THE DLESE PROGRAM CENTER: COORDINATING COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION

The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) provides tools and services to help learners and educators locate and use high-quality digital resources about the Earth. DLESE’s development is based on a distributed, participatory community design process, a philosophy of "users-as-contributors", and the direct engagement of science educators. The DLESE Program Center’s (DPC) role is to develop a technical and social infrastructure that encourages the distributed development, governance, and user participation in library activities.

A key strategy for the DPC is to collaborate in developing and incorporating new tools and services into an operational digital library. As an example, the DLESE Community Review System, developed at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, has been integrated into library infrastructure in the newest version of the library. As DLESE looks forward, the DPC will facilitate regular opportunities to coordinate collaborative efforts. One particularly important opportunity is the semi-annual Developers’ Workshop, in which developers from the DLESE and related National Sciences Digital Library (NSDL) community meet to understand the breadth of development challenges and opportunities, and examine future needs and priorities.

The DPC also aligns library development with users’ evolving needs. A new version of the library debuted in August 2003. This new version included a redesigned interface and several additional services. The interface and services are the result of the participatory design process - community members articulate their sometimes disparate needs and developers respond with options that are iteratively refined to converge on desired services and functionality. Several of the resulting features are geared toward the K-12 community, including teaching tip annotations for selected resources, a “For Educators” area, and the ability to discover resources using educational standards.