Cyberinfrastructure for discovering Earth science educational resources

The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) provides Web service APIs that enable the discovery and display of its library resources in distributed Web sites and applications. The DLESE catalog contains approximately 12,000 educational resources that span all fields within the Earth sciences and are targeted toward researchers, teachers and learners of all ages. Approximately 2,300 resources are related to meteorology and atmospheric science and 1,500 related to the ocean sciences. In addition, the catalog contains news and opportunities postings for members of the Earth science community such as conferences, grants, calls for participation and career opportunities.

Using the DLESE service APIs, developers can create customized user interfaces to search over, browse and display DLESE resources and news postings within their Web sites and applications and can tailor the discovery environment in many ways for their target audience, such as providing search for a given Earth science subject like atmospheric science or educational level such as undergraduate or high school. This cyberinfrastructure is currently being used by a variety of organizations including NASA, GLOBE and the Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE) to support Web and computer based educational activities. DLESE provides developer toolkits and Web application templates for the service APIs that can be used to create and tailor custom resource discovery user interfaces. This presentation will describe the service APIs, the available developer tools and will demonstrate some of the current Web sites that use the service.