Summary of Workshop 2000 plenary session presentation by Mary Marlino and Dave Fulker

Summary by Ben Domenico

Last Modified: October 21, 2003

Information presented on the slides is not repeated here.

Digital Library for Earth System Education

Mary:

Members of the Unidata community were leaders in the development of PAGE (Program for the Advancement of Geosciences Education) and DLESE (Digital Library for Earth System Education). Grassroots community requests for help came from earlier Unidata workshops and the Unidata Users Committee.

As DLESE has developed, some aspects of it go beyond the original requests, e.g., DLESE needs a collection that serves all interested parties, "K to Grey."

Thus far the entire effort has been built on Ben Domenico's great and wonderful work in developing GRDS (the Geosciences Resource Discovery System).

Geosciences had come forward more than any other SMETE discipline in setting up an effective community input and governance structure based on the Unidata model.

PAGE and GDL (Geosciences Digital Library) have now morphed into the DPC (DLESE Program Center) at UCAR.

Q and A

Dave:

The economic models for the publishing industry (e.g., for textbooks, large sums of money flow from students to the publishers and a small fraction trickles back to the authors/faculty) are being altered by the Web, so the long term role of publishers in DLESE sustainability is uncertain at this time.

Yarger: Access to datasets such as the NCAR collection are important

Dave: This is a key part of the DLESE strategic plan

Ben (yet another excellent, insightful observation): Tim Killeen, the new director of NCAR, is very supportive of DLESE as stated in his keynote address.

Ackerman: When will people be able to begin playing with it?

Mary: GDL prototype targeted for two years from last Fall. Beyond that it is still unclear because the results of several large proposals are not in yet.

Bart Goertz (sp) of Wyo : This is a real revolution in science and science education to be able to access the data as well as written publications. But it is a huge job.