSDL's mission was to assemble these elements into a distributed digital library that would be widely available to the public through websites. In 2011, NSF discontinued grant funding for projects in order to build on the results of the NSDL program and to establish the next generation of cyberlearning programs.

This report documents the third and final phase in a series of evaluations of the NSDL program. The broad goal of the evaluation was to assess the sustainability of NSDL resources, tools, and services over time and across the changing technology landscape. The report also identifies lessons that could be useful to other programs, both within and outside NSF — specifically, the attributes of sustainable digital initiatives and the extent to which the NSDL program demonstrated these attributes.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Overview of the NSDL Program

• Chapter Three

  Sustainability of Digital Collection Initiatives: A Literature Review

• Chapter Four

  Health and Sustainability of Collected Resources

• Chapter Five

  Digital Tools and Services

• Chapter Six

  Usability of NSDL for Lesson Planning

• Chapter Seven

  Full Instantiation of the NSDL Logic Model: Replicated Case Studies

• Chapter Eight

  Conclusions and Recommendations

• Appendix A

  NSDL Organization Leadership

• Appendix B

  Evaluation of the NSDL Technical Platform

• Appendix C

  Key NSDL Tools and Services

• Appendix D

  CPALMS and iCPALMS Funding Sources

• Appendix E

  Proposed Teachers' Survey