National Science Digital Library

The United States' National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is an open-access online digital library and collaborative network of disciplinary and grade-level focused education providers operated by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. NSDL's mission is to provide quality digital learning collections to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community, both formal and informal, institutional and individual. NSDL's collections are refined by a network of STEM educational and disciplinary professionals. Their work is based on user data, disciplinary knowledge, and participation in the evolution of digital resources as major elements of effective STEM learning. Resource types available via NSDL include instructional materials, activities, lesson plans, audio/video materials, images, web sites, simulations, visualizations, tools, and services. NSDL also provides annotation collection and paradata (usage data) collections: comments, ratings, or usage information attached to existing resources in the NSDL. Activities Learning Registry: The NSDL is a partner in the national Learning Registry project to facilitate the exchange of resources, metadata about resources, and paradata about their use in learning environments. NSDL is contributing to this multi-agency federal project designed to make learning resources produced by federal funding more accessible. NSDL STEM Exchange: concept for a web service to capture and share social media-generated information and other networked associations about educational resources (tagged, recommended, commented, discussed, clicked, viewed, downloaded, favorited, shared, etc.) Learning Application Readiness - an NSDL initiative that refers to how closely educational resources, collections, and their related metadata are aligned to educational goals, curriculum, or professional development needs of users, and how readily those can be embedded in tools and services that teachers and students use. Repositioning NSDL for the Next Generation of Digital Learning - An NSDL NSF-funded project building on and leveraging the lessons of prior work (NSDL network partners collaborations;; Learning Registry collaboration; ; Common Core Mathematics collection) to bring pilot level projects to scale and to integrate new STEM education services into NSDL.