The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE, www.dlese.org) is a community-based effort involving educators, scientists and students working together to create a library of educational resources and services to support Earth system science education, at all levels, in both formal and informal settings. DLESE offers free access to electronic resources including lesson plans, maps, images, data sets, visualizations, and assessment activities. 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.

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. Our presentation will focus on these new features and the process we employed to determine and meet the needs of our K-12 users.