Contents

DLESE events at the 2003 Geological Society of America meeting
Featured Resource of Interest: Marine Realms Information Bankn (MRIB)
NSDL Annual Meeting 2003 proposes new focus
Expanded DLESE outreach

DLESE events at the 2003 Geological Society of America meeting

This year's GSA meeting in Seattle offers many opportunities to learn more about DLESE.

An evening reception on Tuesday, jointly hosted with NSDL, provides an informal setting in which to welcome new DLESE participants and reconnect with colleagues. The reception will run from 6 - 8 PM on Nov. 4, in Grand Ballroom B of the Sheraton.

An oral session on Wednesday afternoon, Nov. 5, includes 6 presentations from DLESE-related services. Session 233: Geoscience Education III: Issues and Opportunities at the Programmatic Level, from 1:30 PM - 5:30 PM (Washington State Convention and Trade Center: 2B) will offer perspectives from the new core service areas, collaborating developers, and the National Science Digital Library.

Other sessions with DLESE-related content at the meeting include a poster session on Sunday, Nov. 2, 1:00 PM-3:45 PM, in Hall 4- of the Convention and Trade Center: Session 46, T32, Using Data to Teach Earth Processes: An Illustrated Community Discussion. Special Session in Support of the NAGT/DLESE "On the Cutting Edge" Program. On Tuesday, Nov. 4, two poster sessions and a paper session: Posters 143, T33: Beyond Google: Strategies for Developing Information-Literate Geoscience Students; and Posters 148, T47: Design and Development of XML-based, Discipline-Specific, Geological Markup Languages, and Development of Applications (with Object-Oriented Languages) and Databases to Process, Store, and Interchange Geological Data over the Web; and Session 147, T45: Geological and Geophysical Databases: What We Have and What We Need.

Featured Resource of Interest: Marine Realms Information Bank (MRIB)

TheMarine Realms Information Bank (MRIB) is a digital library designed to classify, integrate, and facilitate access to scientific information about the oceans and the adjacent parts of the atmosphere and solid Earth, as well as to the people, techniques, and organizations involved in marine science. By integrating information science and communication technology, the MRIB creates a new vision of libraries and scientific publishing and provides a dynamic environment for the global sharing of digital information. Data resources are searchable by location as well as numerous other classifications, including biota, discipline, research method, and author.

NSDL Annual Meeting 2003 proposes new focus

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Annual Meeting, held in Washington DC from October 12-15, unveiled a new strategy to guide library development. NSDL will construct a broadly usable library through a series of pilot projects targeting specific user groups. In the coming year, the pilot project will focus on building services for the middle school level, using existing resources. Middle school grades are an initial focus because these years are seen as a critical time for keeping students interested in science, as well as being an opportunity to provide greater support for teachers who may be obliged to teach outside their accustomed fields. While the pilot project focus is on middle school resources, NSDL is committed to building a library that serves all educational levels, and welcomes the contributions of all resource and library builders.

The meeting showcased the breadth and depth of NSDL projects. DLESE was represented directly as well as in collaboration with several NSDL projects, including the DLESE Community Review System (CRS); Collections Assessment for DLESE/NSDL; Digital Water Education Library (DWEL); Starting Point: Linking Pedagogy, Resources, and Community Interaction to Support Entry-Level Undergraduate Geoscience Education; AAAS Strand Map Service, NSDL IdeaKeeper: Extending Digital Library Services to Scaffold Online Inquiry, and Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services: Middleware Connecting People, Documents, and Environmental Data, to name just a few.

Expanded DLESE Outreach

In the past months, members of the DLESE core services have started to expand their outreach efforts. Recently, DLESE has hosted a booth at the California Science Teachers Association Meeting in Long Beach, partnered with community member Rusty Low (profiled in the August/September 2003 issue of DLESE Matters) at the NSTA regional meeting in Minneapolis, and attended the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Native Americans and Chicanos in Science (SACNAS). A brand new DLESE booth will be unveiled at the National Science Teachers Association Western Region Meeting in Reno on 4-6 December.

Your feedback is appreciated. To send comments, articles, requests for a text-only version of the newsletter, or to unsubscribe, send email to: newsletter@dlese.org.

Photo credit: Kelso Dunes in the Mojave Desert of California, near the Nevada state line. Photo by Thomas McGuire.