The Digital Library for Earth System Education: implementing the DLESE Community Plan

Over the past year, geoscience educators, librarians and information technologists have made substantial progress in initiating the construction ofa Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). Two major efforts, the Portal to the Future Workshop and the Geoscience Digital Library (GDL) project, have established a vision for the library, a governance process to enable community ownership, management, and construction, and have begun development of a testbed collection, discovery system, and user interface. The DLESE Community Plan lays out in detail the need for this facility, a community vision for its goals and priorities, and a strategy for initial construction of the library. From this initial work, two conclusions emerge as paramount in moving forward with the library. First, it is essential that development of the library community and the building of the technological infrastructure for the library go hand in hand. Second, the library will be most effectively built as a highly coordinated, but distributed community effort. In this way, the full range of talents in the community can be leveraged and rapid development of the library is possible. This paper briefly reviews our technical accomplishments to date and outlines their plans for further development. Progress and plans can be charted in the following three areas: 1. Community-centered design and use case development 2. Discovery system, metadata, and collection testbeds 3. System architecture and interoperability.