CONTRIBUTING TO THE DIGITAL LIBRARY FOR EARTH SYSTEM EDUCATION (DLESE): POTENTIAL BENEFITS FOR TWO-YEAR COLLEGE EDUCATORS, STUDENTS, AND THE GREATER EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITY

Two-year college instructors often conduct their teaching and research in isolation from their counterparts at comparable institutions. The combination of work load, geographic isolation, and lack of organized representation within the geoscience community all contribute to this professional disjunction among two-year college faculty. Although two-year college educators can individually interact with their colleagues in the K-12, university, or professional arenas, there exists no systematic or centralized means by which these professionals with common interests of preparing, recruiting, educating, and employing two-year college students can conduct widespread, rather than local or regional, outreach and communication.

One means of organizing this population is through the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). This electronic portal contains educational resources, data sets, links to professional development resources, and community interest groups which host on-line discussions. One interest group exists specifically for discussion of issues that concern two-year college educators. Individuals can contribute to building DLESE by participating in online discussions, or by cataloging digital resources, images, or teaching and assessment tools of interest to two-year college educators and students. DLESE will become more useful as more educators become aware of and contribute resources to its holdings, which currently number over two thousand.

We will discuss the development of the two-year college educators' effort within the growing DLESE community, discuss the utility of the two-year college listserv, introduce the digital library's holdings that are of interest to undergraduate educators, and demonstrate mechanisms for helping to build the digital library's holdings of resources of interest to the two-year college community.