Implementation and Innovation in the NSDL by William Arms

The first solicitation

The NSF provided seed grants through the Digital Libraries Initiative in 1998 and 1999. The main program was announced in 2000, under the name of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). Since then, the annual solicitations provide a record of how the NSF’s view of the NSDL has evolved. Small alterations have been made every year, but the solicitations in 2000, 2004, and 2008 represented major changes of emphasis. The solicitation in 2000 was particularly important. It differed from the recommendations of the planning reports in several significant ways that have shaped the program ever since.

The most important change received little attention at the time. While the planning meetings had been asked to consider undergraduate education, the solicitation called for a library to support scientific education at all levels. This was a major change, since K-12 education is fundamentally different from undergraduate education in emphasizing curricula through highly structured class plans and state standards, and making limited use of primary materials. Failure to grasp this distinction was a serious problem in the early days of the NSDL and remains a challenge today, particularly as most of the funding has gone to university groups with expertise in undergraduate education but lesser understanding of K-12.

A second major difference was to mix the two missions of the NSDL in a single solicitation. The stated aim was to implement a digital library, but the funding program was more suitable for a broad program of research and development. In the early years of the NSDL, only twenty to thirty percent of the funding went to support the library building view of the program. The bulk of the money went to a range of smaller projects with labels such as, “services”, “collections”, or “research”. Most of these early grants were to groups whose primary interest was in innovation. While the services and collection projects were expected to contribute to the goal of building a digital library for science education, the structure of the program provided few incentives for them to integrate their work into the broader NSDL.

The 2000 solicitation postponed the selection of the team that would build the central parts of the library. It funded six short-term projects, intended to create separate demonstration systems to show how the library might be built. The plan was that they would be followed by a single Core Integration project, with long-term funding, to combine the various activities of the NSDL into a coherent library. In the event, only the projects at Cornell University and the University of California at Berkeley actually built demonstration systems.